Posts

This weekend I read an interesting post about Occam’s Razor but decided not to blog about it, until I came across someone misusing Occam’s Razor and couldn’t suppress the need to clear my throat. In a post about digital camera pricing, I read the following sentence: Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest answer is the most likely one. This is not correct. Here’s how Wikipedia defines Occam’s razor: Occam’s razor, often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae, translating to law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness, is a principle that generally recommends selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions, when the hypotheses are equal in other respects. ...

Jeff Shell argues against needlessly baroque testing frameworks like RSpec and Cucumber. I’ve always hated them. Rebecca Murphey explains how to get better at JavaScript. This is related to my 2011 Skill of the Year. I’ve made little progress toward that goal. Mark Nottingham explains how to perform HTTP load testing properly. Tyler Cowen explains the economics of BitCoin. This is actually a post from last month, but I’m seeing lots of BitCoin discussion, so I thought I’d remind people of it. InFocus has a gallery of photos of nuclear bomb tests. Number 14 blows my mind every time I look at it. This story about Al Capone’s dairy farm is a must-read.

Horace Dediu on acquiring companies: Clayton Christensen succinctly defined the value in any company as the sum of three constituent parts: resources, processes or business models. Market value can be nothing more and nothing less than these three things. An acquisition has to be positioned on one of these targets just like a product is positioned on a specific market. The problem with being deliberate about where the value lies is that once positioned a certain way, the integration team will begin to execute on that plan. This means that the thing you decided was worth most (e.g. resources) gets all the attention and the other potential sources of value (processes or profit models) are discarded. ...

Since February, I’ve been working on a pro bono project that launched last week. What’s in it for them is they got a brand new application that replaces an unwieldy bunch of paper and email-based processes. Before, they had a Web page that was protected by basic authentication and led to a set of form-to-mail scripts and downloadable Word documents. Now they have an application with real user accounts that can be carried over from year to year. There’s still a lot of work to do on the administrative side of the application, but I’m quite proud of the results so far. ...

Here’s a project that looks interesting: journalist/programmer Christopher Groskopf is moving from Chicago to Tyler, Texas for reasons mostly not of his choosing. In doing so, he’s going to work to adapt the town to be what he wants it to be. Here’s a taste: Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has government that could be opened. Tyler has news that could be hacked. Moreover, Tyler has an almost completely unexploited market. There are no hackers there. The small number of high-tech businesses that exist in the region are either web development shops serving local businesses or robotics companies. ...

Chris Dixon explains how Tom Pinckney got into MIT without a high school diploma: Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter – all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges. ...

Tim Bray mourns Derek K. Miller, the Vancouver blogger who wrote about his battle with cancer right up to (and indeed, past) the end. Here’s Tim’s last bit of advice: If your plans for your approaching death include a closing magnum opus, well then get your caching setup right.

Rackspace is shutting down Slicehost and migrating customers to their own cloud hosting service. This blog is hosted on a 512 slice there now, for $38 a month. It’s impossible to see what an equivalent cloud server from Rackspace would cost without registering for an account. I’ve been meaning on shutting down my slice anyway because of some problems that are my own fault. I’ll be migrating the site to Linode, where I already have a virtual server. ...

I take no pleasure in the death of Osama bin Laden. That the United States managed to locate him and kill him was a victory for justice. He unrepentantly ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, and finding him was important on those grounds alone, regardless of whether doing so strengthens or weakens al-Qaeda or anyone else. The first question I wondered about was whether the soldiers who conducted the raid were ordered to kill or capture Osama bin Laden or just kill him. I read today that the order was to kill him. In principle, I have a problem with that. I don’t like the idea of soldiers being sent on a mission to kill someone regardless of the circumstances in which they are found. That bothers me from a “rule of law” standpoint. (And I’m not the only person who feels that way.) ...

You’ll see a ton of links today to an article at Ars Technica with the headline, Guns at home more likely to be used stupidly than in self-defense. People are interested not because of the content of the article, but because of a trick the author used to see whether people are reading it before posting comments. He inserted this about halfway through: If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We’re pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won’t even read it first. ...