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Donnerstag, 1. Januar 2009

Schaut doch irgendwie gut aus.

2009-01-01-2009

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Mittwoch, 24. Dezember 2008

Frohe Weihnachten, liebe Leser!

2008-12-24-24

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Sonntag, 21. Dezember 2008

"die einstellung sollte aber ganz einfach sein: wie erzeuge ich wert? nur ist das eine undenkbarkeit."

hackr ta[g|lk]s marketing.

2008-12-21-uncannyValue

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Samstag, 20. Dezember 2008

Ted Dunning: Students learn what they need, not what is assigned

"On the first day, I turned the structure of the class upside-down and assigned the entire final exam. This consisted of a single question in the form of a task (to build a robot that would drive around as fast as possible following a line on the floor). I then passed out soldering irons, computer components and kits of lego parts and told them to get to work. For the record, I had never tried to build such a 'bot myself.

"This tactic resulted, as you would expect, in panic."

Wonderful story.

2008-12-20-botPanic

Olivier Travers: "Google Apps + App Engine + Gears + Chrome + network investments, they're not toying around. There's a deliberate web application strategy at work here with more chances to succeed than Netscape ever had in the 90's."

Prompted by the recent releases of status dashboard, quota monitor, a sneak peek at the upcoming billing system and similarly serious stuff ("[those features] make me think Google must have hired someone who used to work in the mainframe business at IBM").

Speaking of Google App Engine, Ryan Barrett does a great job of competitive monitoring: His Windows Azure write-up (technical details) is certainly one of the most informative per bytes used.

For what it's worth, however, I still like my cloud(y) services as plain vanilla^* as possible. Amazon (especially with EC2, EBS and S3) standardizes at exactly the right (as in: most universally useful) levels of abstraction, whereas both App Engine and (many parts of) Azure seem more akin to (scalability-enforcing, but still) straightjackets.

^* Who'd have thought?

2008-12-20-ns2.0

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Sonntag, 14. Dezember 2008

"Specifically, we're hearing that the smart money KNEW [Bernard Madoff] had to be cheating, because the returns he was generating were impossibly good. Many Wall Streeters suspected the wrong rigged game, though: They thought it was insider trading, not a Ponzi scheme. And here's the best part: That's why they invested with him." [ Ø DKRT • ]

Addendum: Bill Burnham's Madoff Madness: Seven Things You Might Not Know

2008-12-14-evictim

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Mittwoch, 10. Dezember 2008

Fastest rising Zeitgeister, 2008:

3. Facebook, 4. Spanish Facebook, 6. Democrat Facebook, 7. Polish Facebook, 8. Facebook des Saarlandes.

2008-12-10-endOfYearBook

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Dienstag, 9. Dezember 2008

Paul Graham: "If we have to crack down on anything to save News.YC from excessive growth, we'll try first to do it indirectly by cracking down on fluff posts."

2008-12-09-autoNews

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Montag, 8. Dezember 2008

Michael Mitzenmacher writes about a talk by Ben Edelman on all kinds of fraud related to online advertising. I highly recommend reading the (short) book chapter mentioned to get some basic insights on how the system works (e.g. elaborate "guilt distribution" schemes) and why the incentives to change (for almost all involved) are lower than one might, naively, assume.

Not quite unrelated: How thin is the line between working the system and gaming the system?

2008-12-08-fraudology

"Kreaturen werden aus ihrem Lebensraum vertrieben."

Bestes Bild bislang im reichhaltig illustrierten Supportmaterial zu Martin Lindners Vortrag mikroinformation, "[...] darüber, was zwischen 1998 und 2008 passiert ist."

2008-12-08-kreaDeck

Heinz Wittenbrink: "Twitter ist kein Werkzeug, sondern eine Kommunikationsform. [...] Mit Twitter kann man twittern, so wie man mit einem Telefon telefonieren, oder mit einem Blog bloggen kann."

2008-12-08-twin

Matthew Yglesias: "I've seen a few people express the notion that [Malcolm Gladwell]'s conclusion — that success is determined largely by luck rather than one's powers of awesomeness — is somehow too banal to waste one's time with. I think those people need to open their eyes and pay a bit more attention to the society we're living in. It's a society that not only seems to believe that the successful are entitled to unlimited monetary rewards for their trouble, but massive and wide-ranging deference."

As to the backlash: Those who want science (should) know where to find it.

2008-12-08-outlie

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Sonntag, 7. Dezember 2008

Evan Williams: What Blogger Should Do [ Ø HCKR • ]

Delicious-looking relatively-low-hanging lemons (iff you have the data; and as Evan notes actually making lemonade is more work than just plucking the fruits).

2008-12-07-blogFruit

Seth Godin: "It takes three years to be an overnight success [...]"

2008-12-07-squidPro

2 comments • BY motz, chris

Freitag, 5. Dezember 2008

I fear this beats that ...

2008-12-05-deconese

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Donnerstag, 4. Dezember 2008

While on the topic of big and important releases, let me relay the great news of beanstalkc 0.1.0 having been released some days ago.

beanstalkd is a no-frills message queue patterned after memcached (and similarly useful, if not even more so); beanstalkc is an elegant, compact (what else would you expect from earl?) client library for Python.

Go check it all out.^* May, henceforth, the queue be with you.

^* ... and note, slightly stunned, that the tutorial doubles as unit test battery.

2008-12-04-funq

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Mittwoch, 3. Dezember 2008

Python 3.0 is here! And everything's better.

In terms of day-to-day Pythoneering, this probably doesn't mean much (yet), as almost every library not among the batteries included still needs to be ported; on the other hand, the release looks so good that I'd be surprised if the bulk of the remaining porting work took longer than a year. Ain't no opportunity for dusting off old code like backwards-incompatible changes ...

Benjamin Peterson: Is it all futile?

Georg Brandl: Things that will Not Change in Python 3000

2008-12-03-3000

Scheduled for today (a long while ago): Check Google Chrome's market share.

Past, I shall oblige.

As earl mentioned in the comments, it seems to oscillate around ~1%. Real Numbers™ from a large general-interest site like ORF.at would be truly interesting ...

In any case, it seems obvious that it's tough to launch a new browser, even if it's pretty darn good and you have the opportunity to promote it on Google's frontpage; not a big surprise that the company is mulling OEM distribution deals for the post-beta phase.

2008-12-03-chromery

1 comments • BY earl