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August 2008
Is Python More Fun Than Java?
I'm a long time Java developer who has been digging into Python these past couple months. Besides the fact that I expect it to be part of my regular tool belt - it is more fun! Brian M. Clapper shares some good reasons why in his piece "Why is Python more fun than Java?".
In a similar vein, a poster to Hacker News asks What does Ruby have that Python doesn't?
Karl at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Musical Ditty About Twitter
"You're No One If You're Not On Twitter"
Karl at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees
Yes, this rocks: Tragedy (watch your speaker volume clicking that link!).
Karl at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Commodore 64 manual brings back nice memories
Someone is maintaining a Commodore 64 Manual online.
Karl at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Blogs that deal with mental illness
My wife, Richelle, has been encouraging me to talk more about Mom, including here on the blog. I don't talk about her that much because I have yet to find the words that can adequately express my childhood, but I grew up with a mother who wrestled with a condition called "Schizoaffective Disorder". I can go into detail about how the disease affected her reasoning and capacity to deal with day to day life, maybe one day I will, but for now, it probably says much by simply indicating that she was aware she had a problem, she sought out help, and that it was episodic, and that those episodes could be heart rendering.
It's scary talking about such subject matter, many are dealing with such issues in our lives, in our families, and feel forced to conceal such knowledge from others for fear of how it will reflect.
That's why blogs that talk about mental illness are so important. They are few and far between. And some face insurmountable pressure to represent the views of one establishment or another.
I want to mention two blogs that are worthy of your RSS reader:
Furious Seasons: Ran by a journalist, and psych patient Philip Dawdy, Furious Seasons wrestles with the ongoing, terrible state of psychiatric care.
The Trouble With Spikol: Ran by executive editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, Liz Spikol documents her fight against her illness and her takes on all matters that strike her to write.
Of course I'm biased due to the experience of growing up with Mom, but both these blogs stand as the most courageous I have encountered on the Web.
You know you are dealing with these issues in your life somewhere. Subscribe. Read. Relate. Maybe even comment.
Karl at Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Is blogging for your company?
WashingtonPost.com: Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere:
The strategy part is important because a blog may not work for every business. Before starting one, companies have to "make sure that the blog fits in with the existing culture of the company," said Walter J. Carl, a professor of communications at Northeastern University who has studied corporate blogging. He says a blog is a "really bad idea" for companies that are secretive or tend toward non-disclosure.
Karl at Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More Vacation Pics
Karl at Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
The Evolution of George Carlin
WFMU's Beware of the Blog has a great piece on George Carlin's early years, including clips and audio.
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: "The Early George Carlin 1956-1970":
"The musicians I knew had gone through that transition ... I'm listening to Bob Dylan ... and I realize these artists are using their talent to project their feelings and ideas... not just please people ... I was in the wrong place. In 1967 ... I was thirty. I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were forty. They were at war with their kids who were twenty. There was a generation war. I was in the middle of it. I said 'what the fuck am I doing over here?' [The twenty year olds] are the people who will understand me and give me a chance ... I took two years to change and it happened on television ... happened on ... shows like Della Reese, Virgina Graham and Steve Allen," He added, "Virginia Graham was a real shit stirrer. She just loved to get me to talk about smoking pot and Henry Mancini... she got Henry Mancini to cop out to being a pot smoker on TV ... I went on there ... my beard was growing ... my attitudes ... were changing. And I talked about my changes on the panel... a lot."
Karl at Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Why do some students excel while others just get by?
Google Video: "Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding":Karl at Monday, August 25, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
New Emma Pictures
Karl at Sunday, August 24, 2008 | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Funding journalism: the way it is, the way it will be
Mark Glaser asked his audience to imagine "a Future Tense for Newspapers", back in February 2007, inspired by a post by Jeff Jarvis. Among many great responses, I added my own two bits:
The way it is:: Newspapers judge readership size/demographics via subscription numbers and use these numbers to make themselves attractive to classified advertisersThe way it will be: A combination of metrics that combine traffic with online relationships/connectivity statistics will become the new way news sites make themselves attractive to advertisers.
The way it is: Newspapers finance the cost of in-depth journalism via the selling of classifieds.
The way it will be: I have no idea.
This is a problem because newspapers provide the financial, legal, organizational and attention driving infrastructure that acts of journalism largely require.
To lend credence to how much this is a problem, consider the results of Pew's News IQ Quiz (take it - I dare you - it is short and fun!). Do you think a community so ill-informed can drive its government effectively? Try driving with one eye closed (no don't do that!).
And it is getting worst.
But hey, don't listen to me, listen to Google's Eric Schmidt:
Newspaper demand has never been higher. The problem is revenues have never been lower. So people are reading the newspaper they're just not reading it in a way where the newspapers can make money on it. This is a shared problem. We have to solve it. There's no obviously good solution right now."
As indicated by Bethany Anderson in a conversation Leonard Witt:
strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism - nor has it ever, really.
Advertising and Classifieds subsidized journalism as a side-effect - not directly.
So I tend to disagree with Leonard Witt when he says that "if advertising and journalism are forever linked, we will not have a problem."
