Only one raptor

I am very glad I flew out to Cambridge to attend the xkcd meetup. Very cool/geeky people doing cool/geeky things.

Also, there were so many hot nerdy babes, I felt just like Bret.

The bomb

Can reading weblogs make you a small fortune? It might have in Panic's case.

Rands in Repose, September 3, 2004:

My impression is that while there are great prototyping tools for web applications, we still haven’t seen “the bomb” in terms of great web application development environment. I’m talking about a soup to nuts product where I’m not jumping between Terminal, BBEdit, and any number of browsers just to see if my primal application works on my development machine.

To the people who have asked me over IM to give them product ideas, I instead give you this advice: read people's weblogs and resolve their complaints.

Baby, we got to go to the library!

Ladies, please stop picking on the helpless retarded woman. It's not nice.

Idiotic to a degree

Paul Graham has another of those articles that make you go, "Yes! Yes! Of course!" as you read the thing. Check it out.

In a related note, why do they spend all that time teaching you how to take a nap in kindergarten, when that sort of behavior will just get you fired in the working world?

Psylly

Jef Raskin on obstinateness:

As far as I know, the CEO never learned how better user interfaces could add to the bottom line. On the day I resigned, I made a last attempt to be helpful, suggesting that the CEO use her full name, "Patti. Hart," in her email address, because the form she was using had an unfortunate pronunciation. The reply said that my note would not be passed on because Ms. Hart was accepting "revenue generating messages only." Until she left to become CEO of ExciteAtHome last month, she still used her old "phart" email. After all, it's just an interface issue.

Quote of the day

"You know something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush."
--Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Richardson

Bugs aren't tricks, they're illusions

Steven Frank has a fun article about the similarities between bug-hunting and figuring out how magic tricks work.

I think there are two different types of magic tricks to decipher:

1. The "psychological" trick. This is possibly the lamest type of all. These tricks usually depend on some legalese, i.e. "Now, ma'am, have we ever met before?" "No (but your assistant talked with me in detail before the show)." These tricks make you feel sorry you spent the mental effort.

2. The "physical" trick. Most magic tricks fall under this category. These can range from incredible demonstrations of sleight-of-hand, to incredibly complicated applications of chemistry and physics. These are really satisfying to figure out.

I leave it up to you to extend Steven's analogy given these categories.

I also liked Isaiah's comment:

My personal faves are when the bugs behave differently in the debugger than they do running in the stand-alone app.

It's like Tivo-ing a magician only to find that when you play it back in slow-mo that the elephant doesn't even disappear after the curtain is pulled back.

Falco

David Letterman on Britney Spears' performance on the 2007 MTV Video Awards:

"General Petraeus thought it went pretty well."

Feeling sorry for myself

What do other people do when their Saturday night date blows them off?

Personally, I find I get drunk and then read old Bugtraq archives. But that's just me.

Now this ruling is in the hands of a higher power

About damn time.

Coordination

Raymond Chen, genius programmer blogger from Microsoft, has an awesome article on why you shouldn't create new processes to solve coordination problems.

Unfortunately, the corporate world has been making this mistake for 20+ years. Not only do they continue to make this mistake, but they also give it new acronyn names like ISO 9001 and CMMI. Even worse, some customers will refuse to do business with you if you decide not to hobble yourself with these acronyms.

Provocation

Josh Marshall getting snarky about casus belli:

For the moment, however, my attention is fixed on one of those 'hints', Reuel Marc Gerecht's piece in the current Newsweek, in which he argues that war with Iran is most likely to come not because of Bush-Cheney warmongering or a breakdown in negotiations but rather "an Iranian provocation."

It is worth stepping back for a moment to savor this claim in its full flavor. Clearly, this must be the kind of 'provocation' comparatively weak states again and again through history seem to make against extremely powerful states -- just before the latter provides a thorough beating to the former. One can of course think of various examples over the decades and centuries.

Blue, part 2

The one positive side to the debacle is that very few people actually witnessed it.

Blue

Hmm, I wonder if something happened yesterday....

But does he wear a flight suit?

Instaputz wisely says:

Elliot Spitzer was editor of the Harvard Law Review, helped take down the Gambino family, and was an ass-kicking AG.

Someone who for 7 years has shilled for a mama's boy who's a make-believe rancher and plays dress up fighter jock might not want to start throwing around the word "phony."