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Brought to you by the magic of Twitter.
@jeresig: Anyone else having issues with IE8 randomly switching into IE7 mode without warning or in a reproducible manner? Pulling my hair out.
@ppk: @jeresig When this happens the IE8 engine has crashed, and IE automatically switches to IE7 mode.
Normally I avoid Twitter-related goings on, but I couldn't just let this fucking gem go by without sharing it.
Donating money to worthwhile causes seems like a good idea, but doing it right requires knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, time, and of course money. I have at most two of those things. The traditional solution is to rely on "experts", but that has its own problems.
One of the great things about the Internet (other than the obvious) is that it enables people to collaborate in new ways, and each contribute little bits of their time and knowledge. Wikipedia is probably the best example of this, but I think it's possible to do much more. I'm not quite sure how to make this work, but I expect that in 10 years we will have much smarter "collective" systems that leverage small bits of time, knowledge, etc from large groups.
This is my first experiment in solving this problem. Actually, in some ways it's my second experiment -- a few months ago I posed a question about the "best use of money", and although it was only meant as a thought experiment, people also provided a lot of specific suggestions. That was rather encouraging.
Now I'm trying it for real -- I have a lot of ideas, but not much time, so I'm starting with the simplest solution that I could find. It may not work, but it should be interesting.
Here's how it works: I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes.
Here are the rules:
Nestled in my feeds today, I found a quick little rant in the middle of a review of Wolfram's Alpha on The Register:
"Alpha is really good at telling you all sorts of information about mathematical expressions, showing you publicly available data about populations and geography, and comparing stock quotes. However, I am a software engineer by trade, and the information I need is about Python module documentation, Apache configuration, and why some fucking snippet of CSS won't fucking render in fucking Internet Explorer fucking 6. For someone like me (and in the web market, there are a lot of people like me), Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness."Emphasis and knowing smile mine.
We're getting close to the end of my blog. After today's entry, I only have three left to write. After that, I'll only blog anonymously or (more likely) not at all.
This is part three of five in my "Programmer's View of the Universe" series. I struggled for a while with how best to introduce the ideas in this installment, and ultimately opted for a short story.
This is a science fiction short story. It's different from many other sci-fi stories in that it is set in the "near future", but it has realistic schedule estimates. So unlike 1984, 2001, The Singularity is Near and all the other sci-fi stories that grossly underestimated their project durations, this one is set 1000 years in the future. I.e., right around the corner.
The story is disrespectful to pretty much everyone in the world. It will create a fantastic shit storm. This is probably a good time to point out that I don't speak for my employer. [Edit: Yay for fiction! Apparently marking something as fiction placates people. Nice to know.]
The story is 18 pages (PDF from Google Docs print preview). That's not unusual for my blog, but I went ahead and published it as a standalone document.
I'd encourage you to enjoy it, but I'm old and embittered enough to know better. You probably shouldn't even read it. Just wait for someone to summarize it for you.
Installments 4 and 5 will not be short stories; they will be regular old blog rants. In them I will further develop these ideas, and I will also attempt to clear up any gross misconceptions about the story, of which there are bound to be many.
My final blog-rant entry is the only one I care about anymore. I've been working on it so hard that my fingers have started to fail. It's been tons of fun, aside from the chronic pain. It's about a neat programming language, and Emacs, and lots of other stuff. I can't wait!
Oh yeah. Here's the link to the story. I've never done a read-only Google Docs link before, so it's probably broken. Or editable. I don't know. We'll see.
This week is going to suck. People are going to be mad. Maybe I should take a vacation and come back when the whining is finished. Can someone email me and let me know when it's all blown over?
We're getting close to the end of my blog. After today's entry, I only have three left to write. After that, I'll only blog anonymously or (more likely) not at all.
This is part three of five in my "Programmer's View of the Universe" series. I struggled for a while with how best to introduce the ideas in this installment, and ultimately opted for a short story.
This is a science fiction short story. It's different from many other sci-fi stories in that it is set in the "near future", but it has realistic schedule estimates. So unlike 1984, 2001, The Singularity is Near and all the other sci-fi stories that grossly underestimated their project durations, this one is set 1000 years in the future. I.e., right around the corner.
The story is disrespectful to pretty much everyone in the world. It will create a fantastic shit storm. This is probably a good time to point out that I don't speak for my employer. [Edit: Yay for fiction! Apparently marking something as fiction placates people. Nice to know.]
The story is 18 pages (PDF from Google Docs print preview). That's not unusual for my blog, but I went ahead and published it as a standalone document.
I'd encourage you to enjoy it, but I'm old and embittered enough to know better. You probably shouldn't even read it. Just wait for someone to summarize it for you.
Installments 4 and 5 will not be short stories; they will be regular old blog rants. In them I will further develop these ideas, and I will also attempt to clear up any gross misconceptions about the story, of which there are bound to be many.
My final blog-rant entry is the only one I care about anymore. I've been working on it so hard that my fingers have started to fail. It's been tons of fun, aside from the chronic pain. It's about a neat programming language, and Emacs, and lots of other stuff. I can't wait!
Oh yeah. Here's the link to the story. I've never done a read-only Google Docs link before, so it's probably broken. Or editable. I don't know. We'll see.
This week is going to suck. People are going to be mad. Maybe I should take a vacation and come back when the whining is finished. Can someone email me and let me know when it's all blown over?
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