Advertising never directly paid for journalism. Acts of journalism bolstered the reputations and influence of newspapers, that drew demographics, that advertisers wanted to reach. It was the audience that advertisers were paying for.
Attention driving influence is flowing elsewhere now. Like Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter now).
Read Jack Shafer in "What's Really Killing Newspapers":
You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide. As falling circulation indicates, fewer do. And the newspaper isn't the only media hub suffering in the new era. Radio, which once served a similar social role with its menu of music, news, and talk, is plummeting.
One of the more interesting research exercises in all this is examining how we got here.
Christopher Anderson is doing a terrific job of that working on his dissertation, "Networking the News: Work, Knowledge and Occupational Authority in the New Metropolitan Journalism" in the Philadelphia area.
His latest posts (from oldest to newest) "Paying For Reporting, Paying For Conversation ... a Thought Experiment.", "Adding Nuance to the Journalist / Blogger Relationship", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: By the Numbers", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: Beyond the Numbers" are must reads.
I say this as a former employee of Philadelphia Newspapers and Knight Ridder.
So if you are interested in the topic, and want to read the thoughts of a non-insider who is doing considerable research in the trenches, go forth and read.
Karl at Friday, August 22, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nice tutorial: "How To: Live the Cloud Life"
Paul Stamatiou: How To: Live the Cloud Life.
Karl at Friday, August 22, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What it takes - it's not praise and neither is it born-with talent
Fellow Comcaster Arpit Mathur: shared some thoughts about 37Signal's piece "Don't be so quick to embrace your own ignorance" and reflects on confidence in the workplace.
This made me reflect on a set of material I've read over the past few months on what it takes to be "a success" (we'll skip that word's definition for now). Much of these pieces apply to the workplace, our sense of self, our belief in what is possible, with more than a few drops of advice for parents in how to inspire the right mindset in those we love.
Fortune: What it takes to be great: The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
NYTimes: If You're Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow : Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they're ever going to have approach life with what she calls a "fixed mind-set." Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a "growth mind-set." Guess which ones prove to be most innovative over time.
Stanford Magazine: The Effort Effect : Dweck found that people who believe personality can change were more likely than others to bring up concerns and deal with problems in a constructive way. Dweck thinks a fixed mind-set fosters a categorical, all-or-nothing view of people's qualities; this view tends to make you ignore festering problems or, at the other extreme, give up on a relationship at the first sign of trouble. (The growth mind-set, though, can be taken too far if someone stays in an abusive relationship hoping her partner will change; as always, the person has to want to change.)
Malcolm Gladwell: The Talent Myth: On Enron: They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.
NYMag.com: How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise.: Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
Harvard Business Publishing: Scott Berkun: How to Win by Studying Culture: An Interview with Grant McCracken: The point is not to dismantle ideas unless they stand in the way of what the new idea is. We don't want to forget what it is we know, the knowledge we have build up of our markets and our industries over many years of expensive trial and error.
James Carr: How To Not Fit In On A Development Team: Good advice on being part of any team.
Karl at Thursday, August 21, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Terrific 5 minute video: How to buy a car
Karl at Tuesday, August 19, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Plastic packaging MADNESS
Karl at Tuesday, August 19, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dare Obasanjo: "Don't fight the Web, embrace it"
A must read: Dare Obasanjo: Explaining REST to Damien Katz:
There are other practical things to be mindful of as well to ensure that your service is being a good participant in the Web ecosystem. These include using GET instead of POST when retrieving a resource and properly utilizing the caching related headers as needed (If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, Cache-Control), learning to utilize HTTP status codes correctly (i.e. errors shouldn't return HTTP 200 OK), keeping your design stateless to enable it to scale more cheaply and so on. The increased costs, scalability concerns and complexity that developers face when they ignore these principles is captured in blog posts and articles all over the Web such as Session State is Evil and Cache SOAP services on the client side. You don't have to look hard to find them. What most developers don't realize is that the problems they are facing are because they aren't keeping RESTful principles in mind.
Karl at Sunday, August 17, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Great intro to Getting Things Done with Emacs and org-mode
Sacha Chua: Emacs: Getting Things Done with Org - Basic.
Karl at Sunday, August 17, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
NYTimes on Jon Stewart
NYTimes: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?:
Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it's been "The Daily Show" that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.For that matter, the Comedy Central program -- which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh -- has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. "The Daily Show" resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart's frequent exclamation "Are you insane?!" seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-"Catch-22" reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace -- an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
Karl at Sunday, August 17, 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
SEO Advice Not Followed Often Enough
Aaron Wall: Emotionally Engage or Enrage:
Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site, but when you get into the big fields where people are deeply passionate or interested links are needed to win. And those links are often a reflection of our emotions.When you look at your site do you find anything that is emotionally engaging? enraging?
As the web gets more efficient and search engines gather more data, those who evoke emotional responses will keep gaining marketshare while bland webmasters fall quietly into the abyss.
If you aren't linked to by others, you have no chance of being seen or heard.
Of course, there is a chicken and the egg here.
