It’s important to speak out

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Karl

Wha, that last link threw you a bit? Why is that? Is it that we are more comfortable confronting racism then sexism? And has the Presidential campaign reflected that? Why?

How we go about fighting racism and sexism, while protecting free speech is confusing territory.

I figure the best way is by speaking out loudly, and clearly.

PS – Make a donation to the Thomas Jefferson Center for free speech in George Carlin’s name.

Favorite Super heroes?

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Karl

Empire has a feature sharing their choice for the Civil War crossover that took place in Marvel comics over 2006 and 2007. It’s weird, but back when I was a teen, there was no way I’d ever claim to be a fan of Captain America. But as an an adult, I recognize now that his character didn’t represent the blind patriotism I thought it did – far from it in fact.

Here is a related story at NPR.

Now some choices from Empire’s top 50

(But first note, no Superman, sorry Oliver. All powerful super heroes that aren’t the least bit flawed in some way, never really interested me all that much. The funny thing is Supes used to be the template for super-heroes in comics – now he’s the exception – which is making him more interesting to me now)

What does it mean when our media re-writes itself?

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Karl

Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.

What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?

NYTimes: Link by Link – Poof! You’re Unpublished

Boing Boing on the matter.

Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.

There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this – but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don’t wish to add to any of it.

However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking – note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don’t point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don’t.

As Rafe states – links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we’ve earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don’t live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.

Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.

Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)

Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or… well.. see above)

Children’s Creativity

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Karl

Seven development related links for today

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Karl

Spartan programming – Ssdlpedia (via Coding Horror)

HTTP request flow diagram – print out worthy.

36 steps to success as technical lead | Little Tutorials – some good advice here

Python best practices – still learning

MIT OpenCourseWare: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.189 A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python, January (IAP) 2008 – speaking of still learning… yippie!

CryptoKids: America’s Future Codemakers & Codebreakers – hmmmmmm….

good coders code, great reuse: Follow Hacker News from the Console

Scaling Java EE Applications Series at TheServerSide.com

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Karl

TheServerSide.com: Scaling Your Java EE Applications – Part 1

TheServerSide.com: Scaling Your Java EE Applications – Part 2

Two Emacs links for the day

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Karl

Got Emacs?: Learning to use the Emacs keyboard macro system effectively

Emacs Lisp Idioms

Google releases internal development software open source

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Karl

Protocol Buffers are “a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats”. This will start some interesting conversations around work, as it should. XML doesn’t need to always be the choice when building server to server side data interchange.

For JavaScript developers, note that Google has not released a library, as this appears to be used, within Google, for server to server side, not server to client. In fact, according to Kenton Varda in the Google Group discussion shares that some internal projects serialize or parse Protocol Buffer messages in JSON format.

Google Open Source Blog: Google’s Data Interchange Format

Matt Cutts: Cool: Google Releases Protocol Buffers Into the Wild: To understand the other nice thing about Protocol Buffers, bear in mind that in the Google cluster architecture, there are many different types of servers that talk to each other. Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It’s a fool’s game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.

Joe Gregorio: Protocol Buffers: They’re one of the first things you learn about when you start at Google and they’re used everywhere.

And a related Hacker News discussion.

ratproxy is “a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool, optimized for an accurate and sensitive detection, and automatic annotation, of potential problems and security-relevant design patterns based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments.”

It can be very difficult auditing XSS security issues and it is always good to find a tool that is well used and trusted.

Google Online Security Blog: Meet ratproxy, our passive web security assessment tool: We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security challenges associated with contemporary web technologies.

Coldplay drives women to violence

Posted on July 5, 2008 by Karl

I know I shouldn’t laugh, but I’m surprised Coldplay inspired *any* emotion, let alone diving a women to clock a karaoke singer as he goes into “Yellow” screaming “Oh, no, not that song. I can’t stand that song!”