Posts

People should strive to be more interesting and more responsible. Happiness may result as a byproduct, but those are more important values. Tyler Cowen discussing Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.

Firefox 4.0 will include a feature that runs the browser in multiple processes, like Chrome: Electrolysis is the name of a Mozilla project that will split Firefox into multiple processes — one for the user interface, one for plugins and one for each tab. Similar functionality is already being seen in other clients, like Google Chrome. Like Chrome, a crash in a single tab will no longer be able to bring down the entire browser. Also, we can expect Electrolysis to make Firefox faster and more stable overall. ...

Guardian religion blogger Andrew Brown talks about his family’s holiday tradition – sending Christmas cards to people on Amnesty International’s Christmas Card list. Amnesty International publishes a list of people who are oppressed and imprisoned and could really use some support, and encourage people to send cards to them.

Here’s your adrenaline boost for today. James Salter reviews Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson by William Langewiesche in the New York Review of Books. Here’s a snippet of the review, which includes a gripping account of the ditch: In the cockpit the ground warning alarm had begun, an automatic voice repeating that the plane was too low. Sullenberger called for the flaps on the wings to be extended in order to slow the plane for impact. At two hundred feet he began breaking his glide and ballooned a little. They were at 150 knots—about 180 miles an hour. He lowered the nose slightly and then, pulling back on the stick in the last few seconds before touching down, his airspeed spent, remarked coolly to Skiles, “Got any ideas?” ...

O’Reilly Radar’s best and worst tech of the decade inspired me to think about trends in software development. In the past decade, one prevailing trend has been the migration of process in software development from management to individual developers. Traditionally, process has been imposed on the development team, who usually ignore the process or actively resist it. Or in many cases there just isn’t any process at all. Traditionally, “process” has been associated with project managers. Most processes had to be applied at the team level in order to work. Whether it was old school process like Waterfall or newer, agile processes like Scrum or Extreme Programming, everybody on the team has to participate for the processes to work. These processes are heavy, difficult to implement, and in many cases, completely ineffective. ...

James Warren attended an event where Stephen Colbert discussed his performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. I’ve been fascinated by that performance since it happened, mainly due to Colbert’s audacity in wickedly satirizing the President and the press right in front of their faces. I’ve been dying to hear anything at all about what Colbert was thinking at the time, and Warren’s blog post delivers. Here’s a snippet: ...

First, here’s the Smithsonian’s food blog interviewing Vickie Kloeris, who handles the food for the International Space Station, about Christmas Dinner in space. A few year round rules: nothing that requires refrigeration, nothing carbonated, and no alcohol. Second, Slate covers the Swedish national tradition of sitting down to watch a national broadcast of old Disney cartoons on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas!

Leave it to Bruce Schneier to come up with a reasonable explanation for why the video downlink from Predator drones is not encrypted. His theory is that it’s because it would be a key management nightmare, given the way the military manages encryption keys. Basically, the audience for the UAV downlinks changes frequently and has a wide variety of security clearances, and military encryption is for data is for top secret stuff. ...

For one thing, newspapers work very hard to report things that are true, but they are less concerned with whether the overall impression from their reporting is a true impression. Shark attacks, for instance, happen very rarely. But if you report excitedly on every shark attack that happens, people will think they happen quite a bit. You haven’t told anyone any lies, but your stories aren’t leaving your readers with a true impression of the world. ...

Ronald Bradford has a good idea for developers who are debugging slow queries – include comments in your SQL so that the queries are easier to identify in MySQL’s process list or in the slow query log. I’m wondering how easy it would be to include a setting for various database libraries (Hibernate, ActiveRecord, any of several PHP frameworks, and so on) to include the context in which a query is called in a comment when the query is run. For example, it would be great, if inside every Hibernate query, the class and method from which the query was called were included. ...