Clinton's Position on Florida Last Fall

Last August, when the DNC Rules Committee voted to strip Florida (and Michigan, if it persisted in clinging to its date) of its delegates, the Clinton delegates on the committee backed those sanctions. All 12 Clinton supporters on the committee supported the penalties. (The only member of the committee to vote against them was an Obama supporter from Florida.) Harold Ickes, a committee member, leading Clinton strategist and acknowledged master of the political game, said, "This committee feels very strongly that the rules ought to be enforced." Patty Solis Doyle, then Clinton's campaign manager, further affirmed the decision. "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process," she said, referring to the four states that the committee authorized to hold the first contests. "And we believe the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role. Thus, we will be signing the pledge to adhere to the DNC-approved nominating calendar."

Why Agile Doesn’t Really Work

Let’s say that a high functioning Agile product team has a product that can theoretically ship every 2 weeks. Heck, let’s make it a month. Can the sales department keep up with that kind of change? How about the customer support department? Not typically.

Scrutinizing Government Accounting

As had been the case for the previous 7 fiscal years, the DOD Inspector General disclaimed an opinion on DOD’s financial statements for fiscal year 2003. DOD’s financial management systems and reporting weaknesses substantially impair our ability to determine the reliability of the financial information reported in the federal government’s overall financial reports. Given the significance of DOD’s activities and balances to the consolidated financial statements, until DOD corrects its material weaknesses, it will continue to impede our ability to express an opinion on the consolidated financial statements. In addition, as noted later in this report, there are other material weaknesses that will need to be corrected.

• Economist challenges government data

Easy way to reset your sleep cycle: Stop eating

or example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am in the morning, you should stop eating between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm the previous day. When you wake up at 2:00 am, eat a nice healthy meal to break your fast.

Taxes that Aid the Invisible Hand

That the invisible hand often breaks down is actually good news. After all, we need to tax something to pay for public services. By taxing forms of consumption that generate negative side effects, we could not only generate enough revenue to eliminate budget deficits, but also help steer resources toward their most highly valued uses.

Translating BusinessSpeak into Programming Code

..the idea was so that managers could write programs in English. It failed because nobody could write a parser that would handle something like "The bottom line is that the stakeholder group requires the situation going forward to be such as to facilitate the variable known as x to provide the same outcome when stimulated by dereferencing as the variable known as y".

Microsoft Source Analysis for C#

We are very excited to announce the release of a new developer tool from Microsoft, Source Analysis for C#. This tool is known internally within Microsoft as StyleCop, and has been used for many years now to help teams enforce a common set of best practices for layout, readability, maintainability, and documentation of C# source code.

I’ll Be Brief. No Really.

Better yet, groups might develop a norm to have speakers publicly estimate how many minutes they intend to speak before they begin: Instead of saying, “I’m going to be brief,” it would be a stronger commitment to say to the moderator, “Please interrupt me if I speak more than X minutes.”

Omnisio: Video Sharing

Promoted on the Xandau list as having advanced linking (transclusion) in video as well as comments. Most of the comments are along the lines of "First Post"

Chinese Analogy: The Horse and the Zebra

Zhang Weiying has a favourite allegory to explain these reforms. He tells a story about a village that relied on horses to conduct its chores. Over time, the village elders realised that the neighbouring village, which relied on zebras, was doing better. So after years of hailing the virtues of the horse, they decided to embrace the zebra. The only obstacle was converting the villagers who had been brainwashed over decades into worshipping the horse. The elders developed an ingenious plan. Every night, while the villagers slept, they painted black stripes on the white horses. When the villagers awoke the leaders reassured them that the animals were not really zebras, just the same old horses adorned with a few harmless stripes. After a long interval the village leaders began to replace the painted horses with real zebras. These prodigious animals transformed the village's fortunes, increasing productivity and creating wealth all around. Only many years later—long after all the horses had been replaced with zebras and the village had benefited from many years of prosperity—did the elders summon the citizenry to proclaim that their community was a village of zebras, and that zebras were good and horses bad.

Python Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

Want to write shorter, cleaner code? Have an unfortunate situation where you need to fit as much as you can in one expression? Prefer a quick dose of hacks to spending the rest of your life reading the docs? You've come to the right place.

