Theresa Nielsen Hayden describes a variety of ways in which authors can be “insane”, all from her experience with Tor and the rest of the publishing industry. The list is amusing but the comments are even better, as various authors chime in to say “Hey, that describes me!” or explain how they work around their foibles.
Someone should do a similar list for programmers, ideally written by an experienced (and good) project manager.
This site received about 10 comment spams today, which was sufficient motivation to head on over to Jay Allen’s site to pick up MT-Blacklist. But after months of ignoring new Movable Type releases because I didn’t want to take the time to learn how to upgrade my MT 2.5.1 installation, I was stuck — MT-Blacklist requires MT 2.6 or later.
About 45 minutes later, this site is now running Movable Type 2.6.4. It was a nearly painless upgrade — “nearly” because I forgot that Rescomp’s local installation of Perl invariably always has the wrong set of modules installed, so I had to redirect the MT CGI scripts to point to Stanford’s AFS version of Perl instead. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that until I spent about half an hour trying to remember enough of object-oriented Perl to debug the Movable Type scripts.
I think everything is working now, but if it isn’t, please send me a note.
Dan Gillmor mentions that the Philadelphia Inquirer now has an RSS feed for its front page. That’s a huge surprise. I’m not used to anything from Philadelphia being at the forefront of technology. Since I read the Inquirer every day, I’ve subscribed.
Also, huge thanks to Brent for pointing out ESPN’s RSS feeds a week or three ago. The original link for the MLB feed doesn’t work any more, but a quick Googling for “espn rss” shows a new one that seems to work just fine. That’s one less web page that I need to visit continuously….
I just subscribed to Mac Developer Journal. I didn’t do so because I thought the first issue was amazing — it’s good, but it doesn’t cover what I do every day (and won’t for the forseeable future). I certainly didn’t do so because I like the interface; rather, like Erik and Michael, I can’t stand the Zinio reader.
Instead, I subscribed because the Mac development community desperately needs a good developer magazine. I appreciate the effort that MacTech has made, but I canceled my subscription because I rarely found even one article that would be potentially useful to me in each issue. It’s difficult to do a programming magazine in print because you have to waste far too many pages on source code. That increases production costs and brings down the quality of the rest of the magazine.
I have high hopes for Mac Developer Journal. I’m sure it’ll have its growing pains, as all new magazines do, but if anyone understands tech publishing, O’Reilly does. If they get enough subscribers to warrant putting a lot of effort into MDJ, I’m sure it’ll be terrific. I’m certainly willing to pay $50 to help it flourish.