Posts

On the subject of Google’s reprisal against CNet for publishing information found via Google about CEO Eric Schmidt in a news article, Jason Shellen says there’s a difference between public data and publicizing data, which I agree with. The point he seems to be missing is that search engines like Google exist to shorten the distance between information that’s public and information that’s publicized. The implications of the changes that search engines (and other searchable databases) are making to society are worth discussing, this spat between Cnet and Google aside. ...

Today, I watched Fog of War, the Oscar-award winning documentary from Errol Morris featuring former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. For a bio of McNamara, see his Wikipedia article. I thought Fog of War was perhaps the most astounding documentary I’ve ever seen. Many people who were against the Vietnam War didn’t like the documentary for what it wasn’t. I enjoyed it for what it was – a look at how decisions are made and the limits of human beings in making them. ...

Maciej Ceglowski’s article, A Rocket To Nowhere, is a must read. He explains the failings of the space shuttle program, starting with the initial design. It’s the kind of article you’d expect to read in the New Yorker, except that it’s freely available on a personal site. Amazing stuff. My favorite quote: There is no satisfactory answer for why all this commotion must take place in orbit. To the uneducated mind, it would seem we could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all - leaving the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings without the slighest impact on basic science, while also increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude. It might even bring mission costs within the original 1970’s estimates, and allow us to continue the Shuttle program well into the middle of the century. ...

Ed Felten has a sumamry of the lawsuit filed by ISS and Cisco against Mike Lynn, the security researcher who gave a talk on a Cisco exploit at the BlackHat computer security conference. Jennifer Granick is representing Lynn, and a legal defense fund has been established. Bruce Schneier points out that Cisco has only compounded its problems by giving Lynn’s original presentation so much attention in the first place.

Yes, the amount of time President Bush spends on vacation still ticks me off.

The Washington Post has scored big by hiring Adrian Holovaty away from the Lawrence Journal-World. He’s looking for someone to replace him at his old job to build cool features for newspaper Web sites. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the new things that Adrian brings to the WaPo.

Well, after flirting with the idea of learning Ruby on Rails for months, I’ve finally found a reason to actually dig into it. There’s an application I had in mind for personal use that involves recording data and presenting it in various reports, and I have some ideas of how it could be expanded to be useful to many users. Rather than write it in PHP or Java, I’m writing it in Rails. ...

I once had a conversation with a coworker who had once done some kind of forestry work in Montana. He indicated that one nice thing about living in Montana was that you were at the top of the pecking order when it comes to western states, with the exception of Alaska. Alaskans were considered more manly than Montanans, but Montanans looked down on everybody else. What I’m looking for is the Alaska of programming languages. I’ve done projects in Java, Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, TCL, and probably some other languages I’ve forgotten, and at this point in my career, I’m looking for a language that will cement my status at the top of the programming heap. I just can’t figure out which one it is. ...

Cory Doctorow has an editorial at BoingBiong about what it will mean if Apple adopts Intel’s Trusted Computing hardware in new Macs. As consumers, it’s vitally important that we reject any operating system that provides application developers with access to these features, and indeed, reject hardware that provides these features as well. The copyright industry hates the idea of the general purpose PC existing under the control of the user. Trusted Computing is an attempt to take that away. ...

Christopher Diggins warns us not to trust computer science articles on Wikipedia. Here’s his admonition: This is not the first time a Wikipedia computer-science definition has made me want to pull my hair out. In the end I don’t care, as long as people don’t make the mistake of taking Wikipedia definitions seriously. Just remember that in Wikipedia the definitions are written by random people, and edited by random people, not experts. ...