Peter Lindberg writes more about Semiotics.#

The more I read of Yuri Lotman's Semiotics of Cinema, the more convinced I get that this is something that has great relevance for software development—specifically for the social aspects of the architectures of systems, something that's most often overlooked in software projects.

[...]

Software architecture advocates, however, seldom speak about the social aspects, such as how the architecture can support discussions about the system, as well as between members of the development team, as between the team and the stakeholders. The architecture must be habitable; it must be a meaningful model of the problem domain; it must constitute a universe where every element conveys as much information about its role in the interactions with the other elements, in as small means as possible—where they are signs charged with information.

Like in government, and indeed in any situation that requires a lot of interaction and has a very important effect for its constituency, you need to create an environment that supports discussion and change. To do this you need to accept it as fact and truth; that you can't plan anything and if you could, you probably wouldn't want to.

Adam Curry pushes the wonder of RSS enclosures.#

I spoke to several developers yesterday, including ex-apple developer Kevin Marks, who wants to work with me on creating a simple gateway betyween RSS feeds with enclosures and the iPod. I've learned that developers do their best work when they have fresh content to work with every day. So I've created a new rss enclosure feed that will contain a new song from my iPod every day. Subscribe to it with an enclosure aware aggregator and you'll receive this file without any clicking and waiting. Once we've got some widgets too complete the gateway you'll be able to synchronize your iPod with mine. Some songs will be oldies, others fresh and new, many without major label distribution.

Simon Willison is a BIT sarcastic about CSS.#

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but Paul Hammond's open letter to "tableless" recoders caused quite a stir a few weeks back with its extensive list of reasons that recoding someone else's site in CSS helps no one and can in fact have a negative affect on the CSS advocacy effort (the response to the article is summarised in his follow up post).

A year ago I would have strongly disagreed with him - the question then was whether or not CSS was even capable of creating complex layouts, and CSS redesigns were a valuable demonstration of how much could be achieved without tables. I am unsure if that argument has been won yet - there still exist legions of web developers who think CSS is a useful trick for turning off the underlines on links - but the body of evidence seems great enough now that this no longer counts as a valid reason for creating tableless remakes. Paul's main arguments rest on etiquette (it's rude to dismiss someone's work by recreating it), and it's hard to disagree with him there.

Charles Miller writes about the problem of being put on the spot to do things you're already good at.#

One of my possibly annoying habits is inserting pop-culture references into random conversation. I have a large store of song lyrics and movie quotes swimming around in the back of my head, and they have a tendency to pop out when they seem vaguely relevant. A lot of the time I don't even realise I'm doing it until too late.

[...] Paradoxically, when that meme was going around a few years ago where you had to answer a series of questions about yourself using only lyrics or quotes, I was unable to do it. I guess that has something to do with how much I suck at improvisation when I'm put on the spot. I can free-associate when the pressure's off, but sit me down and order me to think of a relevant quote for something specific, and my brain seizes up.

Andrew Birkett writes about educational and professional equality, that everyone CAN learn.#

I've always hated dry academic papers; In fact, I hate any situation where information is deliberately made to seem arcane or difficult by the use of jargon or needless layers of abstraction. [...]

The closest I come to having a "life philosophy" is my continual belief that nothing is really as difficult as people make it out to be. That's why I just go ahead and do things like melting metal (it ain't as hard as you'd think either). There is some primitive force which makes people want to dress up their knowledge to make it seem more impressive, and they are reluctant to share that knowledge - as if somehow that will drain away some of their own power. There's something very Emperor's New Clothes about it. Maybe "knowledge horder" is a suitably pejorative term.

My parents are both teachers. One consequence of this is that I have no inclination to become a teacher! But, I feel very strongly about education and about equality of opportunity. I guess when I see people "dressing up knowledge in jargon", I perceive people who are building unnecessary barriers around learning. If it isn't really hard, don't make it seem hard.

