Posts

Jumping in: Did you know that many people are released from prison owing a debt to the state for things like court fees and charges for public defenders? Our criminal justice system is intentionally cruel in so many ways. And speaking of the criminal justice system, people who benefit financially from incarcerating massive numbers of people are generally in favor of maintaining and expanding the systems that put people in jail, even unnecessarily. The League of Ordinary Gentlemen looks at how the prison guards’ union has gained influence in California and the quality of prisons has gotten worse. This is a great piece of blog writing. This is the sort of libertarian philosophy I agree with. The fair price of goods should include the negative externalities of their use. The description of now-more-than-everism is useful, and not just for politics. I’ve certainly seen it plenty of times on engineering teams, and probably have practiced it more times than I’d care to admit. James Governor talks about the advantages of giving engineers some responsibility for communicating with the public. Probably the smartest blog post I read last week. Anil Dash explains how he uses the favorite and like features on social sites.

Trying to spin up the link blogging again: Kevin Carey explains why all those articles about the decreasing value of college degrees are wrong. Mike Loukides thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript. I agree, but I have little progress on that project this year. John Scalzi has a simple rule of thumb for figuring out whether or not you’re cheating on your significant other. Inbox Influence is a browser extension that shows the political donations people in your Gmail in box have made. It’s a very cool illustration of how easy access to various databases will affect user experience in the future. Rands talks about notifications. His tangential discussion of RSS is noteworthy as well.

I don’t work at a company that does continuous deployment like Flickr, or Etsy, or Facebook. We are not close to doing continuous deployment. I’m not sure anybody at the company besides me is interested in continuous deployment. Generally speaking, when we create new features, the product team creates a spec, then developers write a short tech spec, then quality assurance comes up with a test plan, then we write the feature, test it, launch it, and then test it again. ...

Apple announced a whole slew of new features for iOS 5 and OS X Lion today, and some of them step on the toes of popular third party applications. The New York Times has a helpful list of threatened applications. To gauge the reaction, check out the results of a Twitter search for “sherlocked.” Platform vendors build in functionality that’s already being provided by third party applications all the time, and this has always been the case. It’s also always been the subject of some controversy. I’m old enough to remember when Dave Winer was feuding with Apple because AppleScript competed with Frontier. And of course, Microsoft’s decision to bundle a Web browser with Windows rather than ceding that turf to third-party developers like Netscape got them into trouble for abusing their monopoly on desktop operating systems. ...

Nelson Minar suggests the proper way to handle login names in Web applications: The right way to do logins right now on the Web is use email address as the login name and let the user choose their own display name which does not need to be unique. That’s not ideal (email addresses can change) but it works pretty well. If you absolutely have to not use email as the login name, please at least let my login name have a space in it. ...

David Heinemeier Hansson takes a look at the numbers behind the Groupon IPO: At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion? ...

Tim Bray wrote up the browsers he uses on a daily basis. Impressively, he uses Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari consistently. These days, I’m using Google Chrome for most things and Firefox for Web development. I’m hooked on Firebug and I like doing development in a browser that’s sequestered from the browser I’m using for email and standard Web surfing. Unfortunately, Firefox loses the basic speed test to Google Chrome, so I can’t use it for day to day browsing. If I were going to put up with a slower browser, I’d stick with Safari because it is a better behaved OS X application. ...

Here’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Ta-Nahesi Coates: I don’t link to Coates as often as I’m tempted to because I assume most of our readers read him already. If you don’t, you should; his blog is one of the Great Works in our little genre, and as good now as it has ever been. It occurred to me that there a number of blogs that are so good and so popular that I can’t imagine anyone spending their time reading this one and not reading those others as well or instead. ...

Last week, Roger Ebert wrote a piece about the effect improperly operated projectors have on the movie viewing experience. Most of the time, when you go to the movies, the bulb in the projector is insufficiently bright, usually because movie theaters are too lazy or incompetent to configure their digital 3D projectors to project 2D movies properly. (3D movies are inherently less bright than 2D movies, it’s a drawback.) He also points out that improper projection goes back before digital movies, it’s a long term problem in the movie industry. ...

How DRM may have made it more difficult for the Amazon.com MP3 store to fulfill orders for Lady Gaga’s album when they put it on sale. The Affordable Care Act is increasing the number of people with health insurance. “In matters of cooking, authenticity is a joke.” This statement is important and true. Edouard de Pomaine’s tomatoes a la creme. Incredibly tasty and easy to make. An explanation of Pivotal Tracker’s client-side architecture. These days, all of the advanced Web applications are client-server apps written using JavaScript and HTML instead of Visual Basic or PowerBuilder. Tim Bray thinks about what may happen to our stuff when we’re gone. The Cassiopeia Project is a library of free science instruction videos. Funded by a retired scientist who wants to improve the quality of science education. Journalists appear to be noticing that Republican politicians and pundits are not engaging with reality. Hopefully it’s the start of a trend. The New York Times explains the lengths to which hotels must go to protect their staff from guests. Depressing. Researchers find that cultured people feel less stress. Perhaps you’d enjoy a trip to a museum this weekend.