Worth reading: Simon Willison’s “Things I learned at EuroOSCON.” Bits that I found alternately interesting or alarming:
“SVK … lets you mirror from, branch and commit patches back to Subversion, CVS, Perforce and more”
“If a worm locked your drive with a random password, it would be illegal under the DMCA to recover your files”
“PHP 6 (out next year) will probably have namespaces”
“The European broadcast flag proposals are even nastier than the US ones”
I find Rob Curley interesting for many reasons:
Until recently, he worked as director of New Media and Convergence for The World Company of Lawrence, Kansas, which sounds kind of weird and obscure if you don’t know that LJworld.com is possibly the most award-winningest, cutting-edge local news site in existence.
The World Company and its web projects gave birth to Django.
He is at heart a newspaper guy. Two or three careers ago I was a newspaper guy too (though the paper was weekly rather than daily).
My old scam-and-hoax search engine project, Purportal.com, grew out of a longstanding morbid fascination with the variegated forms of fraud, especially those that have flourished in email and on the web. The other day I came across a form letter I used to send in response to “419” gambits, also known as “advance free fraud.” Excerpt:
The fund you speak of, in the South African Mining Corporation, is of great interest to me since my recently deposed brother-in-law, erstwhile shoeshine boy to the one-time International pie-eating champion’s third cousin twice removed by marriage…
John Nack of Adobe posted yesterday about Aperture :
As Apple is the first to say, Aperture is not designed to be a Photoshop competitor… if you’re looking to do something as simple as make a selection and sharpen someone’s eyes, you’re out of luck.
…however, I’d be blowing smoke not to acknowledge that Aperture does compete with Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. The capabilities of Photoshop (of which Bridge and ACR are a part) are vast, so there’s bound to be some overlap, and Aperture joins a long list of products (Capture One, RawShooter Essentials, Nikon Capture, Canon Digital Photo Pro, etc.) that also offer raw browsing and editing. Bridge and ACR aim to provide the best possible workflow in conjunction with Photoshop, but you’re free to mix and match.
The creator of Rails has a nice aphorism in his blog today about the ever-elusive general-purpose CMS:
The more expensive it is to create fresh software, the more appealing the mirage of generalization will appear.
Of course, many religious wars in software architecture (including the one between Rails and J2EE) seem to boil down to differing attitudes toward generalization, so maybe the apparent wisdom here is itself a mirage. But it rings true for me.
