Posts

The Pilots in the Basement Really interesting look at flight simulator subculture on the Internet.

One of the more interesting debates that’s cropping up off and on around the Web and Twitter is whether it’s unfair for conferences to invite speakers without compensating them beyond free attendance at the event. Remy Sharp’s argument can be inferred from the title of his post, You’re paying to speak. This reminded me of a post by Andy Budd from last August, Paying Speakers is Better for Everybody. Budd’s post is a bit less inflammatory and comes at it from the perspective of what a conference organizer gains by paying speakers: ...

I gave this talk at Monki Gras in London in January, and the slides are available as well. It’s about the evolution of Etsy’s bug rotation in 2012. If you have a chance to attend Monki Gras or its sibling in the United States, Monktoberfest, don’t pass it up.

Seventeen year old Sara Sakowitz writes in the Washington Post about the attrition that results from gender stereotypes for young women: When I looked around the arena at my robotics competition, I counted only three other girls out of over a thousand high school students working on their teams’ robots. Glancing at the bleachers, I watched girls parading as mascots, girls cheering for their teams, and girls dancing in the stands. But I didn’t see girls on the competition floor. Maybe in the next few years that gender balance will change, and the timid girls in the bleachers will be replaced by fearless women who are undaunted by society’s confining expectations. Someday, my all-girls team will not be the exception to the unspoken rule, but until then, we have to keep breaking it. ...

One way to do a tiny amount of good in the world (assuming you shop on Amazon.com) is to opt in to Amazon Smile. Once you have done so, Amazon will donate 0.5% of the money you spend on the site to the charity you select. I’m set up to donate to the Environmental Defense Fund currently. The catch is that for the donation to be applied, you have to access the site through “smile.amazon.com” rather than “www.amazon.com.” Amazon will remind you of that a few times, but then it goes away, and of course when you follow links to Amazon, they’re always to the main URL. ...

I want to write a bit about businesses that make their money through fraud, inspired by Jon Bell’s post The Graph That Changed Me. In it, he talks about RealNetworks. RealNetworks was one of the first companies that provided streaming media infrastructure. They created proprietary streaming audio and video prodocols. They offered a free version of their client, and tried to make money by selling licenses for premium versions of the client and their streaming server. More importantly, they were pioneers in bundling unwanted software with their client downloads in exchange for cash. ...

Today the New York Times has another Edward Snowden story, this one by David Sanger and Eric Schmitt. It discusses the means he used to harvest millions of documents from the NSA’s internal network, and runs under the headline Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best NSA. Good security reporting focuses on the conflicting goals come into play when designing secure systems, rather than retreating into counterfactual thinking. Here’s the sort of counterfactual thinking I’m talking about: ...

When I mentioned seeking out people who are intrinsically motivated to work with a few weeks ago, my friend Jason commented with a link to Miya Tokumitsu’s essay In the Name of Love in Jacobin magazine. It has since been picked up by Slate. Here’s her take on “Do What You Love”: By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace. ...

One of my goals is to perfect my dotfile setup. I suppose this means that I’m not quite all in as a manager yet. Every self-respecting developer has their dotfiles in a public repository on GitHub, but I have a couple of requirements beyond just being able to clone my dotfiles on any machine. They are: I have some dotfile information that can go into a public repository, and some configuration and preferences that must live behind the firewall for use on work computers. I’d like for the behind the firewall stuff to be a supplement to my public dotfile information. For example, my .vimrc should be the same everywhere. My .bashrc should be mostly the same, with a few additions of stuff for work. I may also have some dotfiles that are exclusive to my work environment. Any setup should understand how to clone files first from my public repo, and then apply the dotfiles from the private repository. Homebrew can be bootstrapped using a single shell command. (Check it out under the Install Homebrew heading on the Homebrew page.) I’d like to have something similar for my dotfiles. Not only would it be cool, but it would also be useful at work. All of our servers at work are managed using Chef. It’s possible to check your dotfiles into our Chef repository and have them deployed automatically on all of our servers, so that when you log into a new server, it already has your preferred environment set up. I have two issues with just putting my dotfiles into Chef. The first is that I don’t want to clutter up the Chef repo with my junk. If everyone does that, our Chef runs will slow down. The second is that I don’t want to have to update them in two places whenever I make changes. If I have a bootstap command that pulls all of my dotfiles from their regular location, I can just put that into Chef. I’m going to start hacking away on creating a dotfile installer that meets both of these requirements and blogging about my progress. My public dotfiles are in a GitHub repo. I’ll let you know how it goes. ...

Ten years later, those freedoms are still embedded in every copy of WordPress downloaded, including the 9.2 million downloaded in the past month … WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg writes about The Four Freedoms, Richard Stallman’s software bill of rights.