obfuscated.org

I don’t use paypal at all, but if paying via text message takes off, I might. I seem to recall the H’s using paypal in a similar way with their Palm Pilots back in the day, but didn’t that involve some sort of synchronization with the PC and the hooking the plam up to it? Anyway, this seems really need, especially for those of us who prefer to stand five or six steps back from the bleeding edge and pretty well top out a text messaging mobile-technology-wise. (via waxy)

So I’ve been all different sorts of busy getting up to speed at the new gig, and I seem to have completely missed the boat on Amazon’s S3 service. Is this anything other than what it looks like, and is the business model really as simple as it seems? Didn’t Xdrive do basically this a few years back?

Anyway, related to S3 is what looks like a very useful Flickr backup tool using S3. Pennies on the dollar backups for bulky media like photos and MP3’s stirkes me as pretty appealing.

1. To establish as legal tender.
2. To coin (money).
3. To convert (government debt) from securities into currency that can be used to purchase goods and services.

You — and by “you” I mean “Yahoo!” — are hereby incentivized to use this word correctly. [source]

I’ve spent a certain amount of time looking at contextual advertising systems. During my time at Overture Research, I helped build a system to evaluate them. Needless to say, I’ve seen my share of bad ad placement.

My personal all time favorite was on an article about a gruesome murder. I don’t remember the names or the place. The long story short was that the killer hacked his victims in to little bits and shoved them in to suitcases in order to hide them. Google, in their wisdom, chose to place an ad for luggage on that page. Priceless.

Only slightly less wonderful than that was the ad that I found on my weblog today: “Meet Republican Singles.” Way to be, Google.

In today’s exciting edition of Nerdporn from IA: Circular Treemaps.

They don’t use space as efficiently as squrified treemaps, but they’re a huge win in that you don’t have to recompute the child maps if you want to zoom in to one of them. That’s very, very cool.

Plus, they look damn, damn snazzy, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

The charts that Krider built and I extended are better than Google Finance’s charts. That’s for damn sure.

Was I the only one who didn’t know that Laphroaig is a Beam brand? I don’t know why this throws me or why I care — Beam makes some really great Bourbon. Seeing the frog up there with “Pucker” and “Clous Du Bois” hurts, though. Oh well.

Are there any independent distilleries left out there?

(Man there’s a lot of good stuff out there today.)

Scalzi’s short essay on responsibility in government would go over well with me as a call for a third party.

Yes, it would suck to have to clean up other people’s messes. But from a moral and economic point of view, it would suck worse to refuse to clean it up and to leave it for the next generation. Taking responsibility for things is what makes people grown-ups, and why as far as I can see grown-ups are mighty thin on the ground in Washington. The Bush folks are excellent, even primal examples of people who are not grown-ups economically or morally, but to be clear there seems to be a bipartisan lack of grown-ups in government right about now. It’s not just the Bushies who are the problem here.

I understand that the Democrats and Republicans are very, very good at getting things for their supporters, and that’s why people keep voting them in to office, but in my mind that’s exactly the problem with both sets of those clowns.

Ruby/Rails guy DHH waxes unimpressed about the difficulty of scaling Ruby on Rails applications. There’s not a ton of meat to this article — everybody pretty much already knows how to scalt this type of application, as he clearly points out. However, the attitude he takes towards it is excellent.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: There’s nothing interesting about how Ruby on Rails scales. We’ve gone the easy route and merely followed what makes Yahoo!, LiveJournal, and other high-profile LAMP stacks scale high and mighty.

It’s trite, but it’s important. Good software shouldn’t wow you with its whiz-bang this and that or its complexity. It’s the principle of least amazement, or KISS, or whatever you want to call it. These things make software easy to understand, which makes it easy to use, easy to extend and easy to improve.

Boring is good. Boring works.

Mark Cuban posts some great advice regarding owning digital content in this day and age:

Many of us are not going to take the time to re encode the content we already own to make sure it continues to be compatible with the new playback devices we are buying. Most of us wont even know that we need to as we go through different media playback environments over the next years.

All we are going to know, is that we have files on our hard drives that we cant play back.

My advice ? Any and all digital content that you purchase and OWN, with any sort of copy protection, crack it, and make a backup copy for your own personal storage.

Do you trust Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. to give a rat’s ass about the digital content you purchased from them when it comes time to sell the latest and greatest playback hardware or software? Didn’t think so.