Blogs

I wouldn't know Joshua Gross from Adam but I really though what The Next Web did the other day by ripping of a story of his and then only belatedly adding attribution was a pretty sleazy move.

Not to mention the way the Zee Kane (CEO of TNW) responded both on twitter and on the subsequent hacker news thread. A text book example of how not to run your company and a total disaster from a PR point of view. And up to that point I liked the guy enough to contribute a huge article to TNW for zero compensation.

Best practice has it that when you move content around for whatever good reasons you have that you should do it using a 301 redirect.

If you've done this in the past and it looks like it works the way you intended then good for you.

What you probably didn't realize is that browsers cache 301 redirects agressively and there is nothing short of a complete cache wipe by the user that you can do to re-vive a url that has been redirected. Moved permanently indeed! Maybe that should read 'Moved eternally'!

In the early days, even if the fruits of the labour of programmers could be used for destruction (for instance, to compute the trajectory of a missile) the work itself was as far as I can see always creative.

Codebreaking, a long time programmer pastime is all about reading or at least being able to read, and so not about destruction. Even if it may appear that way on the surface, especially with the word 'breaking' in there.

For quite a few years this situation persisted, programmers made stuff and the world used it.

And then something changed.

An industry is dying.

That's should be sad thing but this time around it is actually a good thing.

That industry is the media industry, the companies that got insanely wealthy by playing both ends - their consumers and the providers of their merchandise, the artists they pretend to represent - against the middle.

Most of sales is concentrated on getting to 'yes', in fact there is a book with that exact title and many more that aim to achieve the same goal.

And I used to think that was all there was to it. Sure, I would test my code but typically that was limited to testing whether expected input produced expected output.

Since about a year I've become a convert in the school of testing. Test, test, test. Only after all the edge cases have been tried and code coverage is as high as I can get it without contortions I'll say that code actually works.

It could easily be the title of a Peter Greenaway movie.

When you submit a sample for genetic analysis you are not just making a decision for yourself.

You are also making a decision for all of your children, their offspring *and* all of your ancestors, your brothers and your sisters and their offspring.

In fact, you're making a decision for everybody that is a blood relative.

I've been wondering for a long time what exactly the added value of Google+ is to Google, and why it is that they are pushing it as hard as they do. After all Google has tried 'social' before and many voices have been raised effectively saying that Google should concentrate on their core business, search and leave social to others. But what if they had no choice? What if they actually needed social, and needed it badly?

This article outlines a hypothetical way in which Google+ could be of major strategic value for Google in its core business, search.

Ingredients:

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C.

The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful.

How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do.