HOWTO: Be more productive
Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.
Flight 93 (movie about 9/11) Trailor
Nice to see hollywood capitalizing on national crisis so soon. Bastards.
The (Business-Driven) Enterprise Architect
Excellent description of where Enterprise Architects should be moving and why…
Nikola Tesla (Wikipedia)
Tesla’s wikipedia entry. I've been wanting to read up on him for some time now.
The Impeachment of George W. Bush
When you see everything stacked up like this, it’s a bit harder to call the impeachment crowd “crazy”.
"Customary Historic Use" to replace "Fair Use"
Big Content would like to outlaw things no one has even thought of yet
Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination!
or, “How the iPod destroyed the Broadcast Flag” :)
Quotations for Learning Programming
“I have enjoyed reading (and writing), collecting, and pondering the following quotations, which I think are all relevant to teaching and learning programming.”
Everything Your Professor Failed to Tell You About Functional Programming
“This leads to my point: In computer science, nothing [still] makes sense [even] if you violate the identity principle.” :)
Agreed Framework
Wikipedia entry on the “Agreed Framework” for nuclear non-proliferation reached between the US and North Korea in 1994. Understanding how we backed out of this agreement is key to understanding the current issues w/ N. Korea.
Male nipples can keep babies calm
Serendipitously appeared during a google images search for “newpaper”.
Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?
It’s impossible for diffuse flames (jet fuel, paper, office stuff) to reach temperatures needed to melt steel. This guy thinks there were thermite charges in the buildings.
/atom-tools/README
Decent looking ruby library that implements a fair bit of an Atom Publishing Protocol client.
A Block Costume
why on rebinding blocks to specific objects.. I had to do the same thing a little while ago. Using instance_method seemed like a hack but if it’s good enough for why, it’s good enough for me.
Microsoft Vista and .NET
They ripped a bunch of .NET code out of Vista, replacing it with C. Interesting.
Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure
But instead of ducking grues and collecting zorkmids, you’re interacting with whatever program code you’re working on, as well as the data and hardware devices that it uses. “It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform fo
Math For Programmers
Hell yes Steve Yegge will be teaching me mathematics. I haven’t been this excited about a new blog in a while to be honest.
Reclaiming the Oxford English Dictionary for the public
“That means that every page I scan, out of the fifteen thousand or so, produces about $19.5 million of value for the world; that’s about $9.8 billion an hour. My hourly wages have usually been less.”
Comment of the Day. On "Evidence of the Missing Link Found?"
Evolution is at work. We leave them to themselves and we’ll stick to ourselves, and in another 250,000 years we can eat them as either game or domesticated farm animals. God knows we don’t have to selectively breed them for size.
Everyone Hates the Christians
“When I became a convert from Judaism to born-again Christianity after watching The Chronicles of Narnia, I thought things were going to get a lot easier for me…”
Help Win My Bet
Help a brother out: “if I could make a website to get 2,000,000 hits, she would have a menage a trois (that’s a threesome to you non french-speakers)”
Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp
So I'm considering automating my del.icio.us to just automatically add links with “statistically infrequent” words as tags to all Steve Yegge’s posts…
Feynman Interview: The pleasure of finding things out
Nice little Feynman short on google video. Feynman talking, Feynman painting, Feynman being the complete bad-ass that only Feynman can be… I can’t get enough of him.
On the implausibility of the explosives plot.
I’ll have to come out of hiding to bookmark this one. Too good to not make my wow list.
The Overton window.
Visible in accelerated form on Fox News' recent “coverage” of whether bombing the piss out of Iran would be a good idea right now. Go Think Tanks!
I Hate This Place
This place is everything a weblog should not be.
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
This site is really starting to come along now. The latest addition on how to manage vertical spacing in intervals is something I've been wondering about for a while now.
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
Outstanding piece. Adrian ought to write more often. Microformats.org could really use someone with Adrian’s background to squash some of the “why?” type questions.
Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky debate The Lord of the Rings
Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring Platinum Series Extended Edition DVD, Part One
The Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay
“The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and ‘Jeopardy’ comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.”
How to make multiple SSH connections to the same host faster
All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.
Web Based Site Monitoring Tools
Some praise for Site24x7.
analogies.google.com
Need an analogy but don’t have the time to actually think of one your self?
Maverick
Cedar Point announces their new coaster for 2007. It looks like the first real attempt at building something serious since the Millenium.
But Martin, Enterprise Software IS Boring
A well thought out and respectful response to Fowler’s argument that business software doesn’t have to be boring (RailsConf 2006). Good points abound but I have to disagree with the premise.
