Kevin writes about John Kerry's Presidential race announcement.#

``John Kerry has years of experience at the national level. We've elected governors the last two presidents, and maybe it's time to see how a Senator does (you have to go back to, I think, Kennedy to find another President who went straight from Senator to President - LBJ was VP first, Carter - Bush II were all governors, right? Correct me if I'm wrong). John Kerry, like Dean, strikes me as a reasonable man who uses a sharp intellect to make decisions based on facts. This is an advantage over Bush. Kerry has military experience. Kerry is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and therefore has some foreign policy experience, which Dean doesn't.''

Raymond Chen writes about obnoxious Windows programs...#

``What's particularly galling are the programs that, as part of their install, decide that they are so cool they want to be everywhere to make sure you don't miss out on the coolest most amazing program ever written in the history of mankind, so they go into the Start menu, into the Fast items, onto the desktop, into the Quick Launch, onto your Favorites, take over as your default autoplay handler, and even hang out as an icon next to the clock on the taskbar just in case you somehow missed all those other places - and each time you run them, they go and recreate those icons and settings in case you "accidentally lost them". ''

The Yeti write about religion...#

``In our modern era, the more you know about science, the more you are supposed to doubt the existence of God and mock religion. The same people who in the last century supported Stalin, Mao, Pot, and every other People's Champion, now realize that the best way to attack Western culture is to go after the US and its values. Religion is one of those.

One of the great myths of religion is that only stupid people believe in God. You know who started that right? That's right, Jimmie - the Communists did. You remember Marx - "Religion is the opiate of the masses." You ever heard someone say that? It either comes out as a bitter laugh or a superior lecture. ''

Via Just a Gwai Lo -#

``Min Jung: "We used to be 11:00 friends. You remember that term? We made that up in college. After 11:00 is when you really started to know a person. That's when they stopped fronting and became real and true and honest with themselves and with you. That's how we always were with each other. Until things changed."''

Amazing Switch Parody - "Apple, Crash Different"#

At Kuro5hin is an Introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos#

`` To Lovecraft, a dedicated materialist and lifelong pessimist, the universe was a dark and dangerous place. With no benevolent Creator to manage it, the ignorant, hostile cosmos cared no more for humanity than it did for a stray hydrogen atom drifting through space. He saw our Earth as an oasis in the wilderness, where ignorance really was bliss -- and he saw the human race doing its best to scale the walls of its cradle, completely unprepared for what it would find on the outside.''

Razib and Godless discuss not flunking kids in school,#

``I prefer the much derided "teaching to the test" than not teaching at all. Sufficiently rigorous tests (e.g. the AP in high school) are quite worthwhile. However, a test must be combined with accountability: if you do not pass, you fail. If standards based assessment was combined with an end to social promotion, we'd be ok.

The problem is not standards based assessment per se . The problem is that it is biologically impossible for no child to be left behind.

[...]

If I was a parent, I would try to send my kid to a magnet school or a private school, or somewhere where math & science education was still revered and where there were no metal detectors in the hallways. The problem with educational assessment is that the left blames society and funding, while the right blames the teachers and the parents. No one identifies the real problem: kids who just aren't that smart. ''

Razib points at an article about the importance of the evolution of the eye to the history of life.#

Via Boing Boing is a Real Map of Europe which the correct names of countries!#

Daniel W. Drezner has an article in The New Republic about Bush's upcoming policy shift,#

`` The market pressures of outsourcing cut into two constituencies Bush cannot afford to alienate. [...] The second group is more amorphous but also more dangerous--affluent professionals in the service sector. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, and professors have avoided competitive pressures because their services were, to this point, not thought to be tradeable. The Internet has changed all this. As Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales point out in their recent book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists:

For centuries, technology has created new products and new ways of making them that render workers and their skills redundant. While the dislocation stemming from technological change is not new, its pace has increased tremendously. Moreover, it is now affecting the professions that have not much changed their way of doing business over the centuries [emphasis added].

