Are you a generalist or a specialist?

Aaron Held writes a great post on specialization and the issues it raises in a development organization.

The Heinlein quote he shares is a keeper, and so is the podcast he linked to: Escape Pod: EP179: Arties Aren’t Stupid. I’m new to Escape Pod, which, apparently is a podcast where a sci-fi story is read and then discussed. The comments thread on this one is hot and heavy with folks arguing the effect of the narrator’s accent and slang – I think they transport you deep into the story’s universe. It’s an awesome fun recording. I typically don’t find the time for podcasts, but in this case, I’m subscribing.

Software Architecture Links: Documenting Architecture

IBM developerWorks: Documenting software architecture, Part 1: What software architecture is, and why it’s important to document it

IBM developerWorks: The architecture of Web applications

W3C: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One

w3.org: Web Architecture from 50,000 feet

Social Software Links: The Future of the Web Edition

Gabor Cselle: “The Future of Email” Talk in Sydney

Identity Management Manifesto: via robert_francis

Burningbird: This Week’s Semantic Web, Burningbird style

Waxy.org: Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey

slacktivist: They need help: Information — facts, reality, the rebuttal and debunking of lies — is one kind of help that the captives of unreality need. That information is necessary, but not sufficient, for those who have chosen their own captivity. What else is necessary, and what might be sufficient to help them choose not to make that choice, is something I want to continue exploring.

Planet RDF

Social Software Links: Activism and Privacy Edition

Penny Arcade! posted a comic that summarizes what many think of online anonymity and the Internet: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Up until the past few weeks, I would have agreed. But now I am starting to adopt a more nuanced view.

I don’t want to get into what has triggered the change of heart, and no – I am not anonymously blogging – my name lends credibility that I am not willing to trade. However, I have come to realize there are those who need to be able to speak out, and without anonymity cannot do so.

It’s confusing subject matter, so here are a few links of various viewpoints:

CNet: U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity

Business Week: Busting a Rogue Blogger: Troll Tracker has been unmasked as a patent lawyer for Cisco. Now they’re both facing litigation

SSRN: Anonymous Blogging and Defamation: Balancing Interests of the Internet: It is important not to silence communication on the Internet, but it is just as important not to silence victims of defamation. Therefore, this comment argues for the protection of libel plaintiffs facing defamatory comments from anonymous bloggers.

Media Bloggers Association: Announces Libel Insurance For Bloggers – huge news for those who intend to pursue acts of journalism independently.

Must See Video: Hope2604 – Steve Rambam Pt 1 – Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It

Must See Video: Hope2604 – Steve Rambam Pt 2 – Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It

Wired.com: ‘Anonymous’ Member Unmasked, Charged With Web Attack on Scientology

Bruce Schneier: Essays and Op Eds

Time Berners-Lee’s new World Wide Web Foundation

Global Voices Online: Global Voices Advocacy: A project of Global Voices Online, we seek to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

Reporters Without Borders

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Risks Digest

Slashdot: Your Rights Online

Upgrading SVN on Leopard

If you’ve been keeping your Subclipse Eclipse plugin up to date on Leopard, sooner or later you will be met with a situation where your svn cli client will report an incompatibility and lead you to upgrading it.

The problem starts when you download and install the universal binary at CollabNet.

Installation goes well, but it doesn’t upgrade the original installation you have on your machine.

The simplest solution found in the comments in this post was to override path so that /usr/local/bin/ takes precedence over /usr/bin/ . In addition, I took the additional step of moving the original svn binaries from /usr/bin to a backup folder, to avoid any possible conflicts.

TheServerSide.com: A RESTful Core 3 Part Series

There’s a great series on applying RESTful concepts in application design at TheServerSide.com by Randy Kahle and Tom Hicks that’s worth a read:

A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility – Part 1

A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility – Part 2

A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility – Part 3

Social Software Links for October 1st, 2008: Of Google Hive Minds and Friending Obsolescence

Links on a theme in today’s roundup.

Union Square Ventures: Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed:

. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Jeremiah Owyang (of Forrester Research): Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete:

Like a baby, we’re teaching the ‘system’ our language, how to walk, how to coexist in our real flesh and blood world, the ‘system’ is just starting to show intelligence. One primary example of this is the use of hashtags in Twitter. We use the # sign to tag content so it’s easily to organize and find. That one # character isn’t native to our tongue (unless when you recite your grocery list and say “hashtag”) it’s another example of us speaking machine language in order to teach the system.

For example, I started a social experiment on Sunday, where I encouraged folks to tweet related music artists using the tag “#relatedmusic” you can see the database form when you search for that term -If we had enough people do this in my -and your- network we’d be able to build a reference engine that other music reccomendations services could pull from.

Search Engine Land: Danny Sullivan: The Google Hive Mind:

As Google turns 10 years old, that important birthday sees the company more powerful than ever before. With its competitors in disarray, the Big G seems likely to grow even further. The secret to its success? For me, it’s what I’ve been calling the “Google Hive Mind. ” Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company’s direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they’ll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.

Phil Windley’s Technometria: Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?:

One of Alan’s undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can’t understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years. That’s not true in computer science. The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They’re about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms.

The Internet is like the human body. It’s replaced all of its atoms and bits at least twice since it started even though the Internet has never stopped working. Attacks on the ‘Net aren’t really attacks on the ‘Net, they’re attacks on machines on the ‘Net. Very few software systems, maybe none, are built in ways that sustain operation in spite of being continually rebuilt and continually growing.