Posts

FeedBurner has introduced a service that lets you splice your weblog’s RSS feed with your del.ico.us links. I’ll be putting up a link to a spliced feed this weekend.

Tim Bray notes today that everything in the world of software is already patented, which is sort of the same thing as nothing being patented, really.

Salon magazine is back in the black, or in the black for the first time. (Pro forma, naturally.)

Digby has a post on the torture that took place at Gitmo. Difficult to stomach, but important not to ignore.

Eric Sink’s response to Paul Graham’s essay on the care and feeding of great hackers is worth the read. His point is that if being a great hacker means that you’re a prima donna, then many software companies are better off without great hackers. James Robertson’s response is also worth reading.

Jeanne D’Arc posts a useful update on what’s up in Iraq these days, at least based on media accounts. I also read an account of Robert Fisk’s three weeks spent in Iraq today, but I didn’t link to it because I was too depressed after I read it. Finally, I was talking to a real live person today who has been in Iraq for the past four months, working on IT issues for coalition forces in Iraq. He lives at the coalition base near the ruins of Babylon, and travels around south central Iraq working on satellite uplinks and that sort of thing. He said flat out that he didn’t see any way for Iraq to turn out OK after having been there. (Those aren’t his words, he said something equally plain but I can’t remember what it was.) Update: here’s a link to the Fisk article. I’m never sure whether Robert Fisk’s talent is in making things seem more dismal than they actually are, or just as dismal as they actually are. ...

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry has posted an apology and a promise to do better on his weblog in response to the deluge of recent criticism.

I said something kind of ugly about James Robertson and he responds here. Here’s his response: It's not a matter of hating C# or Java - I recognize them as rather large scale improvements over C++, the programming language from hell. What I'd like to see is less auto-decision making going on. Instead of "well of course we'll use Java", I'd like to see people actually think. I've seen people using EJB and three tier set ups for problems that could best be solved by Access, for instance. What I mostly object to the sheer volume of hammer/nail thinking in the IT industry. It’s hard to argue with that. ...

How does Sun figure out how the market values their computers? By selling them in no reserve auctions on eBay. That’s fascinating.

Adam Greenfield to Technorati: you suck. Honestly, I find Technorati close to useless. I hate to say that, because I know at least one person who works there, and I think they intend to provide a useful service, but they seem to have run into massive scaling problems. Their index is always way behind, and I find the results for this site to be useless most of the time. Honestly, I find that Bloglines does a better job of keeping track of cross references between weblog posts than Technorati does, and that’s just a sideline for them (for now). ...