Pros:
a tornado of razorblades: SQL Databases Don’t Scale (Hacker News thread)
Cons:
Code Monkeyism: The dark side of NoSQL (Hacker News thread)
Related:
Archives of the Caml mailing list: Message from Brian Hurt
Chris Williams , Co-Curator of NoSQL East, NoSQL: A Modest Proposal
Carsonified: Should you go Beyond Relational Databases?
John Kleint: Python Project Howto – describes how to get a Python project up and going, from unit tests to project hosting. Fantastic howto.
Dpeepul Blog: django guys let us understand django guys let us understand python *args and **kwargs – Great for a Python beginner to discern just what those features are. Here’s more in the official documentation (which you’ve read – right?).
Josh Long: “A Survival Guide to Maven, OR, Why Maven’s Still Cool” – nicely done.
(defvar my-dir-root (expand-file-name "~/elisp")) (set-default-font "-apple-consolas-medium-r-normal--13-0-72-72-m-0-iso10646-1") ; appending to the elisp load path for our stuff (setq load-path (cons my-dir-root load-path)) ; stop that splash screen (setq inhibit-splash-screen t) ; set the fill column (setq-default fill-column 79) ; set the default tab width (setq-default tab-width 4) ; always show the line number (line-number-mode t) ; always show the column number (column-number-mode t) ; allow selection deletion (delete-selection-mode t) ; yes-or-no will always take "y" or "n" (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p) ; stop automatic insertion of new line (setq next-line-add-newlines nil) ; enable selection highlighting (setq transient-mark-mode t) ; enable search highlighting (setq search-highlight t) ; show matching parens (show-paren-mode t) ; have backspace be backspace (normal-erase-is-backspace-mode 1) ; have emacs scroll line-by-line (setq scroll-step 1) ; prevent emacs from making automatic backups (setq make-backup-files nil) ; switch dabbrev-expand to hippie-expand (global-set-key "\M-/" 'hippie-expand) ; turn off backups (setq backup-inhibited t)
Kimberly Blessing: Craftmanship can change the world
Tim Bray: On Duct Tape: Slashdot thread
Dare Obasanjo: Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects
Chris Smith: “What To Know Before Debating Type Systems”
Making Good Software: “Programmers top 10 sentences” (painfully funny)
Ethan Zuckerman covered a Clay Shirky talk given at the Shorenstein Center” on journalism today and its future. It’s an absolute must read for media/info/com future thinkers: “Clay Shirky and accountability journalism”.
Mark Bowden traces the path a story takes, from political operatives, thru social media, to mainstream news, in the The Atlantic piece“The Story Behind The Story”. Another must read.
Paul Graham: Post-Medium Publishing. Slashdot thread.
Mathew Ingram: Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?
The Atlantic: The Rise of the Professional Blogger
And finally, Timothy Egan attacks an entire subset of the population for their passion based on a lack of facts, missing the point that he is working for a member of the industry that has a role in that: “Working Class Zero”
The Nieman Journalism Lab: Mathew Ingram: Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve:
many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value
That attitude is behind what renders the commenting at most newspaper websites so defective.
Surfacing the community around your news has way more to do with participating with it online than just enabling comments and walking away. In fact, doing the later by itself never works.
The web is littered with sites where commenting is enabled, and the hosts do not participate, do not curate, do not even moderate in a transparent fashion. The results of which are never good – thread after thread of trolling, personal invective, and lack of communication. This leads to far too many finding commenting as worthless add-on that you must have for a website, but for no other reason.
It’s a missed opportunity and for many of these sites, part of their failed web strategies.
If you have 10 million visitors a month and only 1 person focused on ‘community’ or ‘commenting’ – you have already failed.
Alfresco Tech Talk Live: 4.17.09: FSR Callbacks – Deploying to eXist and CouchDb.
I don’t agree entirely with the first first link from Sunlight Labs – blanket statements like ‘x is dead – use y’ – are poor generalizations – however it raises strong points about frameworks and CMSes.
I just wish organizations and individuals would realize that there is not an either/or choice here – as projects such as Alfresco-Django and Alfresco-Drupal show.
Sunlight Labs: Content Management Systems just don’t work.
fiercecontentmanagement: Rolling your own CMS just doesn’t make sense
CMS Myth: Is interest in content management declining?
Stop looking for golden hammers.
IBM developerWorks: alt.lang.jre: Harnessing Rhino.
Bonus link: js2-mode for Emacs.