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Today we learned that Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, died at age 84. The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64. It was the best Christmas present I ever received. I still remember typing in program listings from computer magazines by hand just so that I could see them run. The next summer I saved all the money I made from mowing lawns to buy a Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive so that I could copy games. If Commodore hadn’t offered an affordable alternative to the Apple II at the time, I probably wouldn’t have had a computer at all. ...

From the “you should read this” pile: Rev. Dan Catt has a really thoughtful take on why the New Aesthetic is about the future (or at least the present) and not the past. For background on the New Aesthetic, read this post by James Bridle and this essay by Bruce Sterling.

Reg Braithwaite’s (hypothetical) resignation letter makes it perfectly clear why companies demanding to pre-screen applicant Facebook accounts is a terrible and potentially self-destructive idea. Aside from the very real problems he mentions in his letter, there’s also the fact that if you are even tempted to do this, you need to grow up.

Today Bruce Schneier writes up the actual harms caused by airport security policies imposed after 9/11. It’s easy to decry these policies for their stupidity and costs, but describing the ways they cause actual harm is more work. This piece is a must read – here’s a snippet: This loss of trust—in both airport security and counterterrorism policies in general—is the first harm. Trust is fundamental to society. There is an enormous amount written about this; high-trust societies are simply happier and more prosperous than low-trust societies. Trust is essential for both free markets and democracy. This is why open-government laws are so important; trust requires government transparency. The secret policies implemented by airport security harm society because of their very secrecy. ...

Paul Vixie (the guy who wrote the BIND DNS server) talks about his efforts to clean up the effects of the DNS Changer malware, which changes the DNS settings on the host computer (and sometimes the routers they use). DNS Changer was, in essence, a black hat advertising network. If you paid them, they would alter the malware victims’ DNS searches to redirect them to sites that promoted your products. After the DNS Changer network was taken down, Vixie’s job was to come in and stand up replacement DNS servers to take the place of the bogus ones, so that victims of the malware didn’t suddenly lose the ability to perform DNS lookups. In the meantime, the working group is trying to remove the malware from hundreds of thousands of devices before the new DNS servers are taken down by court order on June 9. ...

Let’s say you are a casual football fan who doesn’t really understand how football strategy works. Chris Brown explains the purpose of every offensive scheme in two paragraphs: With 11 players to each side, every play — but particularly run plays — often comes down to how the offense does or does not account for one or two particular defenders. In the modern NFL, if all of an offense’s players block their counterparts on a running play, the defense will have two defenders unaccounted for: The counterpart for the running back carrying the ball and the counterpart for the quarterback, who most likely has handed the ball off. Good quarterbacks like Peyton Manning seek to control their counterpart by faking a play-action pass, so that a deep safety must stand in the middle of the field. ...

Distributed database creator and LinkedIn engineer Jay Kreps pokes a hole in the widespread myth that systems that scale horizontally are inherently reliable. This is an important post, because intuitively it seems like a system that scales horizontally and makes provisions for fault tolerance should be reliable. Indeed, that’s the value proposition for many people. Rather than having to be smart enough to provision big servers intelligently and figure out how to make them fault tolerant, you can just throw commodity hardware at the problem and be ready to swap out systems when you encounter the occasional hardware failure. ...

I’m going to let you skip listening to the Retraction episode of This American Life. Here are two short snippets from the transcript. First, This American Life made it clear what they expected from Daisey. This bit is from an email that This American Life producer Brian Reed sent to Mike Daisey before the original episode excerpting Mike Daisey’s show aired: Being that news stations are obviously a different kind of form than the theater we wanted to make sure that this thing is totally, utterly unassailable by anyone who might hear it. ...

The big news in my little corner of the world today is This American Life’s retraction of the show they did that included a long excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. In the show, Daisey contrasts the Apple products that are known and loved by both he and most of his audience with the labor conditions under which they are produced in China. Much of the emotional power of the story derives from the fact that Daisey travelled to China himself to meet workers in the factories. In his show, he alternates between telling the history of Apple and his own first-hand accounts of meetings with the workers. ...

Lately, I’ve been interviewing a lot of developers. Not phone screens, but in house interviews that we use to decide whether to hire someone who’s passed the first round. In addition to trying to figure out who the good candidates are, I’m also trying to get better at interviewing. If you’re getting started with interviewing programmers, there are a couple of must-read articles. The first is Steve Yegge’s article, The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions. This article is incredibly well-known and I assume everyone has already read it. ...