Officially Lucky

J. Nicholas Hoover, reporting for InformationWeek:

In the coming weeks and months, Microsoft will launch a huge advertising campaign that’s been reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“We’ve got a pretty noisy competitor out there,” Brooks said of Apple whose “I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC,” commercials criticize Windows Vista. “You know it. I know it. It’s caused some impact. We’re going to start countering it. They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be ...

Clint: The future of journalism is what sites like Ars Technica have been doing for 10 years.

Jeff Jarvis has posted an "utter bullshit" spreadsheet (for discussion only, not to be taken literally) outlining how a newsroom might reorganize to save money and focus on its strengths. One of the notable line items was reducing the number of copy editors (subs, for you Brits) from 15 to three. "Make writers edit," he declared.

It is a timely idea in a profession that just loves a three-point "trend." In London, the free sheet City AM is whacking its entire "subediting team ...

I have developed a few web applications powered by Google App Engine since its launch in May. It has been a fairly easy transition from my traditional programming in Python and Django backed by MySQL to the distributed App Engine environment, Bigtable, and the limitations of each. I have learned a few App Engine best practices over over the past month and would like to share some best practices for App Engine development gained mostly through trial and error. In this post I will share data optimization tips for Google's hosted Bigtable instance, reduce the errors and resource usage ...

I like to give John McCain the benefit of the doubt when it's clear he's making a joke. (Like about how he stopped beating his wife.) So I want to defend this clip where he holds up the company Crocs as some paragon of American business innovation. I mean, on one hand, hahahaha: a company that owes its entire business to the groupthink of suburban teenagers subsidized by parents grown fat off home equity loans and decades of runaway corporate earnings growth afforded by the very ingenious business innovations that led Crocs to manufacture its wares in China ...

Clint: Crap... someone made a smaller USB thumb drive than I have :)

Over on the New York Times "Freakonomics" blog, Steven D. Levitt tackles the issue of "sounding black." Specifically: As it relates to one's salary. Levitt's University of Chicago colleague, Jeffrey Grogger, compared the wages of people who “sound black” when they talk to those who do not. Apparently, if you "sound black," you earn 10% less than if you do not "sound black," and Levitt adds that this is "even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn." Plus! "For what it is worth," he writes ...

Send Barack Your Baby.

Q: How long will my baby be with Barack himself? A: You may choose from three interaction types: a kiss, a hug, or giving hope. For a kiss or a hug, Barack spends roughly two minutes with a baby. Giving hope usually takes about twice that long.

Maaahahaha. Via Coudal.

Serious Sans is a more professional take on Microsoft's much-maligned Comic Sans typeface. The typeface is a project by four students at the Royal College of Art in London. From The Moment blog:

Struggling to understand what could possibly be good about Comic Sans, Valerio -- together with partners Hugo Timm, Filip Tydén and Erwan Lhussier -- found that the doggedly goofy font's irregular forms made it one of the easiest typefaces for dyslexics to read. The designers also liked how it undermined the authority -- and changed the meaning -- of texts set in it.

For many graphics applications, plug-ins are a way of life. This essay presents a method that minimizes the amount of work required to support different host applications, or even different versions of the same host. I used these techniques in our IconBuilder plug-in for Photoshop. These instructions have already helped one fellow developer; with the help of Google, hopefully there will be more.

My goal was to use Cocoa and NIB files produced by Interface Builder for driving the plug-in user interface. As I began to work on this project, I also realized that it was possible make the user ...

[London, July 7. Image via INFDaily.]

Shared by Herschell / Special*Dark Hiking with iPhone? Yes plz.

An interesting story in the Times regarding the importance of looking for a “growth mindset” in potential employees:

After reading her book, Scott Forstall, senior vice president of Apple in charge of iPhone software, contacted Ms. Dweck to talk about his experience putting together the iPhone development team. Mr. Forstall told her that he identified a number of superstars within various departments at Apple and asked them in for a chat.

At the beginning of each interview, he warned the recruit that he couldn’t reveal details of the project he was working on. But he promised the opportunity, Ms ...

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.How do TechCrunch stories make it to Digg's front page so often? With a little help from its friends, of course. Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley, now a foe of editor Michael Arrington, posted a screenshot from his inbox revealing what Riley calls "The TechCrunch Digg Club." It includes four writers from TechCrunch proper; seven from gadgets blog CrunchGear; two from TechCrunchIT, Arrington's incomprehensible enterprise-tech spinoff; plus two or three interns.

Social news purists will no doubt shrilly protest against TechCrunch's marketing scheme, but the ...

The biggest gripe about the original Drobo was that it only supported USB 2.0. The new model, released today, adds FireWire 800, a fast processor (which should make even USB I/O faster), and purportedly runs quieter. The price remains the same: $499. (Via Dan Benjamin.)

“Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms,” says Claire Little, of the Weymouth Sea Life Centre. “Many animals have been shown to favour a certain arm so we will see if octopuses can be added to that ...

From Required Eating

The eight world leaders meeting for the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan, scarfed a six-course lunch and then an eight-course dinner before discussing the world food shortage situation. [via Eat to Blog]

Howard says this is a heady time to be working at NASA. In 2004, President Bush set a goal of sending humans back to the moon by 2020 and eventually on to Mars. The lunar outpost would be a training ground and launchpad for trips to the red planet. But there are plenty of challenges to overcome first. To camp on the moon, astronauts need to ...