Steelworkers losing their jobs is one thing. But hell hath no fury like a spurned white-collar worker. ''

Peter Lindberg thinks about complexity and the possibility of having software teams work like ants - following local rules to produce a great whole.#

``Software projects are very often great examples of poorly defined problem contexts. There are always subtle things in the processes that the software is built to model, things that often are overlooked, and which when discovered can have big impact on the planned design. Because of this, it's important to keep your options open and defer decisions until as late as possible.''

Peter Lindberg writes about Good vs. Bad code. He writes that even though you cannot see the bad code all the time you can tell.#

``Generally, you can't tell if a working program looks bad on the inside. However, if you would examine a number of consecutive releases of the same program, it would be easier. Chances are the code is poorly written if the addition of new features is slow, and if those features doesn't blend well with the previous ones.

But with some apps, you just know that they are well written. Those apps speak their quality loudly. They are coherent, they have integrity, their UIs make perfect sense, they behave as you expect, and so on.

Why is this a good sign of the code being clean? Because software can't be planned. Software is always a dialogue with its users, with competing software, and with its programmers. Good software adapts, and for adaptations to take place gracefully, the code must be susceptible to changes. Bad code isn't.''

Conversation is an AWESOME IRC client.#

Hacknot writes about being "The Quality Guy" -#

``Perhaps you've seen the Dilbert comic about Process Girl. At a meeting, the Pointy Haired Boss introduces Process Girl as "the one who has the answer to everything", at which point Process Girl chimes in parrot-like with "Process!" She then denounces the meeting as inefficient because the participants have no process to describe how to conduct a meeting. By a unanimous vote she is expelled from the meeting. As he escorts her out of the room, Dilbert offers by way of consolation "at least you lasted longer than Quality Guy."''

The key is that you must employ guerilla tactics and create quality without being in everyone's face.

Michael Feldman is a Governmentaphobe...#

``I have a pathological fear of the government, in all of its forms and manifestations. In this I feel profoundly American, as my cursory study of US History leads me to believe that our great country was founded by a bunch of paranoid reprobates whose main motivation was fear and loathing for the British crown, and who went to great lengths to circumscribe and inhibit the inevitable power-mad blood lust which comes over career politicians in major capitals.''

Alexander is funny in times of pain. (HAHAHAHA)#

``So I'm single again. Ladies, start your indifference. ''

Charles Miller on the difference between Java and .Net...#

``Famously, Microsoft's address is also it's philosophy: "One Microsoft Way". Bill Gates' famous vision, almost completely realised these days, is everyone running the same software: his software. As we have seen lately, monocultures are a dangerous thing. Where a monoculture is weak, that weakness is amplified because everyone suffers from it. On top of that, reliance on a single vendor leaves you subject to the whims of that vendor. If their goals diverge from yours, you have nowhere left to turn.

"Fragmented" is a spin word. It has powerful negative connotations, implying that something that was once whole has broken into pieces. I would like to replace it with a better word: "competitive". The Java landscape isn't fragmented because we have more than one IDE. The Java landscape is competitive because our IDE vendors know that if they don't keep up, we have alternatives to switch to.

[...]

There are two ways to produce something people want to use. The first is to have ideas, try them, see how the market reacts, refine them and repeat. The second is to sit back, wait until everyone else is done having their ideas, and then produce an amalgam of what has worked for everyone else. The first requires a competitive environment. The second requires someone else having a competitive environment from which you can cherry-pick the best ideas.''

Patrick Logan points out that software developers work in a studio, not a factory...#

``TV designers get together in the lab and iterate over ideas. Those ideas take shape, and eventually are ready to be produced on an assembly line. The activities in the lab are design-time. The assembly is factory-time.

Software designers get together in the, well, cubicles, actually. Those ideas take shape, and eventually are ready to be copied to tape. (Remember shipping software on tape?)

