jdroth has wonderful story of how a day of work is for him. it's very interesting - he works at Custom Box Service and deals with the customers all day - ''Yesterday a woman called and told me, "I'm calling because of the 'custom' part of your name, not the 'box' part. I need some custom post cards imprinted with my company information that I can use them in my laser printer. Do you make stuff like that?" What does she want me to say? And then, when I can't help her, why is she affronted that I cannot recommend a company that might be able to help? What am I? God?''#

clay shirky analyzes a graph of MMORPG subscriptions and finds some interesting trends. - ''Sir Bruce has posted an updated graph of MMOG subscription numbers, and the results show, even more clearly than last time, a tendency towards long-term homeostasis, via roughly logarithmic growth. ... the Star Wars Galaxies "get big fast" strategy is the right one, that expansion packs should be viewed as one-time revenue hits, and that the key to managing games like this long-term is knowing when and how to switch from fast growth mode, where you spend on marketing, to cash cow mode, where you simply control costs while collecting monthly rent from your long-term community.'' - hook 'em and keep them hanging on#

anil dash writes about why he prefers IE over Firebird, after using it for a while. i like that he actually tries it rather than being dogmatic.#

russell links analysis of the book that he thought was pretty good - this analysis contains this quote, ''The only time different people look at the same thing and come up with different answers as to what it is they are looking at is when the thing they are looking at is amorphous, like a cloud or a Rorschach inkblot—or a politician. Politicians try to be all things to all people. That requires them to say nothing (amorphousness), but to sound like they are saying something ("the point"). They toss in a little spin to try to get all those people with those different views to see in the politician things that they like. Kiyosaki slogans like "Don't work for money. Make money work for you," are amorphous in their actual meaning, but have the effect of "spinning" the reader into thinking he has just gotten good advice.''#

from the bewb blog - ''After having spent the last twelve months attempting to keep up with politics, religion, business news, and the like, spending many free hours listening to NPR and watching political commentary, I am contemplating going back to my blissfull ignorance and abandoning all my political/economic/religious observances. There are many factors that play a role in this. I have noticed that my anxiety level over world, and national politics, has greatly increased. '' - this is what they want. leave the politics to those who can handle, blah, blah, conspiracy, blah, blah, capitalist propaganda - but really.#

from ten reasons why is considerations when deciding if you will blog a conference. i think that i will blog ILC 2003 when i go, not that anyone would be interested :)#

lemonodor links a beverage centric blog called "The Knowledge for Thirst" - a great sample, ''Code Red: I can feel its nanobots building cities of refreshment in my heart.''#

new design for Tesugen - word.#

james writes - ''That probably makes every blogosphere flame fest a real "tempest in a teapot" kind of thing.'' about don park's remarks on blogging. - "tempest in a teapot" is great.#

james links an entry about using tools, specifically profilers, and how they are aides not enablers - ''So why is it that so many people seem to think that knowing how to use a profiling tool means you know how to tune an application? For sure, having a profiler as opposed to not having one makes tuning much easier, just like having a hammer as opposed to not having one makes building a house much easier. But the tool increases your productivity, it doesn't enable the ability. You don't suddenly have the ability to build a house because you know how to use a hammer; you don't suddenly have the ability to tune an application because you know how to use a profiler.''#

lance arthur writes "Don't Move to Canada" and "Give sanity a chance" - a great entertaining and enlightened look at the political climate - i want to quote every paragraph is so great but i'll just choose a little - ''Where is the anger? Where is the frustration? Where is the voice of reason and clarity in this land? Is everyone so convinced of Bush & Co.'s power that they actually want to allow them to have their way with the country and the world? It's OK that he trashed the Kyoto Treaty, and continues doing so, and that we will all live unhealthier lives because of it? Is it fine that he wants to trash the Constitution and fix it so that unless you want to get married to produce children, you cannot ever get married? That's the biggest problem that needs fixing? Not poverty. Not illiteracy. Not hunger. Not AIDS. Not the environment. Not crime. Not racism. No, it's a fear of fags getting married that prompts the President of the United States to start fixing the Constitution. ''#

