Posts

Yahoo has filed a lawsuit against Facebook for violating ten of its patents. You will not be surprised to learn that the patents are for obvious implementations of features that have all been used on literally hundreds if not thousands of Web sites. Facebook is about to generate a huge amount of capital through its IPO and Yahoo has its eye on the loot. It’s hard to beat Fred Wilson’s direct response, but my personal favorite is Andy Baio’s. His perspective as a startup founder whose company was acquired by Yahoo is particularly interesting. ...

Google engineer and former Harvard professor Matt Welsh does a great job of making the case for code reviews. I have never worked in a shop where code reviews were mandatory for every change, or even commonly held, but I’ve always wanted to for all of the reasons Matt Welsh explains. There are a lot of excuses for not doing code reviews, but I can’t think of any more efficient way to encourage developers to learn from one another and to develop a cohesive coding style that spans an entire team. ...

What is impossible for novices is easy for experts. Take a look at what Damir Sagolj refers to as the “easiest big picture he shot for a long time” and then check out more of his work.

Today Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech in which he explained why the US government asserts that it has the right to assassinate suspected terrorists overseas, even if they are US citizens. I urge you to read the recap of the speech. How does Holder justify the government’s logic? This way: This is an indicator of our times, not a departure from our laws and our values. My fundamental problem with the Bush administration was that it chose to put aside the rule of law in pursuing the so-called “war on terror.” My greatest disappointment in the Obama administration has been seeing it continue and even expand some of the worst practices of the Bush administration. As others have pointed out, the decision to do so has cemented these practices as national policy. ...

This morning I read that Ralph McQuarrie has died. Oddly enough, I didn’t even know his name until today, but I certainly knew his work. He was the conceptual designer behind the original Star Wars trilogy, among many other works, and he created the visual world that completely enraptured my childhood mind. It’s strange to think that I didn’t know who deserved credit for that until his passing. There’s a slide show of his concept art for Star Wars at the official site. It’s amazing how faithful the films are to his renderings. ...

EasyDNS has a chilling post on VeriSign taking down a Canadian Web site in order to service a warrant from the state of Maryland: We all know that with some US-based Registrars (cough Godaddy cough), all it takes is a badge out of a box of crackerjacks and you have the authority to fax in a takedown request which has a good shot at being honoured. We also know that some non-US registrars, it takes a lot more “due process-iness” to get a domain taken down. ...

In an email explaining how he optimized GNU Grep for speed, Mike Haertel discloses the secret of high performance software: The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

I’m writing a very simple deployment script that logs into a remote server and uses Git to pull the latest code from the remote repository. The deployment application runs on Server A, and it will update code on Server B and Server C. The deployment application is written in PHP, and it’s easy enough to call the ssh command using PHP’s shell_exec() function. Well, calling SSH is easy, but making it work is a bit more difficult. ...

Don’t miss Dylan Matthews’ piece on Modern Monetary Theory, which argues that deficit spending is essential to economic growth. Here’s the crux of the philosophy: This claim, that money is a “creature of the state,” is central to the theory. In a “fiat money” system like the one in place in the United States, all money is ultimately created by the government, which prints it and puts it into circulation. Consequently, the thinking goes, the government can never run out of money. It can always make more. ...

Last month, I wrote a post arguing that people illegally download content because it’s convenient, not just because it’s free. Along comes The Oatmeal to make the point in cartoon form. We should all cast a dubious eye on businesses that want to generate scarcity where it doesn’t really exist.