For years I’ve been more of a console gamer (XBox 360) than a computer gamer, but World of Goo is trying very hard to change that. I don’t normally like puzzle games, but World of Goo tricked me by hiding the puzzle/construction/physics inside a hilarious cartoon. In addition to being fun, simple to control, and great-looking, it’s just $20. So far, it’s available for the PC, Mac, and Wii.
Category: Opinion
Another use for RSS feeds
Caphyon, the vendor of Advanced Installer, has a feed for updates of the software. A brief look at the feed shows a pretty regular schedule of updates. Each entry in the feed contains the release notes, with new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.
Quick thanks to my friend Dave, who sent me a tweet about this product. Now we’ll see how it stacks up against InstallShield.
Finally joined Twitter
Being part of The Borg Facebook wasn’t enough–I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago. At least so far, it has succeeded in connecting me with the few friends of mine I haven’t found on Facebook yet. I don’t use it from my iPhone that much yet, but fring seems to be a good enough client.
It’s morning again in America
The U.S. is certainly a different place today than it was yesterday. The commentary I’ve seen that sums up best just how different things are is this Tom Toles cartoon of Obama walking into the White House beneath these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Yesterday, America proved that we really believe this.
My Two Cents on Reinventing the Wheel
Yesterday, I came across a spirited defense of reinventing the wheel in a recent post from Jeff Atwood. Dare Obasanjo stands firmly in the “roll your own as last resort” camp. In this particular case, Atwood asserts the following:
[D]eeply understanding HTML sanitization is a critical part of my business.
I’ll take Atwood at his word on what’s critical to his business (and what isn’t), but it seems that there’s a middle ground between his position and Obasanjo’s. Particularly when there’s an open source solution available (SgmlReader in this case, since it’s written in C#), adopting and improving it has these benefits:
- Improved understanding of HTML sanitization for the adopter.
- Strengthening of the existing community.
To Atwood’s credit, he’s made his solution available here so that all of us who write software for a living can benefit from it. I would be very interested in seeing a comparison between the SgmlReader and Atwood’s HTML Sanitizer to see which is better.
My own experience with reinventing the wheel (in software development terms) has rarely, if ever, been positive. Therefore, I have a lot of sympathy for Obasanjo’s perspective. Because I’ve inherited a lot of software from predecessors at various employers, I’ve seen a lot of less-than-ideal (to put it kindly) custom implementations of validation, encryption, search and logging functionality.
There are probably plenty of reasons that development teams reinvent the wheel in these areas, but one highly likely (and unfortunate) reason seems to be insufficient awareness about the wide variety of high-quality open source solutions available for a variety of problems. I don’t know whether this is actually more true in internal IT shops than other environments or not, but it seems that way. Encryption and logging in particular are two areas where it seems like custom code would be a bad idea for virtually everyone (except those actually in the encryption and logging library businesses). With libraries like log4j, log4net, the Enterprise Library, and Bouncy Castle available, developers can spend their time focusing on what’s really important to their application. Code for authentication and authorization seems like one of those areas as well. It seems like there are a lot of solutions to this problem (like OpenID on the public web, and Active Directory in the enterprise) that time spent hand-rolling login/password anything is time not spent working in areas where more innovation is possible (and needed).
When I asked the question of “what should always be third-party” to Stack Overflow, I got some interesting answers. Most answers seemed to agree that encryption should be third-party, except in rare cases, but there was surprising little consensus beyond that. Beyond the scarce resources argument against custom logging (or other areas with widely available open source alternatives), there’s a diminishing returns argument as well. I’ve only used Log4Net and the logging in the Enterprise Library, but they’re really good frameworks. Even if I had the resources to implement custom logging well, the odds that the result would be a significant improvement over the existing third-party options are slim to none. I’d like to see the quality argument made more often in buy vs. build decisions.
Why Performance Reviews Don’t Work
This morning, I came across this interesting post about why performance reviews don’t work. The alternative that stood out was weekly one-on-one meetings with direct reports. It’s a recommendation I first heard nearly two years ago on the Manager Tools podcast. I’ve managed employees in the past, and when I followed the advice about weekly one-on-one meetings, virtually every relationship improved. It is more meetings, but the results are worth it.
While I don’t have a manager title in my current job, I’m still in fairly regular touch with the employees I used to manage. Were it not for those regular meetings, I doubt I’d have the same relationship with my former co-workers that I do today.
Bailout Price Tag Continues Rising
According to this story in the Wall Street Journal (it’s subscriber-only, sorry), AIG just got another $37.8 billion from the Federal Reserve. That puts the price tag for just bailing them out at $123 billion. This may be a sign that the $700 billion $850 billion may not be enough.
In other news, the national debt is now so high that the US debt clock has run out of digits. I don’t know if the figure includes the spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More Financial Crisis Education
The reporters who did the Giant Pool of Money story have followed up with Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Like the first show, this one is well worth setting aside an hour to listen to–much more worthwhile than the same amount of time spent watching network or cable news on the same subject. The explanations of precisely what frightened the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve into begging for new legislation are especially worthwhile.
Other worthwhile stories on this topic include:
- Was ‘Adult Supervision’ Needed On Wall Street?, from the Fresh Air podcast
- The Wall Street Bailout: A Conflict of Interest, also from Fresh Air
Having listened to a number of episodes of Planet Money, it’s proving to be a good podcast. Each one is a lot shorter than the stories I mentioned earlier, so they’re especially convenient if you haven’t got a lot of time.
Planet Money Podcast
The “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life I blogged about in May has apparently spun off an entirely new podcast called Planet Money. If that first story is any indication, the new podcast will definitely be worth listening to.
Google Gives Us a Browser
Even though Google Chrome is open source, I wonder what will happen to Firefox (my current browser of choice). Its extensions (like FlashBlock) and other ad-blocking capabilities make browsing the web a much more pleasurable experience.
If you want to try it out, grab a copy from here.