Garret Vreeland’s wonderful blog, dangerousmeta! is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Garret usually keeps it brief, but his post on spending 10 years at the helm of a blog is worth reading in full. Congratulations, old man!
Korean is perhaps the safest bet, for two reasons. First, non-Koreans are not usually interested in the food. They might enjoy Bul-Gogi but there will be plenty of other dishes for Korean patrons and these will not be “dumbed down.” The lack of mainstream interest limits the potential for sell-out behavior on the part of the restaurant. Second, many Korean dishes, most of all the pickled vegetables, “travel” relatively well and do fine in a culture – the USA – which is not obsessed with fresh ingredients. ...
You shouldn’t hate releasing software. Especially if your software is a Web site, not something that comes in an installer or disk image. And yet it’s really easy to get into a state where releases suck. I think that the thought of making releases suck less is the one of the main attractions of continuous deployment. Here’s a partial list of reasons why releases can suck: Releases require downtime. When downtime is required, releases have to be scheduled far in advance, and the release schedule starts to affect other things. It becomes harder to work productively near releases (especially if your source code management is not up to par), and usually downtime releases must occur in the middle of the night or on weekends. The prerequisites for each release are not well documented. I’ve been in situations where the release time rolls around, everybody is online and ready, and the proper build wasn’t tagged. Or the production build doesn’t have the production log settings (a mistake I personally have made a number of times). Or the list of database changes that need to be made wasn’t prepared. Or the new build is deployed and the database changes weren’t applied and so you have to start over. Releases are too large. At some point, releases become large enough that nobody really knows everything that a release impacts. At the smallest level, a release includes a single bug fix. It’s easy to understand the possible risks involved with such a release. A release that includes hundreds or even dozens of changes can become unmanageable. Releases are insufficiently tested. Nothing’s worse than everyone waiting in a holding pattern while developers furiously bang away to fix a bug that slipped into the release and was only found when the code went out. People don’t have enough to do. In many cases, lots of people have to be available for a release, but they spend a lot of that time waiting for things to happen. Frustrating. Releases take too long. Sometimes the release process is just too cumbersome. Getting releases right is important but ultimately the actual release process is just a form of housekeeping. The more people that are involved and the longer it takes, the more resources are used that could be better applied to something else. Plus most of the work associated with a release is really boring. My theory is that releases don’t have to suck. The releases I’m involved with exhibit few of these problems, but my goal for 2010 is to eliminate the remaining problems to excise the remaining suckiness. ...
A lot of people are wondering about the relevance of RSS readers these days. These days, there are lots of ways to maintain a healthy flow of inbound information. Twitter is perhaps the hottest, but there are plenty of other options as well. And so a lot of people are wondering about the old standby – subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Read Write Web had a post this week, RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline. Dave Winer has taken the time to point out (again) that the river of news model is right, and the email client model is wrong. ...
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen interviews Patrick Appel, one of the “underbloggers” at Andrew Sullivan’s blog. First of all, if you have an inferiority complex about your own blog when you read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, this interview will make you feel a lot better. Andrew Sullivan actually has three writers working on it full time – more than full time, really. Appel says he works on the site 10-14 hours a day. ...
Ruby Inside’s Holiday Fun: How Programming Language Fanboys See Each Others’ Languages is legitimately funny and dead on accurate.
Why didn’t the United States have enough vaccine to fight swine flu this fall? It’s partly because federal health officials didn’t mix adjuvants into the drug. Adjuvants are substances that boost the immune system’s response to a vaccine, so that less vaccine is needed per dose. Using them could have allowed us to create up to four times more H1N1 vaccine doses than we have. Most of Europe used adjuvants; so did Canada. Why didn’t the feds? ...
I thought for sure the date bug that prevented the Motorola Droid’s camera from focusing properly in 24.5 day cycles (24.5 days of proper focus, followed by 24.5 days of focusing problems) would go down as the bug of the year, but then I learned about the face tracking software from HP that doesn’t work for black people.
For hardcore addicts of The Wire like myself, David Simon’s interview with Vice Magazine is can’t miss material. The interview is huge, here are some good bits. David Simon explains what’s wrong with TV writing: But I guess where I was originally going is that nobody wants to write endings in television. They want to sustain the franchise. But if you don’t write an ending for a story, you know what you are? You’re a hack. You’re not a storyteller. It may not be that you have the skills of a hack. You might be a hell of a writer, but you’re taking a hack’s road. You’re on the road to hackdom and there’s no stopping you because stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. ...
One state in America already has a health care system very much like the one that the Senate bill will create – it has an individual mandate, an exchange to buy individual plans through that acts as a prudent purchaser, and no public option. That state is Massachusetts. Ezra Klein asks Jon Kingsdale, the executive director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority how it’s working out, three years into to the project. ...