Less Whining, More Coding
Elizabeth Smith at PHP Advent 2008 – Less Whining, More Coding:
"Download a PHP snapshot or release candidate, install it, and run your PHP application. If it breaks, report the bug! If more people would do this, fiascos like PHP 5.2.7 would not happen because the magic_quotes_gpc issue would have been caught and fixed."
LDIF Basics
LDAP know-how at Novell Cool Solutions, from 2004 – LDIF Basics:
"Change Records contain a set of commands for a particular entry (such as add, delete, or modify). They are used when you want to modify entries within your directory."
The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up
Clay Shirky back in 1997 –The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up:
"Once a product has entered the world of the freebies used to sell boxes of cereal, it will never become a direct source of user fees again.
[…] You might drive three miles to buy used baby clothes, thirty for a used car and sixty for rare coins. Thus, in the economically ideal classified ad scheme, all sellers would use one single classified database nationwide, and then buyers would simply limit their searches by area. This would maximize the choice available to the buyers and the cost able to be commanded by the sellers. It would also destroy a huge source of newspapers revenue."
Quality comes from cooperation
Gojko Adzic – Quality comes from cooperation:
"Quality means different things to different people, Ambler [Chris Ambler, European test manager for Microsoft games] concluded [at XPDay 2008 in London]. He defined his meaning of it as:
The Nonfussy Pill
Scott Adams – The Nonfussy Pill:
"The new poverty is likely to be different from anything that came before. Imagine a world where even the poor have good Internet access and universal healthcare. If you were healthy and could use the Internet to find everything else you needed, from borrowing a tool to organizing a Scrabble game, you'd be pretty much set."
Unicode
Sean McGrath at ITworld – Unicode:
"Let us start by looking at four main variables in the space : language, country, culture and technology. Language. Let us take that one first. How hard can that be?
[…] Oh dear, when we hit the Middle East we hit languages that drive the wrong way on the page. Right to left! That changes essentially everything user-interface-related in most software. Further east we hit ideographics. The concept of a "letter" has just flew out of the occidental window. Not only that but the text is laid out top to bottom. What to do?"
(Via Sam Ruby.)
Google Is My Doctor
Scott Adams – Google Is My Doctor:
"Long story short, the operation I read about wasn't as promising as the article suggested, but the final surgeon in my travels had his own version of surgery that had a good track record. I tried it, and now my voice is normal. I never would have found that path without Google Alerts."
Eine Art LDAP für Metadaten?
Niels Hufnagl im SNAPlog – Eine Art LDAP für Metadaten?:
"Ein halbes Jahr später. Gegen den Artikel wurde juristisch vorgegangen und dummerweise auch noch zu recht. Das kann vorkommen. Wer weiß jetzt noch, an welche Systeme er denken muß, wenn er den Artikel unternehmensweit sperren möchte?
[…] Mir kam bei der Diskussion so der Gedanke, daß das Problem eigentlich sehr ähnlich dem der Benutzerrechte vor Einführung von LDAP sein könnte. Es fehlt eine zentrale Unternehmensdatenbank, in der solche Informationen, die über Systemgrenzen hinweg wichtig sind, gespeichert werden können. In der jede Anwendung Informationen darüber findet, ob Artikel juristisch unbedenklich sind, welche Rechte an Bildern das Unternehmen eigentlich hat, wann diese Rechte auslaufen und so weiter."
The RIA and the Polyglot VM
chromatic at O'Reilly Broadcast – The RIA and the Polyglot VM:
"Of course, the obvious problem with this approach [of Silverlight, JavaFX, and Adobe AIR] is that a big blob of proprietary goo is only a solution for people who want to (or have permission to) get that goo all over their machines. Remember how boggled your bank was back in 2004/2005 that you weren't using Microsoft IE (or that no version of IE had ever run on your OS)? Imagine explaining to them that your 64-bit PC-BSD machine will never get a native version of AIR, and you'd really like to write a check.
At least with bog-standard HTML and CSS (and sometimes, Ajax), the horrifyingly ugly interface works.
The technical design is right, however. A powerful virtual machine, capable of hosting interoperable languages and expressing useful and distinct dialects could improve the state of network-savvy, ubiquitious applications. Don't expect it to come from a proprietary blob, however -- and don't expect JavaScript to be the answer."
Oops, we did it again
Monty Widenius – Oops, we did it again (MySQL 5.1 released as GA with crashing bugs):
"We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important."
unoconv
"unoconv converts between any document format that OpenOffice understands. It uses OpenOffice's UNO bindings for non-interactive conversion of documents.
My Style of Servant Leadership
Joel Spolsky at Inc.com – How Hard Could It Be?: My Style of Servant Leadership:
"Our company was built on the idea of hiring smart and productive people and then clearing the decks. The late, great minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation, better known as DEC, was so adamant about this idea that people in the company used the word administration in place of management and modeled its corporate hierarchy on that of a great research university."
