O'reilly describes his meeting with Barack Obama
posted Sep 06, 2008
Barack Obama went on the O'Reilly show of shows last week. Mr. O'Reilly wrote a column about the interview.
I transcribed the column below.
My copy-paste key is broken, so I had to do it from memory. Apologies for any mistakes or omissions.
Like him or not, you have to give Barack Obama credit for waging a smart, focused campaign. Destroying the Clinton machine was a major achievement and so was putting together a successful convention in Denver. Obama is now firmly a part of U.S. history, no matter what happens in the presidential election. He's placed himself squarely in a historical place. An important place, just for him.
The problem some Americans continue to have with the Senator is that he is long on charisma but short on detail.
A tiny little gripe about javascript libraries
posted Feb 05, 2008
I wrote a rant about something that annoyed me greatly when working with JS libraries.
read the rant if you want. Or read below, which is the same thing, but in a nicer and hopefully clearer way.Because about half of what I ranted about was wrong, and the other half wasn't worth getting angry about. It's just slightly annoying.
A great deal of what I do with js libraries is move page elements around, change their size, and toggle them on and off.
Every JS library has slightly different ways to do this, and these ways aren't internally consistent.
(By "internally consistent", I mean that functions which get a value should return data in the same format accepted by functions that set that same value.)
This isn't too surprising, considering that the properties in question are really css.
Karl Rove re-frames himself
posted Feb 02, 2008
Karl Rove, the elder statesman.
The experienced consultant. The Wall Street Journal columnist.
Rove's "The new rules of politics" is a fluff piece, ostensibly about insights into the campaign process. It's about as insightful as a fashion consultant's views on which color is the new black.
After reading it, go back and look at it again through the eyes of Mr. Rove:
No Democratic candidate is named. Every Republican candidate is named.
The final bullet point - "Ideas still matter", merges into the conclusion. It reads as follows:
"Both Democrats and Republicans are in spirited and, at times, heated contests. The difference is Democrats are running a nasty race that has as its subtext race and gender.
Dreamhost made a 7.5 million billing error.
posted Jan 16, 2008
They handled it in classic Dreamhost fashion, too. Heavy on the comedy.
A lot of customers were unhappy with the nonchalant attitude.
This is a pretty sterling example of Paul Graham's "dignity is deadly" quote:
When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don't add anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly."
I have been a Dreamhost client for several years, and I've been pretty happy with their overall service. This isn't the first time they've admitted doing something stupid.
Before Dreamhost, I was a client of Westhost.
Searching by colors: the good, the great, and the thick-headed hopefully awesome.
posted Nov 30, 2007
(Update at end of post)
Check this great site out right now:
http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour/
Sweet, right?
After I discovered it, I started changing code on http://www.colr.org to link from colors and schemes to the multicolour search.
(Click on a color or scheme, then click the "more" button).
Awesome. Took about 20 minutes total.
You know who else has color searching? Istockphoto.com does. I hooked up colr.org to their site last year.
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&color=227,1,99
You know who else has color searching? Etsy.com does:
And theirs is awesome and fun.
But you know what sucks? I can't link to etsy's color search with colors passed as arguments.
Several months ago, I emailed the etsy folks, suggesting they add the ability to supply colors as arguments (like a search query).
On Feb. 2, 2007, Lloyd Dalton <daltonlp@gmail.com> wrote: Hello,
Your search-by-colors interface is very fun to play with.
This ain't the 80s. Google ain't Lotus.
posted Sep 19, 2007
I like to read Joel's stuff. But sometimes I disagree wildly, and this is one of those times.
He makes several points, one of which makes a bit of sense.
just build cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up...we don't care about performance or optimization much anymore.
There's something to that. Remember when people cared about html page size?
Then Joel goes straight off the deep end.
So if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows.
His supporting arguments for this are:
There are a buncha-buncha ajax frameworks out there, all of which do the same basic stuff
An anecdote about Lotus and their 3D spreadsheet.
The lotus analogy is stupid as hell.
Estimating Google's number of servers using the WWII tank method
posted Sep 16, 2007
Website stats that show referrer information look similar to this:
51 51 0.38% http://www.google.com.mx/search
But if you have a Google Gadget that makes requests to your website, you'll see something like this:
... 9 9 0.47% http://9.gmodules.com/ig/ifr 8 8 0.27% http://22.gmodules.com/ig/ifr 8 8 0.07% http://89.gmodules.com/ig/ifr 5 5 0.12% http://34.gmodules.com/ig/ifr 5 5 0.18% http://36.gmodules.com/ig/ifr 5 5 1.12% http://38.gmodules.com/ig/ifr ...
When Google gadgets make requests for data, these requests are sent to a proxy server at Google, which then repeats the request to the original destination. This is because of the browser restriction that javascript can't make requests to domains other than the domain of the page it's on.
The proxy servers also cache the requests and responses.