Top.app
MacOS X: How to turn textmode tools into first class applications. Mutt.app, Vim.app, Irssi.app, Top.app, etc.
Best 500 Page Eva!
Reddit Broke (Sorry).
Here's a Nickel, Kid
The Dilbert cartoon referenced in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning was The Command Line”
Keith Olberman 2006-09-11 - Special Comment
We should all be as pissed off right now. 9/11 is a disease.
Gosling v. Greenspun
On the relationship between the “Black Hole Theory of Design” and “Greenspun’s tenth Rule of Programming”.
Man Pops Eye-Balls Out Really Far
“I can pop my eyes out four centimetres each, it is a gift from God, I feel blessed.”
360 in a circle, 60 minutes and 60 seconds… What is so special about 60?
Blame the Babylonians – they used the Sexagesimal system. Don’t get excited – it means that instead of using base 10 (as we do) they used base 60.
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science
Dijkstra’s writing style is so perfect.
Is Olbermann on Thin Ice?
It would be massively troubling if anything happened to Olbermann. He’s the only even modestly sane person coming out of the TV at this point.
Shell script awk csv file
“I could whip you up something in Java that would take 2 minutes to design, 30 minutes to implement, a day to write the deployment descriptor for, and 3 months to get sign off from the app support people at the client site _b”
gotAPI.com
The best attempt I've seen at splicing multiple API references together. This uses the external documentation but provides indexing and browsing features.
Free software is a weak mode of production | Free Software Magazine
“The success of GNU/Linux and other free software projects is annoying.”
How We Wish Our SOs Really Talked
“Why would my sister want to borrow someone else’s broom, you sexist ass? My sister is a lawyer for the friggin' ACLU! before tossing her Napa Valley cab in the poor guy’s face.”
After Pat's Birthday
Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.
War Signals?
This is the most thorough of five reports I've just read, each speculating that a US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Nov. elections may be likely: “I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran,” says Gardiner. “It’s a terr
Taking Back the House State by State - OHIO!
Kos / Oct 17 wrap up on Ohio congressional districts. I'm in the 13th, btw.
I plan to travel back to the 1400s. Any advice on how to recreate the Internet?
“You know what I love about Reddit? Someone can ask a question like this, and not one comment points out how completely ridiculous it is.”
Radio Lab: Emergence (February 18, 2005)
This is my favorite episode of WNYC’s RadioLab and maybe my favorite piece of radio, period. The segment, “The Invisible Hand” is outstanding. The show is now in podcast and the last five eps are available in mp3. “Emergence” is only available as a RealAu
Vox Populi
A paper by Sir Francis Galton first published in the March 7, 1907 issue of the scientific journal, NATURE. The paper provides what appears to be the first solid explanation for why Google’s ranking algorithm, not to mention the form of government we've come to know as “democracy”, are so capable.
J2EE SUCKS HUGE DONKEY BALLS.
“Then they spend one day debugging shit that’s gone wrong with Eclipse (or its mangling of the CVS repository, or some ant dependency problem, or)… And meanwhile they whine that 256 megs of RAM isn’t enough to edit a fucking text file (and do NOTHING el
XML Templating in Python Evolves
A brief history of the Kid templating language and an endorsement for the next generation of XML-based templating: Genshi.
Shackled But Free
My best attempt at saying something nice about Sun’s GPLing of Java, even if a bit grudgingly.
ViewSourceClan
Somebody should create a feed that posts a single random entry per day from the Atom Wiki.
Office Space (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
I give Aaron two weeks (tops!) at Wired before he’s off to something bigger and better.
The REST Dialogues
The REST / Web Arch. crowd falls back to its secret weapon in the fight for mankind: The Dialogue.
Java in The Land of Make Believe
What the GPL could have accomplished (and may well still).
tech decentral » a RedMonk blog about web technology by Anne Zelenka
Go RedMonk. This is a major pick-up, IMO.
? will save us, or, Applicative trumps imperative in the large
Aristotle just destroys that recent reg article that suggests we need to shit-can 20 years of engineering masterpiece for distributed objects. Nice piece!
Head for the hills - the new survivalists
“So what do you do when you’re pretty sure that the end of the world as we know it is coming soon, but your girlfriend doesn’t believe you?” (via skvidal)
Ruby for the Web! (irb running in an applet via JRuby)
I take back everything bad I've ever said about Java Applets ;)
Shut the fuck up and write some code???
I have no idea … but I'm digging the Kid and TG references ;)
Intelligent Abstractions
Sometimes I think Aaron’s brain is my brain in the future. I've had all of these same ideas rattle around in my brain before but they never seem to line up so neatly for me. It bugs me a little.
