I was sure today was going to be one of those I’m lame and have no links for you
days, but it turns out there’s a few things to point to out there after all.
Yesterday was one of those ball-crushing kind of days at work. Wednesdays usually are, since I generally have four hours of meetings scheduled on Wednesdays. And even though two of them were cancelled, I still felt like a vise was being applied to parts of me that don’t appreciate that sort of treatment. The worst part was that much of it was self-inflicted. I thought I’d had a pretty good morning, but one of my changes started crashing the application. And the debugger. Ugh. At least this will be one of seven-hundred-thousand google hits for crash and debugger, so I’m not exactly alone in my pain.
Anyway, it turns out I didn’t understand the ownership policies on one of the objects I was working with and was deleting it. When the OS helpfully deleted it again for me, things went south in a hurry. All the memory-protection in the world doesn’t help when you’re a complete idiot. Found the problem and band-aided it just before the day-ending meeting, and I know how to fix it correctly after letting my subconscious chew on the problem overnight (and screw up my dreams), but I still have the feeling that it all would have been a lot simpler if I’d just stayed in bed yesterday.
- I often feel We’re losing in the government game, but Jim Bovard says it better than I do. The key is being skeptical. A politician is offering you some great new handout? What’s the price going to be? [claire]
- I’m with Warren on this one. My biggest Olympics Question is why the hell they’re giving out CD-ROMs instead of medals this year. Is it because AOL quit sending out a dozen every month? [coyote blog]
- The New York Institute of Photography has correspondence courses in photography (but a website that hurts to look at) and dg28.com has a bunch of information online.
- jr Don’ Need No Stinkin’ Bodges! Especially JavaScript ones that call up a website that isn’t working or something. Three of my normal morning reads this morning aren’t working, probably because sitemeter’s down or something stupid like that. But the cool thing about jr’s note is that it talks about Yahoo!’s PHP interfaces. Another thing I should probably learn more about, but probably won’t. [jr]
- Check out Open Usability, which aims to connect usability experts who want to help with open source software projects. Got the link from esr’s The Luxury of Ignorance and its followup, which are pretty darned good essays.
- Bruce Schneier has Proof that Employees Don’t Care About Security, but the bigger problem is that none of the desktop OSes out there make it easy to keep security in mind. Hey, isn’t that a usability problem? Maybe we need to put Jakob Nielsen on the job. [schneier]