Posts

Tim Bray’s take on the self-promotion discussion nails it pretty well.

A primer on how Wall Street makes money and ways for the Internet to hurt its margins. It’s worth reading as a list of ways you can avoid financial practices that enrich Wall Street and cost you money.

Because amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it, modern information networks and the technologies they support can be harnessed for good or for ill. The same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to spew hatred and incite violence against the innocent. And technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights. ...

Here’s the email I sent to my Congressman (a moderate Democrat) tonight: I am a Democrat who attends precinct and county meetings, donates to the party, and went door to door during the 2008 campaign. Like many Democrats, I feel let down by what has been achieved given the large majorities we have in Congress. I believe that passing a health care reform bill, even if it’s the unmodified Senate bill, is critically important for the future of the country. I think it is also critical for our party. Without a signature achievement to bring to voters this fall, I fear that the Democrats will suffer massive electoral defeat and 2011 will begin with our majorities substantially reduced, or worse. ...

George Washington was not a military genius, but his French allies were: Later, Washington was painfully slow to grasp the significance of the war in the Southern states. For the most part, he committed troops to that theater only when Congress ordered him to do so. By then, it was too late to prevent the surrender of Charleston in May 1780 and the subsequent losses among American troops in the South. Washington also failed to see the potential of a campaign against the British in Virginia in 1780 and 1781, prompting Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French Army in America, to write despairingly that the American general “did not conceive the affair of the south to be such urgency.” Indeed, Rochambeau, who took action without Washington’s knowledge, conceived the Virginia campaign that resulted in the war’s decisive encounter, the siege of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781. ...

One of the key pillars of libertarian orthodoxy is that foreign aid is bad. Tyler Cowen sets his readers straight: I still believe that foreign aid does not raise economic growth rates, on average. But aid can alleviate human misery, such as when a visiting doctor gives vaccines or hands out medicine. (In fact per capita income may fall, as a result, if some “weaklings” are kept alive.) I also believe that the U.S. military can make a huge difference in the immediate aftermath of catastrophes. ...

I have a habit, some would call it a bad habit, of fixing bugs whenever I see them, usually without ever filing a case in the bug tracking system or telling anyone that I found the bug at all. Usually this happens when I’m reading through code I’m not ostensibly working on. When I see bugs, I fix them. Someone with fewer battle scars than I have may think that’s a great habit and that there’s no need to apologize. Here’s why I should always file a case, even if I fix the bug right then: ...

You can add oysters to the list of ocean dwellers that humans are wiping out by way of our stomachs and unwillingness to preserve their habitats. The good news is that not only is oyster farming sustainable, it is actually good for the environment. This is a good time to mention the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to eating seafood. I use the iPhone version. Having reviewed the whole thing, here’s the basic upshot. If you stick with fish or shellfish farmed in the United States, you’re probably in the clear. Most wild seafood and nearly all seafood farmed overseas, especially in Asia, is a bad choice. Oh, and if you still eat bluefin tuna (also known as the stuff they make sushi out of), you are part of the problem. ...

Web developers have hated Internet Explorer 6 for a long time. If you design Web sites or write Web front end code, you know all too well how much work it is to support IE6 on all but the simplest Web sites. What we’ve recently learned is that IE6 is much more insecure than its successors, and now Microsoft admits that IE6 has security holes that they cannot fix. Getting rid of the last vestiges of IE6 is going to require a three pronged attack. IT departments that still require it are going to have to be educated on the security risks of sticking with it. Or, more likely, the executives who have the power to tell the IT department what to do are going to have to be educated. I imagine that in the near future, we’re going to see a lot of IE6-remediation work. Web applications that support only IE6 are going to have to be upgraded so that IE6 can be abandoned. ...

I thought this was an interesting point from John Casasanta, a developer who who creates both Mac and iPhone applications: For one, developing for the iPhone is a dream compared to developing for the Mac. Yeah, it’s Cocoa development for both iPhone and Mac, but many of the Mac SDKs are old and crufty compared to the shiny, new iPhone one. This means much quicker development time and greater programmer satisfaction. Many, many programmers I know never want to go back to Mac for this reason and usually cringe when they have to. ...