According to O’Reilly, Python book sales are up 20% from the same period last year. That seems pretty good, until you learn that Ruby book sales from that same period are up 1552%. Now I’m no statistician, but by my calculation that works out to…let’s see…carry the one…standard deviation…subtract the remainder…got it! It’s a Shitload more books than last year.

[UPDATE] Matthew points out that I’ve been duped. The article I’m spouting off about below is a spoof (a pretty good one.) I totally fell for it. Like any new approach to an old problem, Ajax is overused and sometimes abused. Our old friend Jakob Nielsen thinks Ajax sucks. He’s more wrong than right here. Most of his argument is based on the fact that Ajax breaks the existing model of the web, stating “The fundamental design of the Web is based on having the page as the atomic unit of information.

The voice of reason is always refreshing. Case in point, David Heinemeier Hansson… “The business smarts is when you don’t blow the farm before the crap shot[sic] has turned sure bet. Fail cheap. Because odds are you’re going to. And you need to have your shirt for the second round. So. Don’t scale. Don’t worry about five 9’s or even two. Worry about getting something to a point where there’s reason to worry about it.

From Lifehack “Don’t let pressure and overwork encourage you to hurry past parts of your life. Whether it’s your children’s early life, whole segments of your marriage, or maybe the last active years of loved parents, they are swiftly past and gone beyond recall. Regret comes too late to save them. The truth is simple. People confuse what is urgent with what is important; what is pressing today with what is pressing in terms of their whole life.

Seems there’s an entire porn company for sale on eBay. Oh well, I’d probably just get sniped anyway.

“Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else—Secure Flight and Trusted Traveler included—is security theater.” Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security

Rick Bradley has put together a very nice list reviewing the pros and cons of converting a large-scale Java app to Ruby on Rails. I’m convinced.

I dislike filing stuff, but I like being organized. Are these things mutually exclusive? Yes and no. GTD has given me a good reason and a consistent method for always having things filed. What I struggle with is the taxonomy of filing. Does this homeowner’s insurance document go in “Household” or “Insurance?” A small classification speed bump like this can mean the difference between having something filed or just thrown away out of frustration and laziness.

George Dyson Books are not mere physical objects. They have a life of their own. Wholesale scanning, we fear, will strip our books of their souls. Works that were sewn together by hand, one chapter at a time, should not be unbound page by page and distributed click by click.

“You’re single in your 20s. In your 40s you’re just alone.” -Some guy on the radio

As much as I like the idea of Apple’s Spotlight, the implementation sucks just a little. While tinkering round on the DevonTHINK site I ran across EasyFind. Macworld has a nice writeup if you’re interested in searching for your stuff quickly without using Spotlight.