Magic tricks. Steven Frank explains how bugs are like magic, which besides being a good approximation, also makes me feel so much better. My code, not a piece of crap anymore, but something of Houdinic proportions. DailyWTF, ever so useful, illustrates by example what Steven is talking about.
Me neither. I couldn’t have said it better, so I’ll just summarize the main points of Elinor Mills’ “Want to ‘converse’ with advertisers? Me neither”:
I can’t help but view conversational marketing as a thinly veiled attempt by the ad industry to insinuate itself into the popular social media craze. Calling it a “conversation” makes it sound benign and implies that it is consensual.
And:
The most genuine conversation occurs when it is started by the consumer/reader or the blogger. A blog post about a product or company that elicits a response from the company is very effective, said Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart.
Read the article and have fun spotting the irony. (What is it about journalists and elephant blindness?)
Erlang for dummies. Nice introduction to Erlang, if you ever hope of reading other people’s Erlang code. This post won’t teach you what’s good about Erlang, but help you follow when other people talk about it via examples.
I’m personally not in the Erlang camp, but I like the source of influence, and thinking of going artistic on some of its process handling capabilities.
Public service announcement. Judging by the headers, I think someone at Google left an SMTP server wide open. Past couple of days, spammers were sending a gazillion e-mails masquerading as labnotes.org, and it all seems to be routing through Google, even though there is no such labnotes.org account. Definitely not coming from my machine. Apologies in advance if you’re on the receiving end.
Innovate, don’t litigate. I should change that to ‘innovate or bust’. SCO is going to the cleaners.
Above, I sympathize with the generation that will have to clean up this mess.