M-A-O-L

How to know if your application is “strategic”, an excellent title to start a conversation, down to the quotation marks! Nick Malik explains what to do to move your application into the strategic quadrant, but it equally applies to projects etc. No quick way to summarize, so go read the entire article, it’s worth it

Do we need Three Laws of Cloud? Not yet. Neither should we be overly concerned regarding reports of cloud leading to the elimination of IT.

This, at least, is Lori MacVittie’s finding in her very good piece I, Cloud on the impact of the cloud shift on machines replacing humans. It goes into philosophical questions I have not ever thought about in the context of the shift to cloud computing, but it’s very much also about automation, which I do think about a lot, recently!

Via High Scalability blog.

OMG, I just wasted about 2h updating my Twitter Ruby script because I didn’t carefully read this error message:

/home/maol/bin/politr_oauth.rb:39:in `authorize_from_request': wrong number of arguments (3 for 2) (ArgumentError)
from /home/maol/bin/politr_oauth.rb:39

Turns out my gem update run failed to update the twitter gem because of a missing ruby1.8-dev package on Debian, and I didn’t notice until very late. The old version of the gem expected two arguments instead of three, whereas the I read the message to mean it’s expecting 3 but only getting two.

I hope I’ve learned my lesson for a while again…

Paul Carr, who luckily is a much better writer than I’ll ever be, has quit all the social and web 2.0 stuff to focus on his blog (and book, but that doesn’t count for me) again. Read about some first experiences in Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity, and then a 2nd update after also quitting Twitter on Wow. If You Think Quitting Booze Freaks People Out, Wait ‘Til You Quit Twitter.

It’s good to read all of this, and I could relate very much especially to the first article, because that’s exactly what lead to my leaving of Facebook, Twitter etc. on July 1st this year. And I don’t miss it. Although I have to admit that I didn’t go as far as Paul – I didn’t delete my accounts, I’m just ignoring them for now.

Great post by Couchio guy Mikeal Rogers about tech that is not tech. I can relate so much to that – I guess it’s an age or maturity thing.

I don’t know if it’s just because I got a little older, or because I started working so much with JavaScript and writing web stuff, but I can’t stand anything that is hard to use or requires me to maintain it in any way. I have plenty of work to do. On my laptop I’ve got TextMate and iTerm and a browser but anything else that is happening on the machine I don’t want to worry about. I actually find myself annoyed by System Updates.

For me it’s not the Web stuff nor Apple products, but I clearly spend a lot less time tinkering with system internals, and I like it when something Just Works™ that I know is complex to do with computers. Unfortunately these events are still rare today, at least outside the Apple universe…

Are you asking me or or telling me?

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(Ebenfalls)

Wo sieht man gut, dass es in der aktuellen Krise noch lange nicht vorbei sein muss?

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(Via)

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Was ist in den letzten 18 Monaten bei allen Banken massiv runtergegangen?

Was schreibt Das Magazin über die elf populärsten Irrtümer zum Thema Darwinismus?

Wer staunt, dass die Wirtschaftskrise so knüppeldick gekommen ist?