Don Park has a great opinion on the Google AdSense "scandal."#

Recent suckage by Google regarding their AdSense program (see Joi's post for latest set of links to related posts) brings to light an interesting choice in life. If you had to choose, which would you rather be: Stupid or Evil?

Since Google's #1 rule is "Don't be Evil", I guess they would rather be Stupid than Evil. Just in case, here is How Google can be Smart and Secretly Evil:

Moxie is so funny... she leaves my teeth chattering for more!#

General Wesley Clark has admitted that he and Arnold Schwarzenegger have engaged in highly controversial bi-partisan time travel. Digital films viewed only by the VLWC show that Arnold groped and humiliated Hitler several times during their jaunt back to WWII era Europe.

The left is asserting that the fact Arnold dared grope a historical dictator must imply intense disrespect and hatred for the Nazi's. A claim the Schwarzenegger camp has affirmed and refuses to apologize for. And then apologized for, because he doesn't want to offend anyone.

Hitler never filed any charges of course and asked that Clark not reveal his name. It was confirmed through a copy-editor that columnist Robert Novak's article to be published tomorrow will reveal the identity of the gropee much to the chagrin of Maria Shriver, a top secret spy for the CIA. Or so says some unnamed White House Correspondent, Geraldo Rivera.

Arnold is calling for a recall of the film and Gray Davis is raising funds so he can travel back in time and regain his bristly brown hair of yesteryears.

Ted Leung comments on a Bill Joy interview with Fortune magazine.#

He then goes on to talk about writing everything in Java (C# would be fine by me too). He also talked about building software diversity by writing different implementations of the same module and running various combinations of modules as a way of obtaining diversity. These are interesting ideas. On page 2 of the interview his says:

People still don't recognize the scope of what we have to do. You can't simply write a new, multimillion-line program in C and expect it to be reliable unless you're willing to work on it for 20 years. It takes such a long time because that language doesn't support the easy detection of the kinds of flaws most viruses exploit to bring down systems. Instead, you need to use a programming language with solid rules so that you can have the software equivalent of chemistry: the predictable interaction of code as it runs. But on the network, where part of the software works here and part of it works there, programs also behave in emergent ways that are more biological and difficult to predict. So until you have a science of doing distributed computing, software developers will continue to just throw stuff out there. That's why the Net is not going to be secure.

This is why I'm looking for a managed platform.

Tom Coates replies to a reader who suggests turning off features on weblogs that cause "badness."#

The interesting thing about the person who decided to leave this message (which like so many was stuck on the end of my piece about the evils of weblog comment spammers) was that they don't seem to be able to to understand the difference between someone engaging in a conversation and someone coming into your space and trying to sell you something. And they don't seem able to understand that taking advantage of other people's good-will to whore your own products and services is innappropriate - that it's wrong.

The reason - obviously - that webloggers allow individuals to put links to their homepages in their comments is so that we can strengthen links and ties between the members of our heavily abstracted community. We do it so that if people find a comment interesting they can go and read more about the person who commented. The cynicism involved in using such things for pure Google-juice - just to try and scrabble people to your porno site for a few extra cents - is just disgusting. And it's not because it's pornography, it's because it's brazen, disrespectful and offensive.

Razib at Gene Expression points to The Loom and "a post up titled Fear of a Eugencist Planet that reviews a review of a book called War Against the Weak. He comes to the conclusion that the book is much ado about nothing (ie; biotech companies are not pawns of the new eugenicists)."#

He also brings up the point that it might be difficult to genetically modify intelligence: "If you wanted to make your kid significantly smarter, you'd have to tinker with a huge number of them [genes], perhaps hundreds or thousands." Well, what little I know does indicate that the affect of any given gene on intelligence might be small (predicated on the individual being within the normal range), perhaps on the order of 1%, but that's far from "thousands." Additionally, some psychologists have done research which indicates that heritability of IQ (variation within a population caused by genotype) increases as you move up the socioeconomic ladder,