Miss Hawkins said she got dressed at 7.30am and arrived for work at the Holiday Inn Norwich North, near Norwich International Airport without noticing anything unusual. "When I was driving to work I felt a slight vibration but I thought it was just my mobile phone in my jacket pocket," she said. It was not until her lunch break, at midday when she felt a strange movement inside her bra, which had been hanging on her washing ...

A reusable app for bookmark management.

Based on work done for Pinax.

From A Hamburger Today

From left: Clyde's burger, Mr. Smith's.

I spent a weekend in the nation's capital and had time to tuck in to a few burgers on my visit. Because of their proximity, both geographic and aesthetic, I'm covering two burgers together in this post, having already covered Ben's Chili Bowl here because I think it merits special attention.

Clyde's

My first burger of the trip was at Clyde's, a local chain. I generally avoid chains, but Clyde's looked genuinely historical. Indeed, the Georgetown location I dined at is the ...

If you’ve read my article, Regarding Backups where I discuss my data storage and backup process, you know I’m a fan of the Drobo, an external, expandable, RAID device.

Today, Data Robotics has announced a brand new version of the Drobo. I’ve known about it for a little while, but haven’t been able to talk about it until the official announcement today.

So what’s new? The Drobo now supports Firewire 800, and has a faster processor for the behind-the-scenes magic that handles the data redundancy. It’s also said to be cooler and quieter, something ...

Clint Ecker doesn't seem to have his posts syndicated over at the Django aggregator. (*) Over the recent couple of days, though, Clint's been posting about a few different Django apps he's been using in his professional projects and has released to the wider world. Plus a few "how I work" tips.

• django-chunks (seriously, dude! That was the best name you could come up with??)
• Super-simple Google analytics
• Three Django tips

Go read them. Now.

(*) Probably because we've reached the legal limit of Chicago people on that page and he lucked out. Ironic really.

The Rail Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) said today it was planning a 24-hour strike by rail workers on July 17, the busiest day of the Catholic event. It is the day Pope Benedict XVI will make his way through the streets of Sydney during the afternoon peak. The NSW Government will take the matter to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) tomorrow. Mr Iemma said his Government would not cave in to the RTBU. "The Government will not be blackmailed into giving them what they want as a result of these industrial terror tactics ...

There are none.

The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands.

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics' belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings.

Amazing, onion ...

I was looking around DjangoSnippets.org last night and had been using the “site: djangosnippets.org” in google to be able to search the site. To make life easier I’ve knocked up a noddy greasemonkey script to provide a basic Google powered search box (in the header) across DjangoSnippets.org.

It goes without saying you’ll need Greasemonkey installed. Once you have Greasemonkey, clicking the following link should prompt GreaseMonkey to ask you if you want to install the script: Install django_snippets_search.user.js

Tonight we get five catalog titles added to the HD rental list. These titles are A Walk To Remember, S Club Seeing Double, You’ve Got Mail, 187 and The Hours.

Filed under: .Mac, MobileMe

Anne Kate pushed out and asked for some folks to answer the question “How I got started programming?” Seeing as I was on the list (not quite sure how I made that list, but ok…) Here’s the juicy bits

How old were you when you started programming?

I had to really think about this, but I think I was 12. It may have been when I was 13. I remember spending many, many long hours puttering away at the thing while in Jr High. I’m sure I wrote a few simple programs then, but to be honest I ...

Clint: Hmm...

Authorities in Oakland, CA are recovering Nina Reiser's remains after the computer-programmer-turned murderer Hans Reiser led police to the burial site. Snip from ABC News:

We spoke with the office of Reiser's attorney, William Dubois. They confirmed to us that Dubois and Reiser accompanied police into the park Monday afternoon. ABC News reports Reiser led them to his wife's remains. The body was found in a bag, buried deep in a ravine. The bag was well concealed and could have been easily overlooked. The remains have not yet been exhumed. Present at the scene were ...

TouchArcade has a very nice writeup of what’s actually under the hood with an iPhone. I’ve been learning quite a bit about the OpenGL ES implementation, and specifically the chip that’s driving it - but more from a “that doesn’t quite work in a programmatic way of doing it…” sort of thing. I’m not the guy doing the OpenGL programming (thank god - I barely know it), but it’s been interesting following the guys who do know it and what barriers they hit with performance and effectiveness on the iPhone.

After reading that in Python 2.5 some big memory leaks are fixed, I just switched a Django site from Python 2.4 to Python 2.5.

I wasn't disappointed -- the combined memory usage of my Apache processes (which are using mod_python) went from 100 Mb to 60 Mb. So, for anyone else wanting to conserve memory, this is the first thing I'd suggest!

Upcoming sprints ¶

• July 10 - July 12 at EuroPython 2008, focusing on newforms-admin.

• July 18 in Sausalito, CA, focusing on Django 1.0 alpha.

• August 1, location TBA, focusing on Django 1.0 beta.

• August 8, Lawrence, KS, focusing on Django 1.0 beta 2.

• August 15, Austin, TX, focusing on Django 1.0 rc.

• August 22, Portland, OR, focusing on Django 1.0 final.

Clint: Djangocon Djangocon Djangocon