Posts

L’Hote accuses of libertarians of holding liberals in contempt even as they revel in the culture that liberals created: Cosmopolitan libertarians live in liberal urban enclaves, surrounded by liberals, taking advantage of the kind of governmental cultural and transportation infrastructure that liberals created. They consume movies, novels, music, and theater crafted in overwhelming majorities by leftists. They operate in environments where the liberal spirit of tolerance and freedom from conformity underpins everything, yet they will identify again and again the liberal hand as the one of villainy. ...

Ta-Nehesi Coates mentions the approach he’s taking to learning French, and asks his readers not to argue: I’ve found on the autodidact’s path, it’s much more important to “keep going” than to “be right.” This is a deep truth, and not just for autodidacts. I’ve learned that in life, consistency is everything. If you want to get in shape, the best exercise routine in the world is the one that you can do consistently, right now. People spend too much time thinking about the “best” way to do things, or thinking about what will work for them in five years. Do what you can do right now, and when it quits working or you get tired of it, switch to something else. ...

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the conflict between political campaigning and activism for awhile now, and an incident that’s getting a lot of play today provides the perfect opportunity. In short, a frustrated Organizing for America campaign staffer in New Mexico sent an email bashing Paul Krugman and left wing activists for criticizing the debt deal that President Obama agreed to. Unsurprisingly, people on the left who are already frustrated with the White House are taking this as a sign that the Obama campaign has adopted the strategy of bashing the left in order to ingratiate itself with voters in the middle. Greg Sargent argues that’s not the case. Here’s what he says: ...

As part of the announcement of its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Google has posted a page of quotes from other Android handset makers offering support for the merger. One problem: all of the quotes are exactly the same, variations on this: I welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners. I realize that PR people make up quotes for people, but it might not be a good idea to collect them all on one page. Ideally, you’d think they would want to avoid this effect. ...

Mike Monteiro has some good, simple advice for people who use Twitter: Never, ever, talk about clients on Twitter. Ever. I pretty much take this one step further – never talk about other humans with whom you have a personal relationship on Twitter. I talk to other people I know on Twitter, but not about them. I try hard not to even make oblique inside jokes about other people or the code they write. It’s unprofessional and rude. ...

Just for fun, in light of Apple’s becoming the most valuable company in the world, I thought I’d take a look at Wired’s June, 1997 cover story 101 Ways to Save Apple. There’s some good advice, some bad advice, and a number of suggestions included to inject some levity into the proceedings. A lot of the suggestions were to be more like Microsoft and embrace the Windows platform. Apple, obviously, rejected that path and has benefitted greatly from doing so. It’s hard to remember now, but many people thought that Apple should drop their operating system and instead turn to making high end Windows PCs. I think we’re all glad they never went that route. ...

Bagcheck, a company I’d never heard of, was acquired by Twitter today. In Luke Wroblewski’s announcement of the deal, he lists some of the things they learned in building the startup. One idea that really captured my imagination was building features starting with the command line interface: We always add features to the Bagcheck API (and thereby command line interface) first. This provides us with a way to start using new things before we invest time in how they’ll look and work in a graphical user interface. In fact, the first bags ever made on Bagcheck were lovingly typed into the CLI character by character. Including my complete mountain biking set-up. ...

Being that we live in a DevOps world and all, the application I work on sends me texts when it looks like things are going wrong in production, even though I am a developer and not a systems administrator. For months, I have been mildly annoyed that these texts originate from a variety of phone numbers preventing my phone from categorizing them nicely and forcing me to delete them individually to keep my texts organized. ...

Tim Bray laments the feeling of productivity you get when you work with tool set that you’re intimately familiar with. He talks about constantly experimenting with the next great thing as part of his job, specifically the downside: But it means that I’ve been sort of a perpetual newbie. There’s another big piece of the software experience, one I haven’t shared in for years: where you’re concentrating on some problem and you know the codebase and tools, so your time goes more into doing and less into learning. In fact, that kind of work, in particular maintaining a large running production system, is where most of my professional colleagues spend most of their years of service. ...

One interesting and controversial aspect of Diablo III from Blizzard is an auction house where players can sell items they find in the game for real money. Players can put items up for sale and Blizzard will take a cut. Jamais Cascio notes that game prizes that have cash value must be counted as income, whether or not you sell them: When you win a prize in a game that has cash value, that prize is taxable at the fair market value, even if you do not sell it. This is true in the United States, and (from my cursory Googling) appears to be true in the UK and India (and likely many other locations). So when you stumble across that Massive Staff of Infection or Red-White-Blue Shield of Copyright Infringement, items that could be sold in the Diablo III Market for $20, $50, or even $100, you’re legally supposed to declare those winnings on your taxes. While that might seem like common sense if you sell them and end up with a few hundred dollars in your PayPal account every year, it will likely come as a surprise if you’re just playing and avoiding the auction house entirely. ...