From Linux Weekly News is an interview at ONlamp with Guido van Rossum about Python-y stuff. It contains this funny quote, ``when he had his venture capital lined up he asked me out to California for an interview. My plan for that interview was to find out what was wrong with the company or the business plan and to use that to maintain my original decision. But, try as I might, I couldn't find anything wrong!`` - That happened to me, I went to an interview to be polite but I actually became interested, it was very lucky for me to have gone.#

Advice about User Interfaces, ``If I can't find it, it doesn't exist.``, from Don Park - ``FeedDemon could have been good, but it's UI sucks at the moment. It introduces metaphors without feedback nor justifications. On top of metaphors like Listing and Newspaper, it built too many menus and commands that looks all too similar.``#

Don Park also advises on the use of "Fast Web Services" - ``Faster performance could encourage finer-grained web services which amounts to fetching a document one word at a time. Even worse, fine-grained web services increases load on the server-side, not only on web servers, but application servers, database servers, and directory servers. This is one case where common sense differs from reality. While [there] are ways to avoid these problem, solutions require skills, experiences, resources, and mindshares not readily available in the Lazy Web. To best use Fast Web Services, consider it after design and implementation phase and either before or even after deployment so that your design don't end up with a built-in dependency and unavoidable waste and abuse stemming from the dependency.``#

Ted Leung has this comment from Daniel Friedman about what is possible with Lisp, the universal whipping boy , these days - ``Macros have come a long way from the early days of Lisp. Now, with hygiene, and with-syntax, syntax-case, etc., we see that macros are powerful enough to write sophisticated compilers. More importantly, the compiler can be written so that the expressions are not traversed by the code written by the macro writer. `` - I will have to read, the paper#

Kim has this gem, ``Test Driven Development (TDD) helps with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). If you get distracted and forget what you were working on, just run the tests and see where they break. Then go from there.`` - :)#

Via Tom Coates is an article about The Wooden Mirror - Wow.#

James Robertson writes that ``You know when software sucks when the user asks why did they even bother writing it?.``#

Go vote for Moxie in the Sexiest Female Blogger II Poll#

From Michael Feldman is a great quote from "Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and former energy secretary under President Clinton." - ``We're a superpower with a Third World grid``#

From Ben Hammersley is a note about his new book called "The Blogosphere and its asymmetric discontents" - ``I'm looking at the concept of Asymmetry in world today: asymmetric warfare, decentralized systems, terrorism and file-sharing, cascading failures and post-geographic economics and top-down versus bottom-up and so on.``#

Piers Cawley posts a review of Perl 6 Essentials - ``Perl 6 Essentials has had a somewhat mixed reception in various places. The major criticism (from those who have neither read it nor intend to read it) is along the lines of "Even by the most optimistic estimates, Perl 6 is at least a couple of years away, why do we need this book?" Well, yes, Perl 6 is at least a couple of years away, but Parrot (or something very like it) is here right now and it's supporting some 'real' programming languages, not just toys like BASIC and Python, it can even host Brainfuck and Befunge. If you want to start targetting Parrot, then this book is a great place to start.``#

From Just a Gwai Lo is a quote from The Salmon of Doubt - ``Logic comes afterwards. It's how we retrace our steps. It's being wise after the event. Before the event you have to be very silly.`` - Anything good is an accident!#

From Mac OS X Security News is this comment, ``Press totally missing the point about Ftp.gnu.org - FTP.GNU.org will replace all their code from trusted sources. This has nothing to do with the quality of security under Linux. Why does the press seem to think it does?`` - So highly visible deployments of Linux software having security problems doesn't have anything to do with the quality of security under Linux?#

Dave Winer changes some of the details of BloggerCon 2003 - ``Expanding the program into a second day, for Birds-Of-Feather meetings, where any member of the weblog communitity can participate, for $0.``#

NYC is GREAT!!!#

Tony Pierce - ``when i knew that i was going to be coming to los angeles after high school, i imagined dating hot young blonde models, driving a convertible, and surfing on saturdays.``#

New Crypto-Gram - Bruce has a new book, Beyond Fear - ``This isn't a book about computer security; it's a book about security in general. In it I cover the entire spectrum of security, from the personal issues we face at home and in the office to the broad public policies implemented as part of the worldwide war on terrorism. With examples and anecdotes from history, sports, natural science, movies, and the evening news, I explain how security really works, how it fails, and how to make it effective.`` - Hidden information inside Word documents#

Back Rub#

Dr. Frank writes about vocal track recording superstitions. - ``On another vocal-related note, here's the lyric "sheet" for one of the songs. I don't know how other folks do it, but I always provide Kevin with a typed, double-spaced lyric print-out that he uses as a kind of "score" so he can follow along, know where he is, and take notes on where to punch: The circled bits are candidates for punching, the crossed out ones are the ones I allegedly "nailed" (as they say-- when you get it, it's nailed; when you don't, for some reason, it's a "clam." You fix the clams by "picking them up," but somehow in the process they get "nailed" too. No idea why.) It looks like I screwed up quite a lot there, but actually that turned out to be one of the nicest-sounding``#

