Posts

First, some links that are worth noting from last week. There’s an article about Donald Harrison, Jr., the musician who recorded the version of “My Indian Red” that played over the credits of episode 3, at Nola.com. Here’s what he says about Clarke Peters playing Big Chief Lambreaux: I think what the series has picked up on is the seriousness that people who do that have. They maintain the culture and the spirituality of it, and the transcendence from everyday life. Those are some of the things I think Clarke really brings out. And the regal nature of being a big chief. ...

Anthony Bourdain responds to a question about whether foodies are too precious: Yeah. It could be silly, it could be annoying and I like to make fun of bloggers. But when we’re researching a show some place, chances are, it’s bloggers we’re reaching out to first. It’s not the restaurant review in the newspaper that’s going to determine [a place’s] future. The Internet is a big bathroom wall with people writing on it all the time. At the end of the day, some consensus will be reached. You know, 3,000 words on a hot dog, why not? What better thing to write 3,000 things on? How many tens of thousands of words has been written about Kate Gosselin for f—’s sakes. Or the Kardashians. So I don’t see anything out there…what better than a hot dog or a chef? ...

I loved this sentence in a blog post about Meishan pigs: If one reflects for a moment on the needs of Chinese subsistence farmers, it makes sense that the Meishan is the pig that it is; it is a pig best-suited for a Malthusian world.

I’ve been following the ongoing saga of Gizmodo’s publishing photos of the lost iPhone prototype. The latest is that the San Mateo police served a search warrant on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, broke into his house, and confiscated his computers. There are two arguments about this, the first is whether Gizmodo is protected by shield laws for journalists, being a blog and all. That’s not a very interesting argument – of course it is. If you want to argue about that, argue with someone else. ...

Matthew Yglesias asks an interesting question today: why are the big tech companies sitting on so much cash? These are big companies full of smart people, is there no way for them to invest that money to earn a greater return than it is just sitting there? What’s that say about the state of the industry? It’s not as though companies aren’t shipping new product – Apple has increased its cash reserves by around $13 billion over the past year even as it developed the next generation of the OS X for the iPhone and created the iPad. ...

A couple of friends have taken a stab at the binary search exercise and posted the results to their blogs. Check out Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s implementation and Erik Kastner’s implementation(s).

Tim Bray on local storage: In fact, I’m increasingly convinced that any data whose permanent canonical home is on a device that lives in your pocket and can fall into a toilet or the hands of a thief means You’re Doing It Wrong. This is a lesson Apple really needs to get. I don’t think iTunes makes a better permanent home than the device itself does.

A few links from my notes on this week’s episode of Treme. Mardi Gras indians were heavily featured again, so I’m recycling that link from the episode 1 reference. The Wild Magnolias tribe has a Web site with downloadable music, as well as its own Wikipedia article. Dr. John’s version of My Indian Red was included on his 1992 album Goin’ Back to New Orleans. Also on the music front, Professor Longhair’s Tipitina was referenced this week. ...

I wanted to point the programmers in the audience at a series of three posts by Mike Taylor of The Reinvigorated Programmer. In the first, he challenges programmers to sit down and see if they can write an implementation of binary search on the first try, without testing. I tried the exercise without reading the whole post last week and tested intermittently, so I blew it. My implementation didn’t work the first time but that’s because I started testing it before it was finished. Or maybe it’s because I suck. I’ll probably give it a try again later when it’s not so fresh on my mind. ...

Matthew Yglesias on the two ways to break news: But there are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race for priority. You get Type 2 scoops by becoming the favored destination for deliberate leaks, or by ferreting out information that will be officially announced soon enough (Joe Biden will be Obama’s VP pick!), or by chasing down an obvious-but-arduous-to-follow lead. These Type 2 scoops are structurally similar to “breaking news” but they don’t have any real value. ...