'Pushers' pushing people on a crowded Japanese train

video: maximize the number of passengers on the train

Car Buyers Choose Guns Over Gas

This Missouri used car dealership has a different kind of promotion, offering buyers a choice between a $250 gas card or a $250 check toward the purchase of a gun.

The owner, Mark Muller, said everyone “except one guy from Canada and one old guy” has chosen the gun.

• BBC article

JavaScript Templates

For web application developers, the '''JavaScript Templates''' engine from TrimPath is a lightweight APL / GPL open-source component that lets you have template-based programming (like PHP/ASP/JSP) while running in a web browser.

• The '''JST''' engine is written entirely in standard JavaScript.
• It supports a productive template markup syntax very much like FreeMarker, Velocity, Smarty.
• JST is a readable alternative to manually coded massive String concatenations and major DOM/DHTML manipulations.

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

Debugging in Django

On a high traffic site you probably don’t want to be e-mailed on every server error. One neat alternative is David Cramer’s django-db-log, which logs exceptions to a database table.

Talk by Rasmus Lerdorf: Php Creator

Rasmus believes there are four kinds of programmers. First, the pragmatic ones who are just after solving their own problems. The second kind finds programming as a means of self-expression, like an artist finds self-expression in his art-work. The third are the real programmers who enjoy programming for its own sake because it creates a hormone called oxytocin in them, and the fourth are the open source zealots who wish to change the world. He claims to be of the first kind. He programs to solve his problem and then moves on. He confesses that he created PHP purely to serve his own interest, to solve his own set of problems

Friedman: Bush Energy Policy: visit Saudi Arabia

More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

WSJ: You Can't Soak the Rich

The chart nearby, updating the evidence to 2007, confirms Hauser's Law. The federal tax "yield" (revenues divided by GDP) has remained close to 19.5%, even as the top tax bracket was brought down from 91% to the present 35%. This is what scientists call an "independence theorem," and it cuts the Gordian Knot of tax policy debate.

Use recursion effectively in XSL

Due to the growing importance to both application and Web developers of XML and the related XSL technology, the effective use of XSL transformations cannot be ignored. Thus, it is increasingly important to learn how to program in the declarative fashion. This means becoming intimately familiar with recursion, both its basic usage and the methods for using it effectively and efficiently for the problems at hand.

Wind Power: Popular in Texas

I know, most of the media attention goes to a few high-visibility debates about putting wind in places like the waters off Cape Cod. But most installations are a welcome source of revenue to farmers and landowners. In fact, because the new wind turbines are tall, and don't interfere significantly with grazing or farming, they have become popular in the central U.S., where the wind resource is best in the country. Some ranchers make half a million dollars a year by leasing only a fraction of their land for turbines.

..Unlike people on a certain Eastern cape, Texans even find aesthetic value in wind turbines. "Texas has been looking at oil and gas rigs for 100 years, and frankly, wind turbines look a little nicer," Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson told the New York Times in February. "We're No. 1 in wind in the United States, and that will never change." Oilman Boone Pickens is planning "the biggest wind farm in the world," a $10 billion investment. "I like wind because it's renewable and it's clean and you know you are not going to be dealing with a production decline curve," Pickens told the Times. "Decline curves finally wore me out in the oil business."

US: Requires Special Visas For Foreign Journalists

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

Microsoft's Difficulty Spanning Two Eras

Similarly, two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras.

20 Useful Tools to Make Web Development More Efficient

There are many available tools to help make web development projects quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, testing, and debugging tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently.

Build Beautiful Buttons in Photoshop

Nothing says Web 2.0 more than a shiny button. Of course, the "shiny plastic" look-and-feel is not for everyone, but good-looking navigation buttons are still integral to the design of a sexy web page. In this first instalment of a two-part article, I'll show you how to create a wide variety of different buttons using Adobe Photoshop.

Google Maps: With Photos and Wikipedia

It only took 3 years for google to implement my request to add "PictureLink" to their maps service. Now we just need widespread GPS integration with cameras.

Brooks: The Conservative Revival

Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American conservatives are on the way down. British conservatives have moved beyond Thatcherism, while American conservatives pine for another Reagan.

