Why Goes Camping
Why the lucky stiff, who I almost convinced to come take a job at EarthLink (that would have been a serious coup!), has a new microframework for web development based on ActiveRecord and coming in at under 4kb! Go Why!
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Why the lucky stiff, who I almost convinced to come take a job at EarthLink (that would have been a serious coup!), has a new microframework for web development based on ActiveRecord and coming in at under 4kb! Go Why!
Have you heard about HR-4569, the so-called Analog Hole bill that is making its way through congress? Proposed by the RIAA and the MPAA, it would basically limit conversion of music and video to digital formats.
From Boing Boing I saw that Ed Felton (of Freedom To Tinker) dove into the commercial content protection mechanism in the bill and found something pretty creepy: basically that the company behind the DRM scheme won't disclose under any circustances how the encoding (called VEIL) works.
Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?
The EFF has a nice way to contact your congressperson about this bill here.
You can read the full text of the bill here.
Google's stonewalling the DOJ, and frankly this is a great example of their 'Do No Evil' philosphy -- because it's a slippery slope between giving up the data that the DOJ is requesting and having a weekly conference call to Hitler to ensure his phones are working A-Okay. In case you don't click that link, it turns out the the CEO of ITT had a weekly call from Hitler DURING THE FREAKING WAR, because, of course, the German ITT subsidiaries were keeping the German phone system online.
Key companies that maintained the German telephone network were ITT subsidiaries at that time, and communications were obviously of strategic importance for Germany; thus Hitler needed to speak with the CEO every week. ITT never stopped running the German phones during the war...
The fact that ITT helped tapped those lines doesn't justify this.
The Robot Co-Op has released their sweet little Rails scaling memchached for ActiveRecord library. Let the railing scaling begin!
Hey, if you ever come accross a link that you think I would dig, please tag it as for:jrosenblum in delicious. I'll see it in my RSS feed :)
Cringley's 2006 Predictions are in, and there are some real doozies:
a supplemental stock offering timed with a 20-to-1 stock split for GOOG (here's hoping); TiVO will be bought by another company; Apple will announce two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too.
He may be off somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, but Cringley has his ear to the ground in Silicon Valley. I'll bet he bats better than .700 this year.
I want to talk about my job, because I'm totally digging it, but since I can't talk about some of the coolest stuff I'm working on, and the rest, while totally fanscinating to me, is probably pretty mundane to the rest of the world, instead I'm going to talk about my new MacBook Pro.
While I won't have it in my hands until February, let me just say, I'm already totally into this machine. It has 1.67Ghz of dual core beauty, which is very nice for my multithreaded Java applications. While many people have denigrated the built in iSight, I think it's something all laptops should have, and my daughter and I are totally psyched to have mid-day video conferences between the home front and the office. And the remote control -- well if you've ever watched a DVD on your laptop while lying in bed, you'll appreciate the remote control. I know I will.
As far as PCMCIA and Firewire 800 -- I don't have any devices in either category, so I don't care that they left them out. And while many people seem to hate the name, I really couldn't care less. That is by far the most trivial detail in this non-trivial computer. All in all, Apple has proven to me yet again that they are an incredible company that is repeatedly able to pull off herculean research, engineering and marketing feats. Nice work, Cupertino!
Well, just one day into the new job and already cool stuff seems to be happening all around. Around 1pm I got pulled into a meeting about a deal we're doing with a really cool site, and then it turns out that we're in the middle of deals not with just one, but with several sites I totally dig. I wish I could talk about it, but it's confidential :) As far as my new team: most were OOTO today, but I'm very psyched about the folks I met.
I'm uncomfortable talking about the details of anything right now, but suffice to say that it's very exciting, and that I will certainly have my work cut out for me.