Darling Girl writes, ``It's the kind of orgasm that's so intense that you almost resent the person for giving it to you. Almost.''#

Kim writes smarts -#

``It's interesting that programming-language afficionados, especially the elite ones (i.e. the ones that like functional languages) tend to love adding new features to their languages, but that they do this by increasing indirection and abstraction. Parameterized types, virtual methods, function pointers, closures, continuations, etc. All of these things make programs harder to understand. Yes, they add a lot of power, but I think we should focus on making programs more powerful without having to resort to more abstractions to do it. We should be gaining power by removing layers of abstraction, rather than by adding more layers to cope with the inadequacies of the existing layers.

Amusingly, a lot of programmers hate lisp-style macros because they think they make programs harder to read. I completely disagree. I think macros decrease the level of abstraction in a program. They make the syntax more directly-meaningful, closer to the problem domain. Which brings us back to the quote by Graydon I started this post with.''

Tom Coates writes about whether or not Wikis are ugly.#

``A few months ago a conversation emerged across the net about whether or not wikis were ugly (and moreover whether the fact that they was ugly affected how useful they were). Obviously, the whole issue was rife with debate about whether the simple design of wikis was simply nasty or whether it was actually just more useful and appropriate to have something stripped down to the bone.''

Joel Spolsky on colocation...#

``When the lights went out in New York City last week and across much of the Northeast, Joel on Software and Fog Creek were online the whole time. We even sold software while the electricity was out. Credit for this goes to our colocation provider, Peer 1 Network, who maintained 100% uptime on backup generators while many of their competitors were falling over. Peer 1 even invited the journalists of the Toronto Star newspaper to their Toronto facility where they were set up with light, air conditioning, and Internet access allowing the Star to publish during the blackout.''

Via Joel is Raymond Chen on weird Windows behaviour...#

``In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we'd get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.''

Via John Wiseman is Joe Marshall on ll1...#

I have seen this happen time and time again:
1. Prototype is developed in Lisp
2. Attempt is made to port to a less capable platform:
these days it's Java or C++, but in the 80's it was
C and Ada (remember Ada?)
3. The result is a general fiasco.

Dave Hyatt on browser quirks...#

``Do not assume that just because a browser misrenders your site that the browser is wrong. Think the problem through, read the spec, consult other designers, and try to determine who is at fault. Remember that it's unfortunately very easy to trip over ambiguities in the specs as well, and you may be running into a situation where there are multiple valid interpretations.

[...]

The conclusion that we came to was that we may very well have to introduce quirks into Safari to match bugs in Mozilla as well as bugs in WinIE. In some cases we may have to introduce these quirks despite the fact that they don't even occur in WinIE! What a no-win situation.

*Whatever makes the sites work though... that's what we've gotta do.* :)''

Spam Filtering through white lists at Kuro5hin...#

``Imagine you email someone you don't know. You get back a magic message, which requests politely two small actions: (1) hit "reply", and (2) hit "send". Performing these actions will allow you to communicate freely and reliably with this person (without being filtered for using the wrong words) and virtually eliminate spam from their mailbox. Do you do it? ''

The Prison formerly known as America at ku5oshin...#

``America is slowly becoming something of a prison whether many choose to realize it or pass it off as a conspiracy theory. The following article is an attempt to place the entire topic in perspective to give an understanding to why some may feel this country is becoming something of a police state. Included in the write-up is information on the USA PATRIOT act, and statistics that should not be taken lightly, coming from an everyday citizens perspective.

[...]

Now, what happens in court should you have the unfortunate luck of being accused of something is the following, you will be offered a reduced sentence if you accept responsibility, and plead guilty, if you decide to take your case to trial, be prepared to face more time if you lose. See prosecutors don't like to go through the motions of having to waste time in court which is why many cases don't go to trial. To think that everyone who goes to trial is guilty and waisting the court's time is ludicrous. It is your constitutional right to have a fair trial, question witnesses, et. al, it sounds good but in reality is a farce.

[...]

"The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. holds a quarter of the world's prisoners." ''

From deadly.org is this awesome news about the OpenBSD PF code...#

``Mike Frantzen write: "Passive operating system fingerprinting was just committed to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language. Powerful policy enforcement is now possible such as redirecting all older windows boxes to a web site telling them to upgrade. Or blocking all windows boxes from connecting to mail servers (damn worms). A writeup can be found at http://www.w4g.org/fingerprinting.html. Please help contribute to the OS fingerprint database by going to http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f-help/ and typing in your OS description if it does not recognize your OS."''

At Davezilla is Jokob Nielsen reviewing TV shows...#

``*The Daily Show with Jon Stewart*
The Daily Show is a well-produced news show on Comedy Central. Graphics are sparse, clear and always appear in the upper left, a boon to new watchers who may feel unaccustomed to seeing images on television. Bonus usability points for that.

However, good graphics alone do not a news show make, and this show suffers greatly from content. News items and statistics appear to have been made up, as if for comic effect. In fact, one can actually hear laughter from the audience, as they struggle to accept Iraqis in UFOs, or a 60 ft George Bush waiting to trample on Liberians.

I took the liberty of double-checking several other news sources and there is no record of President Bush growing to such a staggering height. I think Mr. Stewart and Co. need to check their sources before alarming the public like this.''