paul schreiber

After the cartoon fiasco, Karim Raslan of the The New York Times wrote Why Asian Muslims didn’t explode. He doesn’t really answer why, but he does cite several cultural differences.

Some of hsi strongest rhetoric:

Whether we are conservative or liberal, many of us are appalled and angered by the stupidity and insensitivity of the Danish newspaper cartoons. But that doesn’t mean we’ve taken leave of our senses.

I, for one, won’t be throwing out my Lego set or my Bang & Olufsen sound system, let alone plotting to unveil a Zionist conspiracy.

I may be a Muslim, but I can tell the difference between a newspaper and a people, a country and a principle.

Amy and Kevin suggested:

Vanessa Morrison
Carvell Wallace
Kyra Brown
Joe Henry

Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista.

interesting software conference this spring.

Sessions include:

• Take Control of Your Team’s Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
• Avoiding the Seven Pitfalls of Lean by Mary Poppendieck
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• Two-Phase Waterfall: Implementation Considered Harmful by Robert C. Martin
• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use by Jeff Patton
• FIT Testing In When You Can; Otherwise Skip It by Ward Cunningham
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
• Slash and Burn: Rewrite Your Enterprise Applications Twice a Year by Michael Feathers
• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You’ll Never Deliver by Jutta Eckstein

The Canadian government wants to help you tour successfully.

fun flickr toys that let you make calendars, billboards, fortune cookies and more out of your photos.

fantastically beautiful high speed photos of water, sparks and motion. and lightning.

Sarah Slean takes a break from poetry to share some tales from the road. Her words recall Finding Forrester:

After the requisite used bookstore visit, we return to the room to find a tray full of goodies from our fairy godmother Natasha. Champagne, roses, chocolates, and fruits…heavens! I enjoy a brief moment of pretending I’m Maria Callas in Milan. The wind howls outside and I remember my toque-wearing self. My guests are impressed. The grapes are delicious. Cool, perfectly taut globes that burst sweetness at first bite. My mind drifts into thoughts of nature’s dazzling perfection.

Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM:

From the blog:

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was “protected” by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.
…
s I understand it, EMI decreed that all of its labels (including our label Capitol) would be required to copy protect all of their releases starting on the day of our album’s release. When I heard this, I fucking lost it. Not only did our label want to make a gigantic business mistake across the board, but we, apparently arbitrarily, were chosen to be at the prow of the crashing ship. Guinea pigs, as it were.

And the more tempered Times piece:

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that’s at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

The Cardinal Inquirer interviewed Steve Wozniak:

Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they’re doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don’t know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don’t work. The most things that are left out because they aren’t finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

We already know MSNBC doesn’t like Bill O’Reilly. Neither does CBS. Instead of the usual softballs, O’Reilly got mocked by David Letterman.