Dienekes has an very interesting "map" of the faces of a Caucasoid and Mongoloid, pointing out what is different in a "technical" sense.#

Dienekes also write about his through for "How Blondness Evolved" - A quote, ``So, blondness evolved because it confers an advantage to women with less than ideal features by drawing attention from their features via the "absence of frame" effect. As a side effect, culling of ugly features in a partially blond population occurred at a slower pace, since women with such features sometimes have a high fitness due to blondness.`` - And a quote from a comment by "Unadorned", ``This, for me, is precisely the most interesting thing about this whole topic whenever it crops up (it's come up before in many variations, of course, both here and at Gene Expression ): Are the members of each race most attracted to their own race? Specifically (for any Dienekes readers who may live in Rio Linda): Do whites find whites to be physically the most attractive of all the major races, do yellows find yellows most attractive, and do Negroes find Negroes most attractive?``#

Phil Windley writes about Phil Wadler's paper, The Essence of XML - ``The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well. [...] Wadler makes his judgment about XML not being particularly good at what it does because of its shortcomings with respect to two properties that a data representation language ought to provide: [...] Self-describing [...] Round-tripping [...] With respect to these properties, Phil says: XML has neither property. It is not always self-describing, since the internal format corresponding to an external XML description depends crucially on the XML Schema that is used for validation (for instance, to tell whether data is an integer or a string). And it is not always round-tripping, since some pathological Schemas lack this property (for instance, if there is a type union of integers and strings).``#

At Lessig's Blog, Dennis J. Kucinich writes about ``what led to [his] adoption of the Creative Commons License and the GNU General Public License for [the] work on the Kucinich presidential campaign.`` - His comments contain this great quote from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams: ``Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom?``#

Scoble responds to Microsoft security related criticism, ``Software is done by humans. I'm not perfect. Neither are any of my coworkers. Well, maybe Anders is. But, we only have one of him. :-) So, snicker away Marc. But, does that help us learn? Is that how you manage your own employees? Should I snicker when you make a mistake? Why not?`` - He also makes the comment, ``Ever try to read someone else's source code? It's not easy. Now, imagine that you have millions of lines of code that was written by someone else (who you might not be able to discuss it with), and you need to go through and make sure it all is kosher. Not to mention you have to make sure that when thousands of pieces of code get put together that one of them doesn't expose a weakness in another.`` - Maybe this would easier with a safer, better language ?#

Matthew Dennis writes about the power going out, his post is entitled "Attention Morons" - ``When the power is out at a stoplight, you treat it like a four way stop. It's on the test, people. You stop. Everyone takes turns. No one gets killed.``#

Courtney wonders if there is looting in Ottawa because there is no power and the Canadian government disarmed the populous. - ``I just turned on the news, and Fox's scrolling banner at the bottom said there is "serious looting in Ottawa". Is this one of those places in Canada which the government has insisted everyone turn in any guns? I'm too tired to research this, but seriously, what are these people going to do to protect themselves from violence and looters? Throw knives? Call the police?`` - Did Americans being armed help stop the Los Angeles riots?#

Jarno Virtanen explains his "Theory of Programming Language Popularity" in this post, ``It is based on the idea that language choices are not based on sound financial and technical evaluations, but, rather, on the implementer's impression of the language. And because us normal humans try to avoid difficulty as much as we can, we choose the tool that just hopefully makes it damn easy to get the dang thing done. Moreover, I argue also that the thing that a given language makes it so damned easy to do is generally easier in that language than it is in any other language.`` - And has this to say about one language that Didn't Make It, ``Take for example Eiffel. Its design by contract is a neat and sound idea, but what design by contract 'makes it just so damned easy' is nothing concrete, only an abstract value of knowing that you're doing more to ensure that the program is actually correct. And, again, it is a wonderful idea, but most of us programmers don't, believe it or not, give a damn about correctness.`` - Maybe they don't care about correctness until all their customers get hacked because of stupid mistakes, because as we know - Security Problems are caused by Bugs.#

Berkeley DB XML supports Lazy Evaluation of Queries - That's pretty neat. - ``The majority of the query processing work is deferred until the caller is actually iterating over the results set.`` - This is of course in the new version#

From MacSlash the iDesk is pretty AWESOME.#

What a Show Off - He also demonstrates How To Get Rid of Crufty URLs in Movable Type - Good job!#

From Linux Weekly News is an interview with Richard Stallman - He says some interesting things: about how Debian GNU/Linux is not the most ethical distribution, instead GNU/LinEx is; and ends the interview with these final words: ``A non-free program is a predatory social system that keeps people in a state of domination and division, and uses the spoils to dominate more. It may seem like a profitable option to become one of the emperor's lieutenants, but ultimately the ethical thing to do is to resist the system and put an end to it.``#