Category: Links

Steven Frank, co-author of Transmit: Don’t use FTP. Finally someone says it! FTP is a crazy, insecure non-protocol, and the fact that it’s still used has more to do with ubiquity than any sort of merit. SFTP piggybacks on all the security of SSH and is much easier to work with. WordPress has a great feature that automatically upgrades your installed plugins — but only on FTP, not SFTP.

I didn’t know what The Escapist was before Zero Punctuation came into being. But now they’ve got Jason Rohrer, the author of Passage, writing a monthly column/game for them. If they hang onto these guys they’ll be the video game webzine that IGN never was.

Study: John Edwards Doesn’t Exist. Obama’s my candidate, but the fact that he has perhaps benefited from the horserace-obsessed media coverage of the primaries doesn’t make the process any less painful for me. This is a perfect example of media laziness: Edwards doesn’t fit into the narrative, so he’s passed over in silence.

NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman recently said that the cancellation of the Golden Globes (as a by-product of the writers’ strike) felt like “the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom.” So United Hollywood is staging a prom at NBC Studios next week. Formal dress and picket signs. I love sarcastic protests.

Justin looks at what YUI gets right in fostering third-party scripts. In particular he enjoys the inline documentation, which gets converted to an API reference using JsDoc Toolkit. I’ve long been interested in inline docs, but have not found a system that would not require more effort than writing the docs separately as we do now. (Relatedly: Prototype UI seems to be using Natural Docs.)

To my amazement, USAspending.gov has launched. It’s a database of recipients of contracts and other assistance from the federal government. It’s worthwhile to read about the bill responsible for the site’s creation. Today I’m cheered by a small victory for information transparency in government.

From John Resig: Bad Background Browser. This reminds me of the arrival/departure monitors at airports — one out of every 16 of those is guaranteed to have the XP “illegal operation” window in the center.

Rails 2.0 released. Includes the 1.6.0.1 release of Prototype (which will see an official release very soon).

Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn’t). Exactly! I tire of JS framework wars for the same reason I tire of language wars: you should use whatever makes you happy. You’re not trying to get your framework of choice to “win”; there’s nothing to be won. Evangelism is a good thing; you ought to share your happiness with others. Zealotry is not.

The Marble of Doom. Record how long the marble/beachball/pinwheel impedes your progress, then see how much money that time would be worth if it were billable. I should do this for the time I’ve spent working around IE6.