Random Articles

• Why Buying Local, Frontier House, and the Trade Deficit are All Silly Russ Roberts’ EconTalk is consistently interesting and engaging podcast covering economics as a perspective and a practice. I spent the first half of this week listening to his hour long conversation with colleague Don Boudreaux on the economics of buying local for the sake of buying local. Boudreaux and Roberts expand on many of the same points
• 9 Things Cullect Taught Me About Software  Forcing people to create an account to use your software is a bug. if you’re not scared to deploy, you’ve stopped caring. Murphy is alive and well. Google and a bookself of technical books can be equally useless. Good software is like an iceberg. if you ask for money, people will give it to you. Software is as hard as you
• Carbon Trading in the US and Minnesota If you caught the NPR/National Geographic segment on the European carbon trading efforts you may have gotten the impression that: the price of being carbon neutral is so low (+2%) that it’s irresponsible not to pay it. a market for carbon dioxide, mandatory or otherwise, didn’t exist stateside. True on the former, false on the latter. First Crack
• The Power of Vendor/Gems Right now, I’m heavily reliant on an unsupported (if not completely abandoned) ruby gem library. Historically, I’ve just gem install bizarro-gem and moved on. A couple of issues have changed my perspective: My host, textdrive, doesn’t allow installing bizarro gems on their shared servers and I’ve had difficulty freezing them, so I worked around the
• Cullect.com Screencasts I’ve just recorded 3 Quicktime walkthroughs of Cullect: Cullect.com Overview - Unsigned In 10:40 min Cullect.com - Signing in, managing items, inviting curators, adding feeds, posting to blogs & posting to twitter 9:28 min Adding Cullect.com to Other Applications 3:44 min