The cubicle activities are design-time. The copying to tape is factory-time. ''

Via Ted Leung to Michael Toy is The Manifestor of the Futurist Programmer#

``We want to fight to the bitter end against the fanatical, thoughtless, and purely snobbish religious faith in the past, stoked by the nefarious existence of the academic journals. We are rebelling against the sluggishly supine admiration for old operating systems, old languages, archaic standards, and against the enthusiasm for everything bug-ridden, rotting with code bloat, and eaten away by obsolescence. And we judge unjust - criminal in fact - the habitual disdain for programs whose construction is different and original, new, throbbing with life. ''

And from the Notes -
``How many transistors does your radio have? Does it have 9 transistors?
How many jewels in your wrist watch? 17 jewels?
Is your program developed using Object-Oriented programming techniques? Is it Extensible?
IT DOESN'T MATTER as long as

You get good reception.
The watch keeps accurate time.
Your program runs FAST and does what the USER wants.''

chromatic writes, if the medical industry were run like the Internet...#

``I'd like to start a cheap, anonymous medical clinic. We'll screen for blood diseases. We won't check identification, but you're expected to give us contact information: if you test positive for something, we have to let you know. We'll also give your blood back after we're done testing.

Hopefully we can get a lot of people using the clinic. I realize there's a bit of trouble if someone comes in and claims to be you and has Hepatitis B, for example, and you come in and are clean and we inject you with his infected blood, but hey! The important thing is that someone knows that someone had Hepatitis and that infected blood is always returned to someone. We sure don't want to keep it around!''

Tom Coates metablogs,#

``Before the world of the weblog was the time of the homepage. Back before we knew any better, it was the homepage that was going to tranform the world. Everyone was going to have them. They were going to democratise publishing. Together we thought we were going to change the world. But we didn't..

[...]

But maybe we did... There's not a lot of difference between weblogs and homepages in some respects. Both are spaces to put written content online, for one. But the fact that homepages had no sense of standard structure, required manual updating, were unbound from time and were resolutely non-discursive meant that they were static, lumpen. At their best they became monolithic tomes - bunkers for content, guides updated haphazdly infinitesimally accreting "content". In terms of the distribution of the word, the homepage was like a "Time Out Guide to {your name here}". The simple addition of structure and mechanisms for ease of publishing have made the comparable form of expression on weblogs so fluid and quick that it borders on speech. In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear.

[...]

This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice''

Philip Greenspun wonders why Republicans may be more popular than Democrats.#

``Basically the Democrats are the party of mediocrity. Schools are in bad shape, sure, but maybe if we pay the existing bureaucrats and teachers more money we could achieve a 2 or 3 percent improvement. Not this year but maybe in five years we'll see results. Government services are shoddy and sluggish but perhaps if we raise taxes by 20 percent they can be improved slightly. We have to come to terms with the fact that we've sucked most of the North American continent dry of oil. Troublesome foreign dictators and rioting mobs can be appeased for a few years if we look the other way while they build more advanced rockets and nuclear bombs.''

Kim decides that the PLT Web Server is not a library, it is a monstrosity to reason. I used it for a while, but I just made servlets and hadn't got into the super hacking mode of not doing that (i.e. trying to embed it.)#

From Bill Maher is an article about the "French Paradox" -#

Bill: ``It's called the "French paradox." — why the French can eat rich sauces and heavy cheeses without getting fat. Well, besides Gerard Depardeau. It's baffled scientists for years. That, and their affection for Woody Allen. Well, according to this story there's nothing baffling about it at all — the French just east a lot less food than we do. ''

Article: ``The French also take a longer time to eat and savor their food, which is a known way to actually eat less. On average, Parisians spent 22 minutes eating their meals at McDonald's, compared to the 14 minutes Philadelphians took to scarf down their Big Macs. (Remember, kids, it's not a race.)''

Dr. Frank writes this about the love of music...#

``One of the nice things about visiting England is that I usually get to see my friend Chris. I know him through my wife, who knew him when they were growing up in Norwich; he has London roots, however, and now he lives in Essex. Anyway, he knows more about music than anyone I have ever met. And unlike me, he seems to have the energy and attention span to keep up with new stuff. When the two of us start talking about music, practically no one we know can even pretend to participate, even though they like a lot of the same stuff-- the conversations require a certain amount of stamina, if not monomania. The other night at the Light Bar in Shoreditch we gave up the pretense of a collective social gathering. Or rather, everyone else did: we were essentially banished to our own table.

The curious thing is, though we grew up on different continents and were unaware of each other's existence, somehow we ended up being interested in pretty much precisely the same things. Like many kids, we both grew up seeing the world, and in a way our own questions, frustrations, and confusion about what life is about, how things are and how things ought to be, through the prism of the contents of our own individualistic, deliberately idiosyncratic record collections.''

Alexander Payne talks about how geeks name their machines. Mine all named after different types of hats: cap, fedora, beret, etc.#

``I don't remember what I called the Sony, or if I even named it (things were pretty hectic at the time). One of the Penny Arcade kids calls his Sony laptop "Scott Vaio." ''

Charles Miller describes strange network problems...#

``Sometimes, overzealous firewall administrators decide that ICMP is a bad thing, and block it. This is fair enough on the surface: ICMP can be used both as a convenient flooding tool and a way to map networks. The thing is, you have to be careful which ICMP you block. If, specifically, you block the Datagram Too Big ICMP, then any attempt at MTU path discovery will fail quietly: packets will be dropped on the floor, and the request to re-send a smaller packet will never get back to the originating host.''

Tony Pierce posts the history of his life in jobs...#

``went to santa barbara and worked for the arts and lectures dept as an usher. heard all the great speakers and authors, saw modern ballet, everything. then wrote at the paper and edited and learned. then worked in the cafeteria, then woke up at dawn and delivered donuts to lots of places in santa barbara including an operation that would later recruit me, train me, put things in my head, ruin my memory, teach me how touch a woman proper, fly a helicopter, steal from the theives and utilize esp. then i painted apartments in iv.''

Ted Leung wonders if his site doesn't render right on Safari. I'll tell you this, it looks terrible, so maybe it's broken? But readable and what not. Sometimes the link hover thingies get stuck and block the text underneath. That's annoying.#

Philip Greenspun suggests that it doesn't make sense to ask the rich to pay taxes because it's not practical to collect it from them...#

``As a point of political rhetoric it makes sense to talk about how the rich should pay tax. But as a practical matter it seems virtually impossible to collect tax from the rich, except perhaps for property tax. Could it be that George W. Bush cuts taxes for the rich not because has so many rich friends but rather because he recognizes the impracticality of actually collecting?

[Note that the idea of taxing what's easy to tax rather than what is fair isn't original. The Europeans have a sales tax that is triple what we've got in the U.S. and more broadly applied (they call it Value Added Tax and it is between 16 and 25%). They put in V.A.T. partly because so many people were cheating on their income tax whereas VAT is easy to collect.]''

John Gruber responds to VapourOffice...#

``So now we're going to pretend it's a mystery why developers aren't beating down a path to develop OpenOffice for OS X? How about the obvious answer: it doesn't pay. Creating a top-notch user experience is extremely hard work, and it takes a lot of time. Wondering why your friendly neighborhood Mac developer doesn't devote his nights and weekends to volunteering for OpenOffice is like wondering why your friendly neighborhood barber doesn't spend his spare time giving free haircuts. ''

On ll1-discuss, Vadim Nasardinov quoted a very cute poem about efficient lisp code...#

``To iterate is illiterate.
To recurse is worse.
To avoid this trap, see
Instructions for MAPC.''

Also on ll1-discuss, Colin Putney wrote an interesting thing about the difference between geometric and object-oriented "subclassing" -#

``Shapes are defined in terms of constraints. To create a subtype, you
add constraints. So a quadrilateral is a polygon with four sides, a
rectangle is a quadrilateral with right angles at the vertices, a
square is a rectangle with sides of equal length. Classes types are
defined in terms of state. To create a subclass you add state. (We'll
ignore behaviour for now.)

To model a shape with a class you have to include enough state to cover
the range of variation allowed by the constraints. The more specific
the geometric subtype, the more constraints it has, and the less state
is required to model it. So the type hierarchies of shapes and the
classes that model them have an inverse relationship. That's why all
circles are ellipses, but all Ellipses are Circles.''