I know this is Old News, but I finally got around to listening to Paul Graham on “Great Hackers”. I don’t think one could find a more lucid, succinct expression of so many things that programmers face.
The way Madonna need the Kabbalah / The way Skee-Lo needed more royalties from “I wish I was a li’l bit talla” / That the way I need Allah.
via McSweeney’s
One of my favorite Broken Social Scene songs, “Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl”, has a video.
via chromewaves
From PalmBeachPost.com:
The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.
That is ridiculous and, potentially, very disappointing.
via O’Reilly Radar
With the announcement that Tiger will be shipped on April 29, the buzz around Dashboard is beginning again. And, by buzz, I mean my own personal excitement! I’m still not convinced that Dashboard will be eminently useful… but, boy, are those widgets cool! A quick glance through some early wishlists shows a lot of cross-over with Quicksilver, Karamba and even Firefox extensions. Of course, Apple’s product will rule them all..
I’ll admit it: I often find myself in disagreement with Preston Gralla. In his latest post he states:
One major advantage that Internet Explorer has had over Firefox is the ecosystem of add-ins and developers that have sprung up around it.
Where have you been, dear Preston? I’m pretty sure O’Reilly’s resident Windows-phile accidentally transposed IE and Firefox in that sentence, because Firefox has always had a tremendous extension community! I should know, I wrote my first extension two years ago. Of course, at that time Firefox was known as Phoenix, but even then mozdev.org and texturizer.net were thriving.
In fact, the original appeal of Firefox was that it was Mozilla stripped-down to the essentials, but infinitely extensible via XUL and its extensions architecture. While I applaud Preston for recognizing one of Firefox’s big strengths, I think credit belongs where credit is due.
From ONLamp:
It seems like a simple idea, but treating system administration like software development and applying programmers’ methodologies is really quite novel. However, it neglected to mention what I think is the most important attributes that both System Administrators and Developers should share: Empowerment. Of course, this is more in the domain of manager than managee, but it’s critical.
If management trusts its admins - like it should trust its developers - to choose the right tools, apply the right techniques and execute the needs of customers, instead of treating them like bureaucrats or inter-changeable technicians, I think we’d see big increases in productivity and effectiveness. Likewise, this will require putting aside the “Us and Them” mentality that too often plagues both admins and developers.
