Posts

There’s a lot of discussion of Google’s deep integration of its Google+ social network with their core search product, but Danny Sullivan is the guy who has actually drilled down to show how it works. My main takeaway is that this is a major loss in terms of usability. Google is anteing up a huge strategy tax payment here, favoring in some cases useless Google+ pages over the content that users almost certainly actually care about. Google obviously feels that their lead in search market share is big enough that they can risk frittering it away in order to promote their social networking efforts. ...

Grassroots efforts to let Congress know what a bad idea SOPA/PIPA is are continuing all over the Internet, and I wanted to make sure people know about them. Fred Wilson is suggesting that people use #BlackoutSOPA to register their protest via their Twitter avatar. Reddit is blacking out their site on January 18. I would encourage everyone to directly contact their Congressperson and their Senators – that will probably have a greater effect than any form of online protest. There’s a long way to go – only 5 Senators are on the record as opposing the bill. ...

Smart Football is one of my favorite blogs. If you’re a football fan at all, you should check it out. Unfortunately, the site’s owner has run into a problem. Some person (whose name is supposedly Anil Jayanna) has registered the domain name smartfootball.net and put up an exact copy of his Web site, apparently to make money on ads (but potentially to distribute malware). From the whois results, I can see that the registrar is Melbourne IT and that the DNS for the domain appears to be handled by Yahoo. A lookup on the site’s IP address reveals that it’s hosted in Russia. ...

My favorite article I read in 2011 was not written in 2011. It was published in The New Yorker in 1987. It’s John McPhee’s piece on human efforts to control the Mississippi River, Atchafalaya. He also wrote a book on the same topic, The Control of Nature, which I have not read. I have long had a passing interest in the ongoing disappearance of Lousiana’s wetlands, which I already knew were caused by degradation resulting from the construction of canals used to access oil drilling equipment, subsidence (a natural process that affects all river bottomland), and levees along the Mississippi that prevent the river from restoring the wetlands. After reading the article, though, I realized I hadn’t really understood the problem at all. ...

Fred Wilson exposes the truth about piracy – all too often it’s about convenience rather than money. Many people download illegally or watch pirated streams because it’s the easiest (or frequently, only) way to get the content they’re after rather than because it’s saving them a buck or two. Sports is a great example – I am a huge University of Houston fan, and often the only way to see their football games where I live is to find illegal streams online. I’d gladly pay, but there is no legitimate way to see them. That’s a pretty huge market failure. ...

Since it’s the beginning of the year, I thought I’d link to my post on the Line Diet. I still stand behind everything in it. I also posted an update at the beginning of 2011. In 2011, I didn’t lose any weight at all, but I was able to keep off all the pounds I lost over the previous two years, so I’m counting that as a victory. I think the key to that success was working out, and I hope to have a post up by the end of the month about what I’ve learned on that front. I keep running into people who tell me they read my original post on the Line Diet and were able to use it to successfully lose weight, so I’m going to keep linking to it. ...

This article (link via Daring Fireball) makes a sound argument against the concept of “maximizing shareholder value,” a concept which has struck me as pretty stupid from the first moment that I heard it. It’s one of those things that makes sense as an abstraction, but no sense as a way to run a business on a day to day basis. Given that shareholders are the owners of a company, it theoretically makes sense to focus on making sure their investments pay off, but in practice, the approaches managers take to doing so are just disastrous. ...

Paul Querna has written an interesting post arguing that developers should rethink how they handle logging – using a robust, machine-readable format (like JSON) rather than human-readable strings that are formatted so that each log entry is a single line long. The big change is not in how you create log messages but rather in how you consume them. Right now, when a user notices an error, I tend to immediately log into the server and start looking for the log messages associated with the transaction in question using grep or my favorite pager. ...

One of the best of the old school bloggers, Garret Vreeland, has written a long series of posts talking about what he’s learned in twelve years of blogging. Unlike the long-winded majority, Garret is economical with his words, so this massive outpouring is particularly noteworthy. There’s tons of hard-won wisdom in there.

I like this quote from Tim Bray on the proper aspirations of people working the mobile industry: Some worry (reasonably) about everyone being online all the time. I think that regularly disconnecting from the endless input overflow is a good thing. But, that choice must always be voluntary; its imposition, by a malevolent government, a failing market, or poverty, is a bug that we should fix.