funny comic from james#

Mr. Hat has an opinion of what Jim Gray calls "Automatic Computing" - defined as, being able to ''devise a specification language that: (a) makes it easy for people to express design (1000x easier), (b) a computer can compile, and (c) can describe all applications (is complete). The system should reason about the application, asking questions about exception cases and incomplete specifications. But it should not be onerous to use.'' - the idea being that software is difficult and expensive to design so there should be an easy way to automatically do it. - Mr. Hat says that it would easier to think about this problem has making better tools and languages and getting them used by real programmers - i imagine a tool that is like an Expert System for software construction that "helps" you and walks you through construction. - richard tallent writes, ''We don't need smarter computers, just smarter programmers.''#

richard tallent also writes about don park's fish cart blogging - ''The reality: micro-business owners are too wrapped up with doing business to invest the time/energy in any electronic catalog; TMI will keep customers away from the owner's ability to sell them in person; the smaller the business, the more negotiable the price; only dedicated customers would take the effort to look up a web site or subscribe to a blog--this is not an effective way to grow a customer base; and, one competitive advantage is location: customer is here, price is more justifiable. The last thing you need are customers comparing prices online and deciding to head to the Wal-mart meat counter instead.''#

clay shirky goes over the advantages of the WikiWay for the !Echo project - ''the wiki was a big reset button, and it worked. The current discussion about its effectiveness is the result of a success crisis -- the critique of the wiki only matters because the process has created enough material of value to make it worth trying to identify and alter anything that might be holding the process back.'' - ''Linear discussion makes roadblocks easy to erect, but a wiki has no such linearity.'' #

holy shit (from marc's voice)#

shelley links another weblog ethics document that tries not to force rules on an unstructured community.#

philip on reno - ''Reno has virtues beyond a big airport, cheap downtown casino hotels, cheap retirement homes for Californians who've come to enjoy Nevada's income tax-free environment, and lack of traffic jams.''#

accordion guy on interoperability - he links gui emacs on os x awesome!#

russell lives in a very hot place and is currently having debaucherous bachelor adventures - ''Small town Spain is definitely nice, especially in Summer. About an hour south of their town is Seville, which last week recorded the hotest temperature ON THE PLANET. Something like 54 degrees celcius. Insane.''#

russell just read a good book and gives a little review of it - '' just read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I've been meaning to get to it for a while, but it's been just sitting on the shelf. It's really short and not filled with any real specific advice, but still, I wish I read it years ago. I wouldn't have paid attention because I was an idiot years ago, but still... it would've been nice to have in my head. '' - it's so true that if i knew what i know now five years ago i probably wouldn't have done much different because i wouldn't have trusted wherever i heard said information. - good advice from russell, ''you definitely need your bullshit detector on for any of these types of books, but the author never claims its a quick and easy solution, just that it's the way it works, and you can see the kernel of truth in it. ''#

tony pierce has heart to heart with his blog. - the blog says to him, ''how many people seriously get laid off their blogs? very few. but you do. and you don't give back. you don't make this better. you don't hype it out in the world, you don't smooze the blogosphere, you don't learn one thing about design, you don't even talk about how good Blogger Pro has been for you.''#

peter lindberg muses on the idea of "replaying event" in his head and is amazed at how much he can remember and also how much he can forget - i read something once about how when the brain's memory system was being evolved it was impossible to predict what would be useful to remember so a random sample of everything was remember so that there was a constant probability of remember something useful when you add no criteria. although, i suppose one "criteria" is that the memory must come from some sense, which is why it's hard to remember things you thought, but not the circumstances in which you thought them - i have no official knowledge of this. i am a bear of little brain.#

perfect by exhaustion#

from ted leung is patrick logan writing, ''Much effort is spent ignoring or recreating lessons learned in the database community. Apparently in hardware as well as software. Alan Kay has wondered why Moore's Law, although wildly accurate and beneficial, has not translated more proportionately into software improvements. Here is an example.'' - he says, ''going back to the discussions around virtual machines this past week, ... Why emulate a 1970's instruction set?'' - i reckon that all innovation in one field comes from looking into another field an seeing what you can borrow, whether that is filesystem looking at database (ie reiser4) or man looking at the natural order of things (ie most everything in the 'engineering' realm)#

