Tuesday, 29th October 2002
ebook rants
Dorothea has posted two more excellent rants on the subject of ebooks, archiving and the importance of a single standard for master files (as opposed to a single standard for end user files which is a lot less important).
[... 46 words]Comment spam and game theory
Mark Pilgrim has posted another of his signature in depth explanations, this time concerning the recent worries over blog comment spam. He points out that all of the proposed solutions are Club solutions, not Lojack solutions, meaning they directly help those who implement them, possibly at the expense of others who do not
. He then ties this in to game theory and the classic Prioner’s Dilemma problem.
Validator warning
As Scott Andrew has noted, the W3C’s beta validator is now returning the following warning as part of it’s XML output:
[... 85 words]Cashets
Roll on the micropayment revolution! Cashets are designed specifically for the small purchases—$1 (or less)—that you ordinarily can’t make on the Internet because sellers have a minimum
. The smallest amount you can charge using the system is 2 cents, of which 1 cent will go to Cashets and 1 cent will go to you, the seller. The 1 cent is a flat rate for sales up the a dollar, then it’s 2 cents for sales up to 2 dollars and so on up the maxiumum charge of 5 dollars. The company is owned by MasterCard founder Michael Phillips and two unnamed partners who are “computer professionals”. The site is atrocious (the text on the front page is a big gif with no alt text ffs) but the business model looks like it could just be the thing small-to-medium web sites have been waiting for.
Software Engineering practises for PHP
Scott Johnson’s presentation on Software Engineering Practices for Large Scale PHP Projects is fantastic—lots of excellent practical advice for professional development with PHP. It’s a shame the presentation slides require Internet Explorer (due to being exported from Power Point) but it was more than worth firing up IE to view them.
[... 54 words]PHP at Yahoo
Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! (via Jeremy Zawodny) looks like it was a great presentation. The slides include the reasons PHP was chosen over ASP, ColdFusion, JSP and Perl and has some interesting details on the history of Yahoo’s server side technologies. Jeremy has extensive coverage of PHPcon so be sure to flick through some of his recent entries while you are there.
[... 76 words]