I’ve seen Undercover Brother twice, and it’s still funny.

Mary sent me a link to this wonderful panoramic image of the world at night as seen from space.

Funny how the lights in all of the other countries look just like ours.

From DevX: An article describing

programming in the creative terms that it deserves.

“Writing code is an act of creativity. It isn’t science and it isn’t

engineering, although programmers are happy to apply science and

engineering to the creative process, when possible. Therefore to be a

programmer one has to be highly creative. This is one of the reasons

programmers are happier working on new projects rather than

maintenance projects. It isn’t just that they don’t want to get buried

in the filth of the past (although that’s part of it); maintenance

doesn’t offer them the opportunity to create.

From The Cranky User: “…navigating pages is all about identifying the objects that have functions, figuring out what those functions are, and then hitting the button as hard and as often as you can in the hope that it’ll do something.”

I worry that I’m often seen as too willing to compromise on projects,

saying “Ship it! It’s good enough!” This might seem like a tendency

toward the mediocre, but it’s not. Sometimes, good enough is just

that, and we can make it better tomorrow. Doc Searls, with credit to David Sifry refers to this as

POGE: The Principle of Good Enough.

“Without POGE we would have no TCP/IP, no HTTP, no HTML, no SMTP. In

other words, no Net, no Web, no Net-based email. POGE also accounts

for the success of XML and Linux. It’s why XML-RPC moved faster than

SOAP.”

Later, he says:

“One advantage of POGE is gradual improvement. From their beginnings,

all members of the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python,

Perl, PostgreSQL) have been triumphantly adequate efforts.”

I think I could accept “Triumphantly adequate,” were it just a step

along the way to something better.

Moved a bunch of stuff around today, before I saw that some folks (including Robert Daeley, author of PHPosxom) had linked to my post about PHPetal earlier. The permalink for the original post was http://www.jackbaty.com/index.php?entry=/geek/untitled.txt. In the meantime I renamed the /geek directory to /dev. This of course broke the links. I’m learning the joys of mod_rewrite and this little bit fixed things right up.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^entry=/geek/untitled.txt
RewriteRule ^(.*)$
/index.php?entry=/dev/untitled.txt [R]

Cool!

Since the Fusionary weblog is about to go online, I thought I’d remind myself that there’s a right and wrong way to do a corporate weblog. Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto is a good place to start.

irritus: Idea for cereal

Does adhering to the well-known Three-Click Rule when designing web

sites actually help users? [This UIE

Article](//www.uie.com/Articles/three_click_rule.htm) indicates that we might be putting too much effort toward

reducing clicks.

“However, these complaints aren’t actually about the clicks. They are

really complaints about failing to find something. When users find

what they want they don’t complain about number of clicks.”

Technorati is habit-forming.