gush for os x apps#

i don't get it#

enemies and villains from OnePotMeal - a enemy is in your face but a true villain manipulates without your knowledge - ''Iago, then, isn't an 'Enemy', but he is a thoroughly modern villain. He's visible, but his manipulations aren't--which I find more comfortable than shadowy figures and shadowy schemes, the modern Enemy of DeLillo or Pynchon or Gaddis or Ascroft (and whose fictions foster more paranoia?). Iago's machinations give way to hidden bureaucracies of oppression and control, and even if you know who's to blame, where are you going to find them?''#

best quote of the 80s - ''Be excellent to each other.''#

running and shopping get the demons out - ''It's trite and cliché to say that, in times of your life when you can't control things, to focus then on the things you CAN control. Be that as it may, I'm all about a cliché, and as such, last night I went and did two things: went for my first run in almost 10 days, and went on a little media shopping spree. Those guys who think girls are weird for using shopping to alleviate angst haven't been to their local record shop lately.''#

new useful lisp code that is pretty macho.#

very beautiful website for a nice simple CMS - rock at it.#

from piers cawley is a discussion of certifying programmers. he was brought to this subject by a panel on "Perl Certification" at OSCON and he has an interesting outlook because ''[his] wife [has] been involved in the business of producing standards for trainers, health and safety professionals and others [there] in the UK; these standards have been used as the basis of high level vocational qualifications for such professionals, and they seem to be successful.'' - can you really certify programmers, seeing as they are not engineers or do you just have to model your certification on something other than the Engineer system?#

from just a gwai lo is an article about something really good about *Gigli* - ''In all the discussion about Jennifer Lopez's and Ben Affleck's alleged crime against humanity, otherwise known as Gigli, nothing has been said about the fact that it contains one of the most clever synergies in modern cinema: Jennifer Lopez talking up the virtues of her vagina.'' - on this: ''Roger Ebert, in his syndicated column, was much taken with the scene, a portion of which is printed on SL9. "It is so rare to find dialogue of such originality and wit, so well written, that even though we know the exchange basically involves actors showing off, they do it so well we let them." He even suggested that Affleck's "rather amazing speech" is something film buffs will want to memorize.'' - rad#

from confessions to technically speaking is recovery oriented computing - the idea of taking high availability and making it less expensive and pervasive in our computing lives.#

c monks offers more specialized schools from the country - ''Much of the nation is still abuzz over The Harvey Milk School, a high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students, that is set to open this fall in New York City. I don't know what the big deal is. I think it's about time we separate our students into different schools based on their differences. Why bother teaching and practicing tolerance in schools? Who cares about holding students and teachers and administrators accountable for not speaking out when they witness a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender student be harassed. If we are going to solve these types of problems then we need to take the problems out of the schools. Am I right, people? And why stop at special self-contained schools for gay kids? Why not create separate schools for other types of students who also have been persecuted in high school? Here are few proposals for other schools that I hope will one day come to fruition.'' - a sample, ''The Oscar Meyer School for Teens Who Even Though They Are Too Old To Eat Lunchables, Still Eat Lunchables'' - read lance's note on tolerance (fifth paragraph from the bottom)#

adam bosworth writes more about "Rich Clients" and the interactive, informative web. - ''Browing is about building and traversing pages whose user interface palatte is an extraordinarily limited one. In a funny way, browsing is almost an anti-GUI revolution. It isn't of course. Look at the rich use of layout, flow, media, and so on. But it is in one key sense. The set of user actions is tiny. Fill in fields. Click on URL's or buttons. Lay things out using flow and/or Tables. Most of the other enhancements in HTML from one I helped build (DHTML) to Framesets to animation have been largely unused. Why is this? Why has the web kept its gesture of user interactions so small? I believe it is because most web applications are not intended for frequent/daily use.'' - hmmmm?#

