Apparently Laws don’t apply to the Executive branch

Posted on February 14, 2006 by Doug Porter

I know this will come as a grand shock considering the whole domestic spying incident of late (sarcasm implied), but the Executive branch doesn’t have to obey laws. They are clearly optional.

While the domestic spying angers me greatly, this one is even more overt and really makes me want to scream.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog and full story here:

Perspective: E-tracking through your cell phone

The gist is that your cellphone’s location is fair game to law enforcement at all times without any probable cause even though when lobbying for the passage of the bill in 1994, FBI Director Louis Freeh ensured the Senate that the bill would not be used for these purposes.

I must admit that of late I have become so disillusioned with our political system. The best we can hope for is gridlock in the Legislative branch. Regardless of which team in our Two-Party system has the majority, all they do is serve special interests, buy votes, get richer themselves, and pretty well screw things up. I hope everyone realizes that not one person that is in public office and has been re-elected at least once has not made deals which compromise their integrity. The only honest ones didn’t get re-elected when they refused to play ball. (Didn’t you ever wonder why people raise and spend Millions and Millions of dollars to get someone else a $400,000/year job?)

Mid-year elections are coming up for Congress. Vote wisely. Gridlock is Good. And make your voice heard to your elected officials by writing to them. They don’t really care what you think, but at least you can say you expressed your opinion. (Congress.org is good site that lets you easily write to them online)

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Confessions of a Welfare Queen

Posted on February 9, 2006 by Doug Porter

This won’t be a popular topic especially with the recent damage from Hurricane Katrina, but this article from March 2004 by John Stossel is well worth the read for any tax-paying American. Thought provoking stuff (and still relevant two years later too):

Confessions of a Welfare Queen: How rich bastards like me rip off taxpayers for millions of dollars – John Stossel

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Pandora Music Service

Posted on February 8, 2006 by Doug Porter

Most of the developers I know work much better with soothing tunes playing in the background or through some good headphones. Now this may be because programmers are artists and artists appreciate good music, but it may also be because most of us work in loud cubicle environments that are conducive for many things but deep concentration is not one of them. Therefore music helps drown out other people’s conversations, coughs, sneezes, moving around sounds, tapping on their desks, phone calls from home, etc., etc.

Now I personally have many different moods I go through while writing code and the style of music I want to listen to also changes. Often times I may get bored with my personal collection of music and really desire new music that is in the same style as what I’m listening to…but different.

Well if you feel the same way, you are in great luck. There is an online service call Pandora that does this exactly. You browse to their site, login, enter a group or song that you like and Pandora will play songs from the selected artist and also songs that it thinks are similar. Very cool app. It is a flash based app that runs in the browser but overall it is pretty good. The original intention was to charge a minimal yearly fee, but that seemed to go out the window in lieu of a banner add on the site. Either way good music abounds.

Check it out, you may find some new bands that you never new existed (I know I have). There are also other services out there that are similar. One that comes to mind is Last.FM. So take one or both of these for a a spin and see what you think.

Posted in Misc, Technology | 1 Comment

Is Retiring While Young All Fun and Games?

Posted on January 30, 2006 by Doug Porter

ArsDigita founder and MIT professor Philip Greenspun has put up a great article on his site about retiring young: Early Retirement

It makes you think. Many of these things I realize are potential problems with retiring completely (especially every time I spend a weekend putting off the large list of things to do around the house). Well worth the read.

Of course, all of that said, I would still like to have the option to hang it all up and find out for myself what early retirement is like. Hopefully one day.

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Content Aggregation Sites

Posted on January 17, 2006 by Doug Porter

Most tech folks have heard of a website called Slashdot where stories are submitted, rated, and discussed by readers. While this site has been around for many years, most agreed that it was an example of awful web design and color combinations and not really laid out very well at all, but it was all we had so we tolerated it.

Well, there are a couple of new players in the game that deserve a look. The first called Memeorandum comes in two flavors: tech.memeorandum and politics memorandum. This site aquires and ranks stories based on how many people are linking to them in the blogs. This is one of the great Scoble’s favorite sites, but I’m not much of a fan.

Following Memeorandum is a site that is really heating things up called Digg which was created by TechTV’s former persona Kevin Rose (who I really couldn’t stand on-air, but at least his code is quite tolerable). This site allows registered users to submit stories to Digg and they are then ranked based on how many submission are received. It has a very clean layout and simple comment system and seems to be what Slashdot should have been for so many years. I usually find that by reading Digg I’ve already read stories days before they appear on Slashdot or Memeorandum.

Update: Just saw an article on Digg that gives the credit for the look and feel to a redesign by SilverOrange.

The last is a small startup that is being funded by LISP proponent Paul Graham’s venture arm Y Combinator which is called Reddit. Reddit is even cleaner than Digg but appears to function on a similar premise. This one really has me captivated. The variety of content available here is amazing. These guys have a blog which is quite interesting (such as reading why they rewrote Reddit changing from LISP to Python, I can only imagine that conversation with Mr. Graham). I geeked out for quite a few hours this past Monday reading through the posts. I highly recommend checking it out. Don’t get scared off if you run across some growing pains (I have seen the site offline a couple of times). Just remember they are new and growing and it is to be expected.

If you know of any other sites like these that you enjoy, please leave a comment and share them.

Update: Scoble just pointed out a slew of similar sites that I was unaware of: Chuquet, Blogniscient, Tailrank, Megite

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