For some reason, TLA keeps selling ads for me, even though I canceled my account a week ago.
I came across this article by Jeff Atwood today that really eloquently captured / mirrored my current feelings about the social networking craze that’s sweeping the tubes these days.
I occasionally get requests to join private social networking sites, like LinkedIn or Facebook. I always politely decline. I understand the appeal of private social networking, and I mean no disrespect to the people who send invites. But it’s just not for me.
I feel very strongly that we already have the world’s best public social networking tool right in front of us: it’s called the internet. Public services on the web, such as blogs, twitter, flickr, and so forth, are what we should invest our time in. And because it’s public, we can leverage the immense power of internet search to tie it all– and each other– together.
In comparison, adding content to a private, walled garden on the internet smacks of the old-world America Online ideology:
While at Sony in 1994, I was sent to Virginia to learn how to build a Sony “app” on AOL (the #3 online service, behind Compuserve & Prodigy at the time) using AOL’s proprietary “rainman” platform. Fast forward to Facebook 2007 and see similarities: If you want access to their big base of users, develop something in their proprietary language for their people who live in their walled garden.
Read more at the link provided above. I did reluctantly dip my feet into Facebook recently, but there is a certain thing that’s always been bugging me about it. I used to think that it was the feeling that it was nothing more than a slightly more respectable clone of MySpace, but now I realize (although that is still part of it) that I think it has more to do with the closed in nature of the system.
This article from the BBC raises a question about the authenticity of the survival show Man vs. Wild. It seems to be based around the allegations of one guy who was involved in the production, and since the production company has not come forward to publicly refute the claims, they have gained some degree of credibility in the eyes of many.
My take? It’s an entertaining show either way, so it doesn’t matter too much to me.
As for the rumors / allegations that he has (on one occasion, which is all the claim states) not stayed out in the wild at night after the cameras were off, I’ll take those reports with a grain of salt. It’s only the report of one person formerly involved with the show (who may or may not have some personal grudges), about a few isolated incidents where there may have been some assistance provided that wasn’t shown in the edited version. If it’s true (and I haven’t seen anything to confirm it), it wouldn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the show.
All that aside, the most interesting parts are when he comes up with some creative solutions for getting food or accomplishing certain other tasks. To take it as an authoritative source of real information for how to survive in the wild is probably not the intent of the show. Especially since he often takes hugely unnecessary risks like jumping off / between high cliffs or rocky mountainsides to save himself some time. Of course, if you actually were stranded out in the wild on your own, you wouldn’t take those kinds of risks (especially if you’re already near a water source, which he often is) because medical attention will be much more difficult to come by than the extra food and water required for taking the extra time to walk around the obstacle.
To give myself a goal for getting in shape (as well as to raise money for a good cause), I’m preparing / training for a triathlon in September.
Before you laugh too hard, it is only a “sprint triathlon”, which is a half mile swim, 12.4 mi. bike ride, and 3.1 mi. run, so hopefully I won’t be killing myself.
I think it will still be a challenge to get ready in time, but I think I can do it. I’m just posting about it on here to give myself some accountability to not let myself back out.
I just recently tried out the Cake PHP framework for a project I needed to get done quickly. I didn’t dive into it too deeply, but I have to say I’m very pleased with it so far.
In case you haven’t heard of Cake before, just think Ruby on Rails but in PHP instead of Ruby, or (to quote from their website):
Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.
It’s a useful thing to have available if you like (or are curious about) Rails but need to deploy on a server that may not be configured for Ruby, but does support PHP & MySQL.
Man do I hate IE.
You’d think that creating a radio button in javascript would be as easy as something like this:
var radioButton = document.createElement('input');
radioButton.id = ‘RadioButtonList_1′;
radioButton.name = ‘RadioButtonList’;
radioButton.type = ‘radio’;
parentElement.appendChild(radioButton);
but, no - that doesn’t work, thanks to IE not allowing the name attribute to be set for dynamically created elements.
So, instead, you need to do something like this:
var radioButton;
try {
// This is the only way you can set the “name” attribute in IE, but it will fail in other browsers
radioButton = document.createElement(’<input id=”RadioButtonList_1″ name=”RadioButtonList” type=”radio” />’);
} catch() {
// The above will fail if not in IE, so try it the correct way here
radioButton = document.createElement(’input’);
radioButton.id = ‘RadioButtonList_1′;
radioButton.name = ‘RadioButtonList’;
radioButton.type = ‘radio’;
}
… is famous. Watch it (towards the front right hand side) during the video of Matt Mullenweg’s talk about the “State of the Word” during this year’s WordCamp.
Dan, you should have sold ad space shaved into the back of your head.
WP developer Mark Jaquith recently posted his thoughts on the Text Link Ads issue, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
When you really think about it, it’s no better than any of the other spam techniques widely despised by the internet community, and this was the reason I personally decided to drop them recently.
Whether you agree or not is, in a way, irrelevant, because I think the day is coming when text link ads (for the purpose of gaming PageRank) will no longer profitable, because I do believe that Google will eventually start penalizing sites that sell links in this manner.
I’m still interested to hear what higher profile bloggers who have been involved with TLA for a long time (like Alex King) have to say on the matter, but so far I haven’t seen anything.
I’m sure that frequent readers here are probably sick of me talking about how much I prefer JetBlue over all other airlines, but I couldn’t resist posting this picture.
Sure, the individual DirectTV televisions in the back of every seat are great, but the other huge benefit is that their rows offer much more leg room than the average, as seen in this photo.
UPDATE - this was actually an exit row, so it had a bit of extra room, but even the regular rows have more than the average amount of space.
On a related note, whatever airline you choose for your flying needs, you might just want to pick a seat at the back of the plane.