Internet Application Workbook. One of the best computer-related books that I've read lately is Philip Greenspun's Internet Application Workbook. The text was written as a guide for a MIT course. I love it because it has a very high level vision of how you should develop community-based projects. But at the same time, it gives lots of thoughtful practical tips.

Greenspun is better know as founder of Photo.net and ArsDigita (a computer company «abulously successful and profitable right up until the day that we accepted venture capital»). An excerpt from the last chapter shows an ode to blogging:

«Also keep in mind that for every person reading this chapter a poor villager in India is learning SQL and Java. A big salary can evaporate quickly. Hundreds of thousands of American aerospace engineers laid off in the 1970s discovered this. The ones who'd toiled in obscurity on "landing gear bolt #39" ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputaton, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession».

Possibly, one of the best advices a programmer can hear. [Binnacle Notebook]

Great quotation; potentially interesting book.
10:16:54 PM    

Aggregator backup.

Argh. Radio just munched my news subscriptions.

Does anyone remember how to restore the sites I subscribe to? I'm not relishing the prospect of having to manually rediscover 70+ feeds.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Look at

http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$7028

8:15:49 PM    

Churches continue to post and send information in traditional formats, with the Web as an afterthought. It is still believed that people look in these other places first—which may be the case, but increasingly less so, I believe. People still look in newspapers and the yellow pages to find a church to attend, but there are increasing numbers turning to channels that they are starting to use in greater frequency, like the Web. Chairmen of committees, etc., may still use email for member notices or paper and postage stamps, rather than relying on their members to check the Web site, but the responsibility is on the Churches to anticipate and recognize the typical communication receiver, and as the Digital generation grows up, more and more of the "membership" will be those "Growing Up Digital".

Which means, as the Church continues to ignore these "more effective" channels, the Church will not only miss a key percentage of the audience (and precentage is on the rise), but will be increasingly preceived as being "clueless" about how people wish to communicate. Churches haven't gotten much a clue yet about what the web can be used for.

Good start, although I don't myself know how many of our community would use the web to find out about us. Perhaps in a more urbanized setting, like the one to which we are sending a church plant.
4:14:17 PM    

Sam Ruby explains where he would take RSS if he were king of the world. Imho, he punts on the hard decisions, but maybe that's not so bad. [Scripting News]

Now, given a few minutes digging through the recesses of my memory for my sketchy recollections of American football, I can almost work out what “punts on the hard decisions” means. Ward's Wiki has a page on this: AmericanCulturalAssumption.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

I remember a particular compiler (can't believe we used it for production work) that would, on encountering an internal error, issue 12 line-feeds, print "punt!", and then another 12 line feeds. (To the young and naive: this would clear a 24-line screen, leaving "punt!" in the middle thereof.) (Of course, memory may fail me, or be a bit embellished....)
10:20:56 AM    

David Weinberger asks "What faith saw on 9/11." He wants to know what people of faith saw as the WTC collapsed. He's not talking about abstract principles, but what did you SEE?

My memory of the day is very clear, as it is for most Americans. We were staying with my parents while we were in the US, as most of you know we live in Indonesia. My hometown is in the Seattle, Washington area, on the West Coast. So, we were asleep. The phone rang and I hopped out of bed and answered. It was my mother-in-law. She said that we should turn on the TV, a plane had just hit the WTC in New York City. I told her we would. I relayed the message to my wife. Knowing that the smallest of tragedies can consume the US media on a slow news day, her reply was that it would still be on when we got up. "Come back to bed," she said. I did and was quickly back to sleep.

The phone rang again. This time it was my sister. She gave a similar report and told us to turn on the TV. Now both my sister and my mother-in-law can be alarmists. One of them calling me I could ignore, but not both. So, I turned on CNN. The initial pictures of one WTC tower in flames was horrifying. I assumed, as many did, that it had been hit by a small plane accidentally. But shortly after we turned on the TV we watched in horror as the second plane hit the remaining tower.

My thoughts were clear. I had no doubt that what I witnessed was the act of a radical Muslim terrorist. I had no doubt that we, America, would demand and extract strong retribution. But my immediate response was not anger or outrage (those feelings came). My immediate response was colored by my friends left behind in Indonesia, by my new life in the world's largest Muslim country. Tears began to stream down my face as I realized that innocent Muslims (along with the guilty radicals) would die as a result of this tragedy. I saw innocent Muslims dying. Innocent Muslims that were so like my friends in Indonesia.

[So many islands, so little time]

Well, I was going to post David's question with my answers, but Radio managed to lose the story mysteriously. I'm still thinking.
10:07:49 AM