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Author Archives: David Megginson
My biggest problem with Wikipedia
Summary: You can’t partition a web site’s users into discrete groups by language. I don’t worry much about Wikipedia’s objectivity or reliability — no sources (especially not newspapers or Britannica) are objective or reliable, and at least Wikipedia preserves its … Continue reading
Tagged architecture, tips, web
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Maybe the women are right
Summary: Perhaps the women who don’t choose computer programming are making a good choice, especially with the deteriorating working conditions, stagnant or falling salaries, and offshoring. Recently, we’ve had a few postings about women in computing (or the lack thereof) … Continue reading
The lawyers …
Lawyers force companies to write page after page of end-user license agreements (“clause xix: The said user hereby indemnifies ACME Widgets against any harm caused to his/her pregnancy by use of this spreadsheet”) and disclaimers (“ACME Widgets does not intend … Continue reading
Tagged business, rights
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XML 2007 Call for Participation (closes 31 August)
The Call for Participation in XML 2007, the world’s largest and longest-running markup conference, is now open until Friday 31 August: http://2007.xmlconference.org/public/cfp/4 The conference runs from Monday 3 December to Wednesday 5 December 2007, and includes a keynote by Jason … Continue reading
Tagged conferences
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REST, the Lost Update Problem, and the Sneakernet Test
Dare Obasanjo is giving a bit of pushback on the Atom Publishing Protocol, but the part that caught my attention was the section on the Lost Update Problem. This doesn’t have to do with REST per se as much as … Continue reading
Tagged architecture, tips, web
11 Comments
Godwin's law goes mainstream
Godwin’s Law has finally left the geekier corners of the net and gone mainstream: political opponents and the press are lambasting Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May for an immature and totally gratuitous Nazi reference. According to Godwin’s law, that … Continue reading
Country codes: a spreadsheet-sharing experiment
I’ve just uploaded a spreadsheet of country codes (plain HTML view) to Google documents and spreadsheets. The spreadsheet includes ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, alpha-3, and numeric codes together with FIPS 10-4 codes, and the country names as provided in each spec. … Continue reading
Ruby on Rails pain at Twitter
Josh Kenzer has posted an interview with Alex Payne, a developer for Twitter, which is one of (if not the) biggest Ruby on Rails-based web apps. A couple of years ago, when I was getting tired of working within the … Continue reading
Tagged programming
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Anonymity and freedom
Elliotte Rusty Harold is right that anonymity goes together with freedom, and I was happy to read his excellent posting How to Blog Anonymously. Rusty distinguishes three different kinds of anonymity — roughly “I don’t want to be embarrassed”, “I … Continue reading
Open Data matters more than Open Source
Dare Obasanjo just put up a posting with the title Open Source is Dead. Dare does happen to be a Microsoft employee, but his posting is none of the standard anti-Linux/OpenOffice/Apache/Firefox FUD. Instead, he voices a question that’s been floating … Continue reading
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