And as Aaron Wall suggests, it pushes us to post content that shouts out to be heard.
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
"Measure, don't guess"
java.net: Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine:
While I'm all for performance planning, I'm dead set against premature optimizations. When is a plan a plan, and when is it premature? I guess it's a little like the difference between art and porn: You'll know it when you see it.
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Early education, dance and music options for Emma
I'm long overdue to post new photos of Emma, but I really should start to post videos because pictures can't capture the singing, dancing wonder that is Emma Rose. Wow.
Last night she was dancing to Funky Town, while singing and and playing her Ukulele (her guitar).
I kid you not/
We're looking into different classes for her to have some fun at.
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Want to introduce someone to Doctor Who?
io9 has a terrific guide: "Doctor Who: How To Discover Classic Doctor Who In 3 Easy Steps".
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 8, 1996 was "Black Thursday"
To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site's background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold's thoughts on the historic day.
It's interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today's context. I mean - Yahoo! turned its home page black!
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nice tutorial on httplib2 and BeautifulSoup
An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Clinton Campaign - Downed by lack of teamwork and massive egos
It always comes down to teamwork - or lack of it.
The Atlantic has published an eye opening piece that is a must read.
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Brain Workshop - a memory and IQ booster game
Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game - fun and challenging.
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Practical threaded programming with Python
IBM developerWorks: Practical threaded programming with Python
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Neil Diamond in the New York Times
Mom loved Neil Diamond and on some level, his music remains a part of my life.
NYTimes: Backstage With Neil Diamond, the Marathon Man of Pop
"I never expected that I would be doing this for as long as I've been doing it," he said after his sold-out show at the XL Center here on Thursday, having changed out of his black silk stage costume and into jeans and a loose-fitting cotton shirt, his eyes hidden behind small round glasses."So looking back and seeing that it's been over 40 years since the first hits makes you think, 'Is there a time that you stop?' " he continued. "But I don't think I'm ever going to stop. It's the only challenge I have left in my life."
Karl at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Our Response to Paris Hilton's Response to McCain Shows Our Biases
Paris Hilton responded, via a video of her own, to John McCain's Celebrity advertisement.
How you see her video is completely based upon your pre-existing bias.
Want proof?
If you are liberal you see it as an endorsement of Obama's plan and as a smack down on McCain:
Open Left: Why Obama's Drilling Compromise Makes Some Sense
Talk Left: Paris Hilton Strikes Back
reddit: Paris Hilton Responds to the McCain Ad = McCain gets served.
If you are conservative, you see it as an endorsement of McCain's plan and as a smack down on Obama:
Althouse: Paris Hilton does a pro-McCain ad!
Either Paris Hilton is a genius, or we are so wrapped up in our own points of view that we look for ANYTHING to reinforce it.
Maybe both is true. But that's a stretch right? Right?!?!?!
Beyond that, there is literally two takes on reality playing out over the video. And there are no links to opposing points of view - it is as if the opposing view point doesn't even exist.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Congrats
Congrats to Jeneane Sessum on her four years quit from smoking. Click for her 100 reasons to quit smoking.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Philly Blogger Meetup in 1 Week!
I've taken on as organizer of the Philly Blogger Meetup and we will be gathering in one week at The Memphis Taproom. I'm looking forward to hanging out with fellow bloggers and sharing a few drinks.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
Do you remember when this was shared on the Net? It's worth a re-read. And some time to reflect. When doing research into my spondylolisthesis, I discovered that John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, is dealing with it as well.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sun's default HTTP classes have come a long way, but...
Issuing POSTs is still way too cumbersome in comparison to Apache's HttpClient.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A nice gallery application
SimpleViewer looks easy to use and I'm spotting it on a number of photo blogger sites.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spring 2.5 Brings New Features to Spring MVC
InfoQ: Spring 2.5: New Features in Spring MVC: As you can see there is minimal XML, no URI paths embedded in annotations, no explicit view names, the request handling method consists of a single line, the method signature matches precisely what we need, and additional request handling methods can be easily added. All of these benefits come without the need for a base class and without XML - at least none directly attributable to this controller.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Migrating to Movable Type's Standard Templates
I've been behind the curve in adding new features and functionality to this blog for a while, so I'm migrating paradox1x.org to a set of SixApart provided templates and rebuilding my look and feel. You can see it taking place here. This will include a change in link structure. To handle that, a query into Movable Type's mt_entry table will provide me with the URL patterns to add to .htaccess for redirection.
Karl at Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The latest "I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC" - Classic
Karl at Friday, August 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Star Wars, Alpacas, YouTube
via geekadelphia
Karl at Friday, August 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Star Blazers, electronica, and YouTube
Karl at Friday, August 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Free book on Hyperlinks and their effects on society and business
This looks like a must read: The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age.
Two interesting chapters right off the bat:
Seth Finkelstein's concise description of PageRank and some of the interesting societal issues it raises: Google, Links, and Popularity versus Authority
David Weinberger's passionate arguments and assertions that links are good: The Morality of Links
Karl at Friday, August 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
