Author Archives: Karl
Plastic packaging MADNESS
Dare Obasanjo: “Don’t fight the Web, embrace it”
A must read: Dare Obasanjo: Explaining REST to Damien Katz:
There are other practical things to be mindful of as well to ensure that your service is being a good participant in the Web ecosystem. These include using GET instead of POST when retrieving a resource and properly utilizing the caching related headers as needed (If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, Cache-Control), learning to utilize HTTP status codes correctly (i.e. errors shouldn’t return HTTP 200 OK), keeping your design stateless to enable it to scale more cheaply and so on. The increased costs, scalability concerns and complexity that developers face when they ignore these principles is captured in blog posts and articles all over the Web such as Session State is Evil and Cache SOAP services on the client side. You don’t have to look hard to find them. What most developers don’t realize is that the problems they are facing are because they aren’t keeping RESTful principles in mind.
Great intro to Getting Things Done with Emacs and org-mode
Sacha Chua: Emacs: Getting Things Done with Org – Basic.
NYTimes on Jon Stewart
NYTimes: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?:
Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.
For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
SEO Advice Not Followed Often Enough
Aaron Wall: Emotionally Engage or Enrage:
Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site, but when you get into the big fields where people are deeply passionate or interested links are needed to win. And those links are often a reflection of our emotions.
When you look at your site do you find anything that is emotionally engaging? enraging?
As the web gets more efficient and search engines gather more data, those who evoke emotional responses will keep gaining marketshare while bland webmasters fall quietly into the abyss.
If you aren’t linked to by others, you have no chance of being seen or heard.
Of course, there is a chicken and the egg here.
And as Aaron Wall suggests, it pushes us to post content that shouts out to be heard.
“Measure, don’t guess”
java.net: Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine:
While I’m all for performance planning, I’m dead set against premature optimizations. When is a plan a plan, and when is it premature? I guess it’s a little like the difference between art and porn: You’ll know it when you see it.
Early education, dance and music options for Emma
I’m long overdue to post new photos of Emma, but I really should start to post videos because pictures can’t capture the singing, dancing wonder that is Emma Rose. Wow.
Last night she was dancing to Funky Town, while singing and and playing her Ukulele (her guitar).
I kid you not/
We’re looking into different classes for her to have some fun at.
Want to introduce someone to Doctor Who?
io9 has a terrific guide: “Doctor Who: How To Discover Classic Doctor Who In 3 Easy Steps”.
February 8, 1996 was “Black Thursday”
To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site’s background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold’s thoughts on the historic day.
It’s interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today’s context. I mean – Yahoo! turned its home page black!