Posts

Thought I’d give a quick status update on how I’m doing with Movable Type, and talk about what I like, what I don’t like, and what my plans are for the site. The good: Movable Type has all of the features that I always wished I had written for my own blogging software. Comments, trackbacks, categories, the ability to schedule posts. I didn’t have any of that stuff, and it’s nice to have. Typekey. I really like the fact that if users sign up for a Typekey identity and use it to post their comments, I can be pretty sure that they’re not sending me spam. Polish. Movable Type is obviously a professionally written software package. The user interface is very nice, it has features galore. Community. Whenever I run into problems with Movable Type, it seems easy to find solutions via Google or to just ask. There are a lot of people who’ve been working with Movable type for a long time. That’s a heck of a feature. The bad: ...

My friend Jef has written an HTTP server in JavaScript, just to illustrate its utility as a general purpose scripting language. His kung fu is good.

Today is finally the day when I migrate to Eclipse 3.1. It has been released for a few weeks, but I had to wait until the plug-ins that I use regularly were updated, specifically Subclipse. Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the process. The distribution of Eclipse 3.1 is 105 megs. NetBeans 4.1 weighs in at 46 megs. IntelliJ IDEA is 53.3 megs. I’m not sure why Eclipse is larger than both of them put together. ...

Joel Spolsky has some thoughts on what it means to hire the best programmers: So, why isn’t there room in the software industry for a low cost provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan is working.) Here’s why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold. ...

One topic that has been on my mind a lot for the past few months has been the notion of who bears risk. For example, Social Security is a system that insures people who have worked throughout their lives from living in abject poverty when they reach retirement age. The argument is whether the costs of Social Security are worth the risk it mitigates. Leaving government programs aside, Mark Nottingham has an interesting post on who bears risk in the world of business. Conventional wisdom is that shareholders are the main risk bearers when it comes to firms, but there’s an alternative argument that employees most of the risk. ...

Bruce Schneier has the goods on the TSA’s Secure Flight program, which is designed to check whether airline passengers are on terrorist watch lists. Unfortunately, the program was expanded to take over the functions originally designed for the CAPPS-II program, which would assign some kind of risk score to every airline passenger based on a bunch of factors mined from commercial databases. This program was killed in Congress, but the homeland security people just can’t resist the temptation to repeatedly revive it. Anyway, Schneier has all of the details. ...

Talk about companies heading in different directions. I read this week that Microsoft and Google are suing each other over who gets to keep a particular employee on the payroll. At the same time, HP has laid off Alan Kay. Yeah, that Alan Kay. Chances are he’ll be able to get a job at Microsoft or Google.

In this Slate dialogue, a point is raised that I think deserves further attention. Activist groups (conservative, liberal, and otherwise) have a financial incentive to manufacture as much outrage as possible during the Supreme Court confirmation process. The more worked up people get, the more money they shovel at these various groups in order to feel like they’re making a difference, so these groups are going to try to overheat the process to the degree that they can. When you toss in the 24 hour news networks who have to do something to get people to tune in to all of their stupid talking head shows, and the bloggers out there who benefit from keeping their readers whipped into a frenzy, then it hardly matters who the nominee is or what they believe. ...

Anybody know why I get ye olde “500 Internal Server Error” from mt-comments.cgi from Movable Type whenever I post a comment? Is everybody else seeing that error as well? Generally such errors mean that the script is not generating a Content-type header before sending printing out the actual content of the page. What’s probably happening is that some error or debug message is being printed unexpectedly, but I have no idea where. If nobody pops up with an easy answer, I’ll be forced to figure it out for myself. ...

Like many developers, I’ve become test infected. When I’m creating a new API in Java, I generally try to write tests that provide good coverage before writing my code. And, I think more importantly, when anyone finds a bug in my code, I write a test to duplicate the bug before working on fixing it, so that I can verify that I’ve fixed the bug and that it stays fixed. Anyway, I want to do bring my PHP programming practices in line with my Java practices. Right now, I don’t write any tests for PHP at the Web layer, and I write basic command line scripts to test my PHP at lower layers. (I have a library that I’ve written that has a few basic assertion functions to make things easier.) ...