From John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s talk on making money by being authentically enthusiastic:
- Give away more stuff than you think you should, and make it easy for people to get.
- Focus on diverse secondary revenue streams, and always have your eyes open for new and replacement ones.
- Don’t do stuff that seems profitable, but potentially messes up the reason people like you.
Stephen Eley has done something very clever on the rSpec list, it begins thus:
should be || should_not be: that is the expectation:And on from there, to a satisfying conclusion.
Whether 'tis nobler in the parser to interpret
The outputs and side effects of outrageous duck typing,
Or to inherit against a sea of matchers
And by declaration extend them?
Fred Polgardy has just released a tasty bit of code that will allow JavaScript to access Rails named routes in a very straightforward way.
Check out his javascript_named_routes Rails plugin.
The best write-up in my memory of how agile processes fit into projects hackers build.
I signed a petition asking my legislators not to approve a bailout. I got a response from Senator Obama similar to the one quoted elsewhere.
Dear Senator Obama:
I contacted you earlier writing against the bailout, and received your reply.
Given your commitment to a bailout, I'm glad you're looking for ways to improve matters. But you are planning to remove thousands of dollars from my pocket, either as taxes or as devaluation of the dollar, to pay for mistakes made by private citizens.
You do not have my consent to do this. It is stealing from me.
Merely waving your hands and saying "liquidity" and "worsening downturn" is not enough explanation for why you're planning to take money from me. You owe us better than that.
Furthermore, you point to a need to rescue the economy. Have you considered the effects of inflation on the economy? Talking about bailing out mortgages without any discussion of the inflation this will create makes it look like you are only interested in protecting the rich. I'm sure you don't want that.
Another topic that isn't being discussed: is it the right answer to go on creating a socialist regime in the US? Buying up companies and personal loans? This isn't the America I grew up in. It sounds more like China. Are you for or against this approach?
The closest you came to answering my call to vote against a bailout plan was "I agree that urgent and decisive action is necessary during this time of economic turmoil". Please come back with a better answer for your actions than that.
Two members of our family were suffering new tooth-decay problems, and my wife Nicole had been reading about a dentist who researched the profound difference in health between people following traditional diets versus Western diets.
Nicole decided to take the plunge and learn how to feed us a traditional diet. We have removed refined flour and sugar from our diet, and added lots of whole, organic, delicious vegetables, milk products (unpasteurized, like God—and Louis Pasteur!—intended), honey, and meat. There are lots of changes she's making as she learns, which I'll also share over time, but she's posting interesting articles on her traditional-food blog.
This is incredible food, and our health is improving dramatically as we restore the levels of nutrition available to our bodies from the red zone to which modern Americans are accustomed, into normal ranges so our bodies have something to work with. Dental health, skin health, energy, mental function, sleep patterns, emotional health, you name it...every one of us is doing well and still improving rapidly.
I was generously offered some chai at work this morning. I took a few ounces. It was delicious, but I noticed an immediate and all-too-familiar feeling of weakening. I used to regard this as normal, but now I realize that I would feel this whenever I ate or drank anything with refined flour or sugar. As long as I stay clear of sugar and flour, I don't crave it, and this kind of experience is quite the reinforcement of my desire to stay away.
So my diet is very different now. This may sound inconvenient, and sometimes it is. But don't cry for me—I'm eating delicious homemade butter, homemade ice cream (sweetened with dehydrated cane juice and/or honey), rich Indian dishes...
Pasteurization was developed for wine. On hearing that pasteurization was to be used on milk, Pasteur is reported to have said, "What are they doing to my wonderful food?"
Steve McConnell illustrated an article about software process with these images. I'm interested in this effort—what is a success, and what could be improved?
I love it when someone can give me a sound way to quantify wiggly and abstract things. Bruce Schneier wrote this about Security ROI:
…a company should implement only security countermeasures that affect its bottom line positively. It shouldn't spend more on a security problem than the problem is worth. Conversely, it shouldn't ignore problems that are costing it money when there are cheaper mitigation alternatives. A smart company needs to approach security as it would any other business decision: costs versus benefits.
The classic methodology is called annualized loss expectancy (ALE), and it's straightforward. Calculate the cost of a security incident in both tangibles like time and money, and intangibles like reputation and competitive advantage. Multiply that by the chance the incident will occur in a year. That tells you how much you should spend to mitigate the risk. So, for example, if your store has a 10 percent chance of getting robbed and the cost of being robbed is $10,000, then you should spend $1,000 a year on security. Spend more than that, and you're wasting money. Spend less than that, and you're also wasting money.
Of course, that $1,000 has to reduce the chance of being robbed to zero in order to be cost-effective. If a security measure cuts the chance of robbery by 40 percent -- to 6 percent a year -- then you should spend no more than $400 on it. If another security measure reduces it by 80 percent, it's worth $800. And if two security measures both reduce the chance of being robbed by 50 percent and one costs $300 and the other $700, the first one is worth it and the second isn't.
I've decided to abandon the idea of focusing this blog on a narrow set of topics. I have very wide-ranging interests and strengths, and I don't think anybody's benefiting from the slow trickle of weak ideas that's left when I restrict this blog to agile + Ruby. I may even wind up posting more frequently on those topics.
You may like this, you might not, but I wanted to give any subscribers fair warning.