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.” In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”

An interview with Malcolm Tredinnick - Django core contributor

For a particular class of applications, I think App Engine is probably ideal. It gives cheap hosting, great reliability and access to some Google’s storage stuff. For example, if you have something that presents a read-only view onto a large bunch of data, App Engine would be very appropriate. Okay, you have to do data extraction from multiple models manually, since there’s no joining, but that’s not too hard to work around and people will write little helper functions for those cases. Remember that a lot of very successful, very popular websites are basically read-only: a lot of newspaper sites, things like EveryBlock (and, formerly, Chicago Crime) — all those sorts of sites. Even news.google.com.

Marketplace: Budget Hero Game

Flash-based interactive game to simulate the future of the federal budget

Timelapse CSS

When building website templates, I’m constantly switching between a view of my CSS code and a view of the page I’m working on in a browser. At my most fevered I’m switching from one to the other after every couple of amendments, to ensure my additional rules are having the intended effect. Over time, were I to record this incremental buildup, it would paint a reasonably good picture of my approach to converting a design comp to a CSS layout.

Django Database Logging App

The question came up today, if there was a database logging solution available for Django. It turned out (to my knowledge) there wasn’t. So I quickly came up with django-db-log. It’s a simply middleware which will catch exceptions in Django, and log them to the database, allowing you to easily view them via the admin or your own custom application.

Byteflow Django Blog Engine

Byteflow is a blog engine, written on Python, using Django. Why should you choose it over competitors? It has very clean codebase and developers, which are struggling to keep it so. It has a lot of cool features, which you can't get in other blog engines or will get with difficulty (consider feed by union of tags, eh?).

Firefox Smart Keywords

The basic idea is that instead of adding a keyword for a simple URL, you add a keyword for a search box. You type the keyword followed by your search terms into the location bar, and Firefox re-writes the saved URL to perform the appropriate search on the appropriate site.

EconLog: Fiscal Reality

Message to Republicans: if you cut spending on "worthy causes" to zero, you still would not balance the budget. You will have to raise personal income taxes.

Message to Democrats: if you increased personal income tax receipts by 25 percent (a ginormous tax increase), you still would not balance the budget. You will have to cut back on "worthy causes."

Message to the AARP: if Social Security and Medicare continue to be "untouchable," then y'all had better buy guns, because in twenty years there won't be any money left to pay for national defense, much less for any "worthy causes."

Cynical Support for Gas Tax

So far, I pretty much agree with the consensus. Economists might overstate the rigidity of supply — it’s possible that eliminating the tax could spur producers to find a way to squeeze out a little more gas — but they’re probably right that the Clinton-McCain proposal will not shrink the price at the pump. Nevertheless, I think it’s an idea worth supporting. In fact, I’ve got two arguments in favor of it, though I doubt that either candidate will want to repeat them in public.

The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely.

Washingtonpost: Presidential Candidate Promises Unrealistic

The Democratic candidates' tax and spending plans are costly and ambitious -- and probably short on fiscal realism.

Emma: email marketing service

Meet Emma, the email marketing and communications service that's taken a unique approach to web-based software. We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue). It's all about email marketing in style, and it's why 10,000 small and midsize businesses, non-profits and agencies have chosen Emma to power their email newsletters and campaigns. And we'd love to help you, too.

Chart: Average Consumer Spending

Each shape below represents how much the average American spends in different categories. Larger shapes make up a larger part of spending.

Why Brazil Loves Linux

Brazil often makes Linux-related headlines, the latest being the adoption of KDE in Brazilian public schools. It’s clear that Brazil is enamored with Linux, but why? This is an important question for Microsoft since emerging markets are key to sales growth. Microsoft’s Annual Report 2007 reported that “impressive growth included India, China, and Brazil which all delivered revenue growth that topped 40 percent”, which is much faster than growth in developed countries. These markets are also friendly towards Linux and pose significant challenges for Microsoft. This post is my take on the reasons for Brazil’s fondness of Linux. I speak for Brazil since I was born and raised there, but I think much of this applies to the other BRIC countries and emerging markets in general.

Friedman: Who Will Tell the People?

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong.