One thing lacking in both news coverage of the Presidential campaign and at the Democratic convention itself was substantive discussion of John Kerry’s policy proposals. Mother Jones as a nice rundown of a few of Kerry’s proposed policies.
Civil libertarians are pissed that the Homeland Security department is using census data to figure out where Arabs live in America.
Mark Hurst wonders what would happen if companies spent less on advertising and more on customer experience. He also has an example of a company that has done just that – you’ve probably heard of them.
Greg Knauss does a nice job of deflating Paul Graham’s essay on hackers that I linked to the other day. When it comes to technical articles like Graham’s essay, my brain has a special filter that enables me to ignore the fatuous parts and mine the value from the useful parts, otherwise I couldn’t read them at all. I mean the idea that there are no great Java or .NET hackers is just so silly that it hardly bears response. There are some software development pundits from the world of obscure languages who have lots of really smart stuff to say, like Paul Graham and James Robertson, whose hatred of popular languages just has to be glossed over if you expect to be able to read them. I think that they’re so offended that their language of choice (Lisp, Smalltalk, or whatever) never hit the big time that they just can’t see other, more popular languages all that rationally. I know they’d tell me that they hate Java or C# or whatever because they handcuff your productivity when compared to the obscure language that they favor, and they may even be right. Update: Here’s a list of the most valuable hackers in Java. I’m not sure how many of them would meet Paul Graham’s standard, but they’d meet mine. You can also add the developers of cglib to the list. ...
So last night I went to update one of my entries, and when I went to my admin page, no items showed up at all. There were no errors, but there was no content, either. So I went to the front page of the site – again, no entries displayed. How odd, I thought. If the site had been unable to connect to the database server, I would have seen an error of some kind, so I knew that wasn’t it. At that point, my mind started racing. I was afraid I’d been compromised in some way – it’s aways possible. I decided I’d check the contents of the database itself. I logged into my server and did some selects on the table. Yep, all the entries were still there. I then went to an export page I created that dumps all my links to a Web page so that they can be imported into antoher weblog package. Everything showed up there as expected. At that point I was really puzzled. I then inspected my query that returns items for the front page, and saw that it only returns items from the past two weeks. I checked the dates for the entries in the database, and they were all still good. So I ran the query: select now(); and the date on the server was set to sometime in March of 2024. I sent a support ticket to pair.com, and they fixed the problem on the server not long after. As it turns out, they were pointing at an incorrect NTP server. So if you came by sometime yesterday evening and nothing was showing up, that’s why. ...
Ed Felten describes Apple’s fight with Real over DRM: See, Apple had this product called iPod that lets you listen to music. That sounds like a good idea. But Apple thought it would be better if the iPod could do less.
In his rundown of the Perl Lightning Talks at OSCON, Danny O’Brien mentions a new web app framework for Perl written by Randal Schwartz, which sounds like a port of something you’d do in Java. You extend an existing class and just override the parts you need to in order to make your app work. That sounds pretty cool to me – I wonder where I can read more about it … Update: Randal Schwartz (channeling Kibo, I guess) sends along the URL to a column he wrote in February about the framework. He says it will be available via CPAN soon. ...
I think it’s time to look again at learning Python. It’s been on my to do list for ages, but I always seem to put it off. My latest rationale for learning is that on top of being a good general purpose scripting language, you can now write Python to target the two virtual machines that dominate the business applications industry – IronPython for the .NET CLR, and Jython for the Java virtual machine. ...
Paul Graham’s latest essay is on the topic of Great Hackers. In it, he talks about what motivates the best programmers. Here’s one of the points he makes, about tools: When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. He goes on to talk about office space, management, and other topics concerning hackers. It’s amazing how few people writing software work in conditions that are ideal, or even suitable, for writing software. ...
So for the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about the range of possibilities for Republicans who are dissatisfied with President Bush by trying to put myself in their shoes. It’s obvious to me that President Bush has done a horrible job, and I think that many Republicans have their doubts about him as well. I could go into the reasons why, but you already know what they are. I’ve been trying to think about what I would do in 2008 if John Kerry is elected this year, and he does a terrible job (by my standards) for the next four years. The odds are very low that I’d vote for a Republican for President, especially if the nominee were an orthodox Republican. No matter how bad a job a Democrat does, I’d be very unlikely to vote to hand the country over to someone who I had fundamental philosophical disagreements with. And, given that I would be unwilling to vote for a Republican, cognitive dissonance would almost certainly compel me to rationalize Kerry’s faults because I’d be voting for him anyway and it’s hard to make yourself vote for someone you detest. So, I have to say that I can understand where many Republicans are on Bush, because I’d probably be in the same place if the President were an incompetent Democrat. ...