Posts

From a New York Times article on a federal appeals court decision denying detainees access to US courts: The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight. The court has ruled that as long as the government detains prisoners in Afghanistan rather than the US, they are not entitled to the same process as they would be if they were detained somewhere else, regardless of where they were captured. That’s quite a loophole. ...

Tim O’Reilly argues that the nature of privacy is changing, and that it would be worse for companies not to experiment in that realm than it is for companies like Facebook to push those boundaries and occasionally run into trouble: The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused. ...

Erik Kastner at Etsy explains how their team handles deployment. They have moved to a continuous deployment system based on a tool they built themselves. Here’s the bottom line: Using Deployinator we’ve brought a typical web push from 3 developers, 1 operations engineer, everyone else on standby and over an hour (when things went smoothly) down to 1 person and under 2 minutes. I particularly liked this question: It’s a metric I’ve come to call the “quantum of deployment”: what’s the smallest number of steps, with the smallest number of people and the smallest amount of ceremony required to get new code running on your servers? ...

I’ve been following Google’s announcements from Google I/O with interest. Google announced version 2.2 of Android and a new set-top box, GoogleTV. The main takeaway from today’s events is that the competition between Apple and Google is heating up. I think all of this is fantastic. Google and Apple both build great stuff, espouse completely different philosophies, and are scary in different ways. And they’re going to be fighting tooth and nail in a number of still unclaimed markets for every dollar of profit that’s available. There is no underdog here. Both operate from positions of strength and both have huge war chests they can bring to bear. Apple has $41.7 billion in cash. Google has $26.5 billion in cash. Microsoft wants to be a player in these markets as well, and they have $39.7 billion as well. So they have plenty of money to hire developers, build data centers, and buy up companies that look interesting. Nobody has market leverage of the kind Microsoft did in the desktop computing market during the browser wars of the nineties. ...

Someone flagged this quote from Google VP Vic Gundrota at the Google I/O Keynote keynote today, explaining why Google created Android: If we did not act, we faced a draconian future. Where one man, one company, one carrier was the future. That seemed wrong to me, and it turns out my instincts were correct. Matt Drance points out that Google acquired Android in 2005, 18 months before the announcement of the iPhone. ...

Sam Ruby has had success losing weight and keeping it off on the line diet, which I wrote about earlier this year. I’ve lost about 35 pounds on the line diet since the end of August last year. I’ve also been working out at the gym religiously since October.

This week I did a phone screen interview over Skype, with video. I was so pleased with how it went that I never want to do a regular phone screen again. I am not a big fan of interviewing people over the phone or being interviewed over the phone. The biggest problem with doing technical interviews over the phone is that when you ask hard questions, the subject of the interview has to think about their answer, and may even need to write things down to get their answer together. When you’re talking on the phone, nothing is conveyed. There’s an awkward silence punctuated by the interviewer letting the interviewee know that it’s OK that they’re not talking while they think about it. People get more nervous, and I think it hurts the quality of their answers. ...

Old school blogger and New Orleans native Chuck Taggart wrote up his perspective on Treme last week. It’s a must-read post. He also points to the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Treme site, upon which they explain every episode in detail, perhaps rendering this ongoing series by me superfluous. Here’s the Time’s Picayune Treme Explained post on episode 6. By this episode, I felt like we were settling into things and I would up taking a lot fewer notes for the essential reference. The big concepts seem to be well-flushed out at this point. I was a bit excited to see one of the characters take a field trip to my old stomping grounds, Port Arthur, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was born in Sulphur, Louisiana and grew up between Lake Charles and Port Arthur. They’re all between Houston and New Orleans on or near Interstate 10, a highway that would be featured heavily in my biography. ...

Danc has posted the notes to a presentation he gave, Why we turned Microsoft Office into a Game. It’s a great piece on the complexity of applications and how to manage it for users. In it, he gets down to the core problem that faces companies trying to build growing businesses around software – dealing with the fact that different users take advantage of different features, and that applications tend to grow more complex as their user bases grow. It seems to me that the fashionable answer to this problem is to claim to be an auteur of application development, and to only build the features that are appealing to you. But that’s not the way big software companies work, and it’s really not the way they should work. If you’re in the software business, this presentation is a must-read. ...

Matthew Yglesias asks whether we should have a college version of the GED? There could be a test or series of tests you could take that gives you the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, or even an associates degree to start out. It seems like a logical idea to me – it would give the self-taught an opportunity to obtain needed credentials and provide real competition to regular universities and alternative schools like the University of Phoenix. I really think that everyone who wants a college education should have the opportunity to have one. That said, given all the lectures and course materials available online, the makings of a college education already exist if you have Internet access. What’s lacking is the granting of credentials once you’ve learned the material. It seems logical for someone to grant those credentials. On the other hand, if that happened, I suspect that many universities would pull down the courseware they currently post due to the new competition. ...