It now costs over a billion dollars a year to run Facebook, and delivering ads is how Facebook pays for this.
It's amazing how much money it costs to run some PHP doodads and spying for free.
Via: Daring Fireball.
In this presentation Kent Beck talks among other things, about a development technique called Keystoning. Someone from the audience asks him what it is. I didn't know it either and that means someone else probably also doesn't know. It's really useful for bigger features and I have used it many times without even knowing it.
What is keystoning? Change the user-visible parts last. This way the changes seem to have come really fast for the user. You can change a lot of code, without making a change to the user inferface.
Things that aren't alive, can't die. So if you write an article with the title "X is dying", you should make sure that X was alive in the first place. If it wasn't alive, you should try and be more specific about what you mean.
Possible meanings
And every time I used people above you replace it with customers, users, developers, companies, grandma's, moms, dads, your neighbours, or your pet.
In I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore Dan Pallotta wrote about business-speak:
It involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said...
Perhaps a solution can be found in a simple little sentence that gives us some room to think. “I don't know.”
I was told that you can't say you don't know. If you don't know something, you make something up on the spot. What happens if you have to know everything and need to give answers to all questions and you can't say or show you don't know? You make shit up.
So, maybe we should be more honest and just say: “I don't know. But if you really like to know the answer I can try to find out.”
While I was doing my morning reading I came across this weblog by Jeffrey Kegler about his parser called Marpa. My post is not about his parser, even though it's very interesting. This post is about the way the weblog guides and explains the work and ideas in the parser. It even includes historical information about where the ideas come from.
It made me think about the work Simon Peyton-Jones has done on writing a research paper. He explains that writing a paper helps your thinking. On the fifth slide he says that instead of first doing research you start with an idea (any idea) and then write a paper. In the course of writing this paper you will do the research needed to fill in the blanks.
Idea -> Write paper -> Do research
I would like to contribute that when you write software you can use your weblog to explain and crystallize your ideas to your audience. The weblog works as a guide and shows you where you are and where you're going. It may even help reflect on your progress and false starts.
Sometimes a story just gets an idea going. This time it was about linking and attribution in articles on the web. On Daring Fireball, there is a good example pointing to a bad example.
I don't understand why there aren't more links to weblogs and other places in the newspapers. I could guess, but I won't.