Looks like the National Federation for the Blind can drop their lawsuit now. The new Kindle offers voice prompts to read the menu items to you. I hope they now sue the publishers that are having Amazon remove the text to speech options for certain books because they think you need to buy a CD if you want to have a book read aloud.

Good and Bad Programming Languages

by Mark Shead on July 28, 2010

Often when someone says a particular programming language is bad, they are referring more to the common practice associated with that language than the language itself. Many times they are really complaining about their own poor programming habits more than the specific language. Sometimes these habits are shared by the entire culture built around a particular language.

Perl is a good example of this. People complain about how difficult it is to read and then proceed to write awful unreadable code. Perl can be very readable, but its terseness makes it easy for people to write huge lines of code that do 10 or 11 different things. You can do the same thing in Java, but most people try to avoid a single line that is 500 characters long because it is a pain to scroll back and forth sideways to read the code.

Sometimes the lack of a particular restriant can inspire horrible code.

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According to this article from the NY Times, a recent court ruling says that it is legal to decrypt DVD’s in order to use their content for educational uses.  It also says that it is legal to jail break your iPhone in order to install software outside of the Apple store.

Dear Sony: When my three year old daughter and I sit down to watch a documentary about fish, your Bluray player shouldn’t force us to watch movie trailers of scary things she doesn’t need to see. I paid for the movie. I paid for the player. Why won’t you let me decide what I should watch?

Blackberry Example App

July 25, 2010

If you are looking for good example application on the Blackberry, checkout the WordPress Blackberry app. It is open source so you can easily get the code and it does everything from resizing images to keeping an offline synced copy of data to making server connections and accessing the GPS.

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Katy and the Wolf

July 25, 2010

When Katy was two we were watching a Planet Earth DVD where a white wolf catches a terrified Caribou calf. When the wolf caught the baby reindeer we were concerned about what Katy would think. Turns out she wasn’t worried about the deer. She was sitting there cheering for the wolf!

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Advanced Link Manager Review

July 24, 2010
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Content may be king, but without any links you won’t get any traffic to your site. A link manager can help you do the following: Identify websites that are currently linking to you. Keep track of reciprocal links and notify you if a link disappears. Track the link popularity of incoming links based on their Page [...]

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Who Writes Wikipedia Algorithm

July 21, 2010
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Based on the number of edits, Wikipedia appears to be written by a small number of people.  Aaron Swartz did some testing and came to the conclusion most content in the final revision comes from people who don’t even have a login. I have been looking for a way to determine the percentage each author [...]

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Phrases I Like

July 15, 2010

Some phrases I like: Constructive Sarcasm Intercontinental Trebuchet

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Shots

July 15, 2010

A friend posted this on Facebook: [Name] does not like shots but she does like the nice ladies who give the shots and take care of you when react to them. I thought she was talking about alcohol and didn’t realize my error until I read the other comments.I thought the “nice ladies” were the [...]

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Google Apps Premier SLA

July 13, 2010
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The paid version of Google Apps includes a service level agreement that guarantees that the applications will be up 99.9% of the time.  It works like this: If you are down for more than 0.01% of the time, they will add some days to the end of your contract–if you ask for it. The maximum [...]

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Computers and Education

July 13, 2010

It turns out that giving kids computers can make them to worse in school instead of better.  This effect is particularly noticeable in low income families. Computers don’t have any type of intrinsic educational value.  In families where computer use is not monitored and guided, a home PC and Internet access appears to cause lower [...]

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Google Analytics Referrers

July 13, 2010

Google Analytics is very useful, but it doesn’t have the ability to show you the exact referrer visitors are coming from.  The downside of this is that sometimes you can get a huge influx of traffic from a large site like Yahoo and still have no idea where the traffic is coming from.  Because of [...]

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Internet is Dead

July 7, 2010

The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince says the Internet is dead.  So he is distributing physical CDs by letting a British newspaper send them along their papers for one day. His reasoning?  Digital technology fills your head with numbers so it can’t be good for you.  I’m not sure he [...]

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Smart Pricing

July 7, 2010

Smart pricing is the way Google keeps advertisers happy with using AdWords on properties outside of search.  Adwords lets advertisers put a small image on their conversion page in order to track which ads produce sales. Google uses this information to determine how much to pay publishers who are displaying Adsense on their site.  Basically, [...]

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Two Plugins for WP

July 2, 2010
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SEO Search Terms Tagging 2 This plugin keeps track of what search terms bring people to your site.   You can put a widget on your sidebar that links to the pages where people are going with the text that they are searching for.  This can give you some benefit in search engines and raise your [...]

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