The Myth That “Eight Battleships Were Sunk” At Pearl Harbor
It turns out Pearl Harbor was a pretty massive blunder for the Japanese. Fascinating.
Stefan Tilkov on SOA
Extremely clear and right take on REST, WS, and other techniques for distributing systems.
PostgreSQL 8.2 Release Notes
We moved from Windows / MS SQL Server to FreeBSD / PostgreSQL about 5 months ago and I've been nothing but completely happy with the transition. 8.2 is a pretty nice upgrade if you’re doing data warehousing style stuff.
10 Reasons Why Django kicks Ruby on Rails’ collective ass.
Wherein the author lists 8 reasons (maybe 3 of which are approaching objective or even valid) and also spells Adrian’s name wrong: “Adrian Zolovaty”. Ruby/Python flame-bait is exactly what we need.
Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004 learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design
A perfect article.
UniveRSS - a 3D Vista RSS reader
Prediction: Microsoft will use 3D nonsensically and egregiously for the next two years. 3D notepad!
Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith
Nice article on burnout, which I have to admit I've been struggling with on and off for the past six months or so :–(
Good Math, Bad Math : Nullity - the Nonsense Number
That’s what I'm saying. As soon as I saw this guy talking about auto-pilot software crashing a plane due to division by zero, I thought: 5 / 0 rescue nil wtf are you talking about? We've had exception handling, conditionals, and NaN forever.
KISS (or why MS CS students have a bad time in interviews ...)
“Yet for some strange reason, the MScCS students seem to value fancy algorithms over working algorithms.”
Microsoft versus FOSS Configuration Management
“Dependency management is probably the most important contribution of open source to software engineering.” — I don’t know about that but it’s definitely up there. It’s mind boggling that MS hasn’t developed some form of package management.
A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft
I guess this could be good thing. Good people have a tendency of being taken advantage of in ways they wouldn’t expect at MS though so I have to give the whole deal a respectful thumbs-down.
Socio-political and Commercial Motivations for WS-*
Nice bit of history showing the chain of events that led to WS-*.
The Problem of Open Source in the Microsoft World
I'm sorry but it is just baffling to me how developers and cough evangelists can put up with this kind of behavior as being the sort-of default mode of operation at MS. The company needs to consider massive sweeping changes in the way they treat develop
Dynamic Language Support on the JVM
Danny Coward Q/A on invokedynamic and “hot swapping” (method replacement). Pretty good piece until the end where we enter into some scary Java-static-typing-is-good-because-it-let’s-you-publish-APIs non-sense.
InfoQ: Interview: Pete Lacey Criticizes Web Services
Wow, I'm flattered blush Turns out I do know something about SOA after all. Speaking of “Motherhood and Apple Pie” – I quite liked that essay but it was one of those that never really took off.
Surfing Lake Erie is basically disgusting
Cleveland is so hard-core. Sometimes I really do love this place.
Why do so many reddit users hate java? (reddit.com)
“Java’s solution to the problem of C++ allowing you to blow your foot off was to chop off your legs.”
Leo Laporte hates the Zune! (video)
I need to get back into following free culture. The anti-DRM sentiment is unprecedented.
Parallels Makes IE Testing Suck Less, Melts Power Cord
A look at the new Coherence Mode feature in Parallels desktop.
Cocoa Remote Desktop
A Cocoa port of rdesktop. Universal Binary, multiple concurrent sessions, no X11 makes it the best RDP client for Mac on paper.
SeamlessRDP
Seamless window support for rdesktop (and perhaps Cocoa Remote Desktop). Similar to Parallel’s Coherence Mode for RDP.
Five Things You Don't Know About Me
Another casualty in the war against blog games.
National Review's Best and Worst of Times
Saying the US is divided is an understatement – the country exists simultaneously in two parallel worlds and is connected only by a small machine that shoots newspapers clippings back and forth. The National Review exists in the other one.
2006: The year the Free Software Foundation reached out to the community
Interesting look at how the FSF is picking up a more activist role with tech. politics and policy. Mentions the GPL v3 process, BadVista.org, and the anti-DRM site, Defective By Design.
Whatever Happened To The Zune?
“I have yet to find a women who wants to be squirted with a Zune. I’ve stopped asking.”
The Pending Ruby/Java Co-op
A prediction piece on the possibility of a Ruby backed coup d'état on the JVM and what that might mean to the pragmatic web developer.
Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)
403 Go Away!
Maruku: a Markdown interpreter written in Ruby
This looks promising: handles all of Markdown proper plus various extensions.
The Role of Resources in REST
“Each resource demarcates a subset of an application’s state, and becomes a handle by which other applications can interact with that state.”