Sean’s Mental Walkabout

NBC Edits SNL Bailout Skit Following Legal Concerns Over “People Who Should Be Shot” Chyron
Interesting. This is one of the reasons you should be watching SNL live, because the archives have this editted out. Revisionist history wins the day.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Amazon.com: Sports Night: The Complete Series 10th Anniversary Edition: Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Thomas Schlamme: Movies & TV
If you haven’t seen this show, you are missing out big time. Buy this and correct it.

freshmeat.net: Project details for ProcessMaker OSS
ProcessMaker is workflow and business process management software that allows small to medium-sized organizations to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across various systems including finance, HR, and operations. An entirely Web-based, AJAX-enabled application built on the popular open source WAMP/LAMP stacks, it includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and send alerts. A full service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web Services interface allows the software to directly connect with popular business intelligence, content management, and enterprise resource planning systems.

Popularity: 2% [?]

tecosystems » Define “Contributions”
“If Novell and Red Hat are then the better plumber, to beat the housing analogy to death, Canonical, to me, is the better designer/architect. And much like I don’t want a house without running water, I’d prefer one that’s designed to be livable. It takes all kinds, as they say. “

openmeetings - Google Code
This looks seriously interesting. I’m going to have to see what it takes to get something like this set up.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been thinking about a lot of things in terms of debt recently, and the world looks a bit different if you do that. Debt is borrowing against the future, be that in time, money, energy, health, etc. Debt is what you get when you take short cuts, as you are borrowing from the future.

When your debt is money, it’s somewhat easy to understand. You take money from the future you which you have to pay back at some point. It’s a little harder to understand in areas that aren’t money.

If you create a new piece of code you are creating both value and debt. Debt is created by taking shortcuts, as the software will need to be reworked to reasonably extend it in the future. You take a short cut now to pay for it later, with interest. Every future feature will take longer until you pay back your debt. Refactoring is really all about paying down debt in a responsible way in software.

Most of the time the right approach is to pay off your debt. The other option is bankruptcy (which we are seeing a lot of this week in the financial world). Software bankruptcy is throwing the whole thing out and starting from scratch.

When I started thinking about software development in terms of debt in the last few weeks, lots of things started to make a lot more sense. Shortcuts are debt. Inconsistent interfaces are debt. Inconsistent coding style is debt. Bad or wrong abstractions are debt. Missing documentation is debt. Confusing APIs are debt. If you want a project to move forward more productively you need to eliminate some of your debt, as it’s what slows people down (green field code is easy, brownfield is hard).

I’d love to hear about other concepts of debt, and what debt looks like in other media besides software. Please post comments if you are so inclined.

Popularity: 12% [?]

FUD Forum
NYLUG just lit this with the mailman bridge for their main mailing list. Apparently it was very clean to integrate. I’m a little concerned with the security implications of php code that hasn’t been updated in a year. If any MHVLUGers want to try setting this up, let me know, as I think it would make a nice addition to mhvlug services.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog
Very nifty, might have to buy one of these shirts

Schneier on Security: The DNS Vulnerability
If you only read one article on the DNS issue, this is probably the one to read.

Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity
thank god this pendulum is finally swinging back in this direction.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Done, and Gets Things Smart
If you work in tech, read this, and be humbled a bit.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve been listening to The World is Flat on audio book, as part of my summer run through of popular non fiction of the last couple of years. One phrase really struck me on the way home, which was the assessment by Brian Behlendorf that

“software is lettuce, not gold”

Software is both a commodity and perishable if not consumed in a timely manner. For the doubters out there, check out the ranks of abandoned software on sourceforge.net some time. My proud collection of shirts from software companies that don’t exist any more is a less compelling, though more close to home, reminder of that fact.

Popularity: 12% [?]