Quotations
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About 80 per cent of public sector data mentions a place. Making Ordnance Survey data more freely available will encourage more effective exploitation of public data by businesses, individuals and community organisations.
— Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.
We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.
How fast do they go? Like everything else, camels aren't what they were. Do not be encouraged by the accounts of the great desert travellers. They were better men than us, and were probably lying anyway, and they were riding camels which were used to going for many days at full pelt over the most hellish land and then charging into artillery fire at the end. The wrecks you get in the modern camel markets of Omdurman and Cairo are degenerate great-great-great-great-grandchildren of them and their forebears would be desperately ashamed of them.
— Travelling with Camels, by Charles Foster
A set of geodata, or a map, is libre only if somebody can give you a cake with that map on top, as a present.
One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor's advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It's the retail version of the doomsday machine.
It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There's a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan's Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem natural, and Closure even uses Acme, the Dojo CSS selector engine.
If you are demanding registration before checkout, you need to cease this practice immediately. It is costing you a fortune.
I loathe [hardware load balancers]. They’re expensive, restrictive, slow, and generally cause you a lot more pain and suffering than they’re worth. At my last job, one of my projects was to convert most of one of our existing clusters from a load-balancing appliance to use keepalived. Why would we do this? Because the $100k worth of appliance wasn’t capable of doing the job that $15k worth of commodity hardware and an installation of keepalived were handling with ease.
HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym "IRL" or the expanded phrase "In Real Life." It used to be the thing we'd say when we meant "not on the internet", and I'm glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.
Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post's purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise "99 Answers to Your Problem That We're Telling You You're Having". Yeah. I'd like to get back to that here.
You count the "value" that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can't now because they can't compete with free. But you don't count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It's the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of "dumping" and ruining the market for competing software. That's true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.
With ubiquitous mobile broadband not far over the horizon, a hyper-connected society might also turn out to be a hyper-indignant one.
Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. [...] The upgrade market for average PC owners is dead. We killed it.
Whenever you build a security system that relies on detection and identification, you invite the bad guys to subvert the system so it detects and identifies someone else. [...] Build a detection system, and the bad guys try to frame someone else. Build a detection system to detect framing, and the bad guys try to frame someone else framing someone else. Build a detection system to detect framing of framing, and well, there's no end, really.
This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.
I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreater - but what was in front of our open door - was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said "Please knock." So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our "costumes" and tell us we were "such cute trick or treaters!" One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.
When I worked at Amazon.com we had a deeply-ingrained hatred for all of the SQL databases in our systems. Now, we knew perfectly well how to scale them through partitioning and other means. But making them highly available was another matter. Replication and failover give you basic reliability, but it's very limited and inflexible compared to a real distributed datastore with master-master replication, partition tolerance, consensus and/or eventual consistency, or other availability-oriented features.
Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don't get it. They're still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they're all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn't. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It's not about calling attention to the technology. It's about making the technology invisible.
Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
Ask browser users, and they'll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can't upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won't let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they'll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6. Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades.
In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.
Years ago, Alex Russell told me that Django ought to be collecting CLAs. I said "yeah, whatever" and ignored him. And thus have spent more than a year gathering CLAs to get DSF's paperwork in order. Sigh.
There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It's just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn't help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development.
Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.
— Tim Bray
We experimented with different async DB approaches, but settled on synchronous at FriendFeed because generally if our DB queries were backlogging our requests, our backends couldn't scale to the load anyway. Things that were slow enough were abstracted to separate backend services which we fetched asynchronously via the async HTTP module.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.
We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission.
— Harry Schoell, CEO of Cyclone
For those who haven't heard the story the details were pulled from a Christian dating site db.singles.org which had a query parameter injection vulnerability. The vulnerability allowed you to navigate to a person's profile by entering the user id and skipping authentication. Once you got there the change password form had the passwords in plain text. Someone wrote a scraper and now the entire database is on Mediafire and contains thousands of email/password combinations.