Month: August 2006

For the last couple of years I’ve been only posting about how my blogging grows and expands. I’ve been adding blogs to my collection like there is no tomorrow. Today, for a change, I’ll announce that I’ll maintain one blog less.

I decided to get rid of my Bloglines blog. It just isn’t worth it to have it separately. The post editor sucks, there are no comments, tags, and other features that I’ve got so accustomed to. About the only good thing was the “Blog this” link in Bloglines that I used to post.

Instead, I discovered something that existed in WordPress functionality for years. Something that I saw many times, but always ignored. It’s called a “Press It” bookmarklet. All I had to do was go the admin interface of my blog, choose Write Post screen, scroll down, and drag-n-drop one link to my bookmarks tab. From now on, when I read something that I want to blog about, I just (optionally) select some text I want to quote and press the blog button. I’ve tried it today and it works like a charm.

Now I have a total of four bookmarklets that allow me to do everything I need with the currently viewed webpage – bookmark it at at del.icio.us, subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds at Bloglines, email its URL via GMail, or post it to my blog. So far so good.

With less blogs that I have to maintain, you can expect more posts in the rest of my blogs. I’ll also gradually transfer the post from my to-be-closed Bloglines blog here.

And again for some Joel Spolsky. This time he examines some management approaches.

If you want to lead a team, a company, an army, or a country, the primary problem you face is getting everyone moving in the same direction, which is really just a polite way of saying “getting people to do what you want.”

In particular, he talks about:

• The Command and Control Method
• The Econ 101 Method
• The Identity Method

Mmm… business concepts in the engineer-friendly language – yummy!

Can Your Programming Language Do This? post by Joel Spolsky can give you some insight on why people use different programming languages, as well as provide you with some doubts on wheathere are you using the proper tool.

…programming languages with first-class functions let you find more opportunities for abstraction, which means your code is smaller, tighter, more reusable, and more scalable.

Both interesting and insightful. And I’m glad to confirm that I don’t have to switch from my primary programming language just yet.

If you work for a newspaper which, God forbid, haven’t yet embraced blogging, hurry to Doc Searls blog and read “Blogging for business” post. Even if you don’t work for a newspaper, go and read that post.

Slashdot had this post recently about data compression contest. Some Wikipedia data was used as a sample for this contest. And, as usual with compression discussions at Slashdot, there were a lot of humorous threads. I liked these three pathes in particular:

1. Steer away contest requirements from the lossless compression. If succeded, the whole Wikipedia encyclopedia could be compressed into 1 bit.
2. Use random data generation method (such as /dev/random device) to eventually generate the complete content back.
3. Use minimum size of compressed data (1 bit), while having an extremely large size of compression executable (the size of uncompressed data)