Should Linkblogs Trackback and/or Pingback?
Linklogs don't generally add much discussion to the original post. I'm wondering how most bloggers think of trackbacks/pingbacks and whether there is any kind of etiquette around their use. Do people consider trackback/pingback as a sort of remote comment or are they useful purely for tracking what is linking to what? Services like Technorati and Feedster track what links to what and are becoming more reliable. I personally would like tracks/pings any time someone links to me but I could see how this could be considered linkspam.
Bosworth on WS-Mess
Adam Bosworth, usually a staunch supporter of SOAP and the rest of WS-Mess, makes an interesting sidebar statement in the last paragraph of his recent post about PC's and Media Revamped:
I have a posted comment about just using XML over HTTP. Yes. I'm trying, right now to figure out if there is any real justification for the WS-* standards and even SOAP in the face of the complexity when XML over HTTP works so well. Reliable messaging would be such a justification, but it isn't there. Eventing might be such a justification, but it isn't there either and both specs are tied up in others in a sort of spec spaghetti. So, I'm kind of a skeptic of the value apart from the toolkits. They do deliver some value, (get a WSDL, instant code to talk to service), but what I'm really thinking about is whether there can't be a much simpler kindler way to do this.
If you've followed Bosworth before, you'll notice that this is a pretty big statement.
Guido's 10-line Python Scripts
My 10-line python scripts are just like everyone else's except I wrote a script to interpret them. -- Guido von Rossum
How the other half lives
I can never remember the names of the meta-windows used in HTML (as in
<form target="_somerandomnamepulledoutofahat">). Partially because they
are named so poorly but also because I haven't needed to use them in a
really long time (pop-up windows are soooo 90s dontchaknow). Anyway, I'm
googling for "target window _blank" when I stumble upon the following
message board post: Pop-up prevention and target=_blank. The question
is whether anyone had heard of these crazy pop-up blocker thingies and how
they could be defeated.
Culture War
The Social Science Research Network has published a paper by Dan Hunter entitled Culture War. The first 13 pages deliver a tremendous account of the origins and current state of the Free Culture / Copyright Reform movement that started around 1999. I wanted to get a link out to this, primarily because it's a great read, but also because it is laden with footnotes to the point where it could be used as a reference for major events and milestones in the movement.
Cleanest Python find-in-list function?
I'm trying to find a Python built-in that will return the first item i in a sequence that given a function f returns i when f(i) == True. I need this about every 300 lines of code or so (that's actually quite a bit of code in Python). The general use-case is running through a list looking for an item matching some criteria and then returning it. This is more commonly dictionary-land (i.e. the items should be stored in a dict keyed by the criteria instead of a list) but that's not always practical/needed.
30 Pixels, 30 Lines
It is perhaps slightly amusing that writing 30 lines of code in Emacs and resizing the Emacs window under OS X requires an equivalent amount of time.
Really Hard Problems
Really Hard
is the official classification applied to problems encountered in software design that are non-technical. That is, when offered a choice between the most complex technical problem and the simplest non-technical problem, the average hacker will choose the technical problem.