this is why i read al3x's blog every day, because it sparkles. - what al3x is talking about is another look at the sensationalism of a battle and how turning everything into a radical battle between giants is doomed to devolve the issue into a childish mud fight - ''it's more glamorous and more fun to be radical, which is why it will persist. Technologists love to be iconoclasts, which is why we'll be cleaning up the political messes of geeks with ill-executed agendas for many years to come. And a new generation with the same lack of restraint, cool, and political precision is now stepping in the awkward footsteps of their forebears, which is why things won't be getting better soon.'' - cooperation, understanding, and compromise#

charles miller reports another radical battle of personalities blooming around the border of reality.#

scoble reports on a speech that hillary clinton made to microsoft the other day. sounds pretty awesome - curiously, ''She challenged us not to become political ideologs who only use our ideas to bring down others, but to find ways to fix the major problems that we're all facing.'' - sounds like another smart person - i would probably vote for hillary if she ran. - hah, first husband? weird.#

the ward has a cute story and an interesting way of doing ice breakers with new people - ''The first night, the ice breakers were switched up from the run-of-the-mill breaks to some breakage with a whole lot of embarassment. Mine went something like this: "My name is Ryan. My neighbors are Fred and Jane. I am 17 years old, and my most embarassing moment was when..." you get the idea. We got 30 stories of mishappenings that night. Everybody knew that everyone else was a complete moron - and that made sticking out as a fool a whole lot harder to do, even for the stupid kids.''#

new lwn.net weekly edition - the kernel section has:
interactivity issues - ''As a postscript, it's worth taking a look at this post from Daniel Phillips, where he states that the wrong approach is being taken for the audio skipping problem. Audio playback, says Daniel, is not an interactive task - it is a realtime task. What is really needed for the audio case is a bounded-latency soft realtime scheduler, not an endless series of interactive scheduler tweaks.'' - solve the problem, not the "Not Problem"
reiserfs version 4 - i've always been really interested in reiser fs. - ''The truly interesting part of Reiser4 is not limited to performance, however. Reiser4 is presented as a fully atomic filesystem - every operation either executes fully or not at all. It thus offers the same sort of crash resistence found in journaling filesystems, but with a couple of differences. One is that, it is claimed, the "wandering log" technique used in Reiser4 offers greater speed, since, unlike with other journaling schemes, it is not necessary to write data twice. And the other is that the "fully atomic" nature of the filesystem can extend beyond individual operations. Reiser4, in other words, can provide actual transactions.''#

don park elaborates on what he calls "down to earth blogging" - ''If the world population was a pancake, Internet users are the top crust and bloggers are just a small tip of it. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how technology affects rest of the pancake. I think about how blogging may be a tool for survival rather than a tool for mere communication. From this perspective, character recognition software or Bluetooth-pen loose all meaning. Even typing makes no sense. Guess how many people in the world know how to type. Only the top crust.''#

new perl 6 summary - containing a great quote about this thread, ''One of the things we discussed at the Parrot BOF was how to solve the 'bogus objects' problem when doing timely destruction sweeps (The 'bogus objects' problem is when the stack walk code detects chimerical objects through holes in the C stack (hmm... if anyone has a good drawing of this?)). After much discussion we came to the conclusion that the trick was to only walk the system stack during DOD (Dead Object Detection) runs that got triggered via resource starvation.'' - a link to How Perl6 is Like Set Theory #

ha ha ha#

moxie has such nice relationships with all the interesting people around her.#

---#

the redhead writes that with maturity and growing together initial differences between people will melt away.#

joel's article was picked up by ventureblog. naval says, ''I would generalize this to: "It is unlikely that a technology company will succeed without a (former) technologist at the helm." ... Non-technical CEOs tend to be led astray by headlines in pseudo-technical news sites, and often hold contradictory and shallow views on products in the space.'' - good thoughts.#

russell reveals that no one really knows what XQuery is. i certainly didn't realize it was a full on programming language, weird. he links a tutorial - it's very strrrrange#

i was born in the wrong country#

so the server that this blog is hosted on has a very unhappy hard drive. the drive locked up at 07:05 this morning and I was able to get it back up by 07:41. i plan on getting a new hard drive for it this week - sadness.#