June, 18, 2005 archives

tony pierce’s story about jury duty is brilliant. the disappointing part is that he didn’t make it on a jury — imagine the stories if he had.

okay, one more little blo.gs tidbit: the effect of being rid of the service on the bandwidth usage of my server.

the final little spike in outgoing bandwidth (the blue line) is when the final dump of the data was downloaded by the yahoo folks.

the current bandwidth usage is in the 30kbits/sec range. it was generally over 1Mbits/sec before, or at least that’s how it looks from the graphs. (it may have been higher — it appears to get sort of flattened out over time in rrdtool.)

slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency by tom demarco is a book that evan williams, one of the founders of blogger, recommended recently. to briefly and perhaps badly reformulate it, the main lesson of the book is that there is an efficiency vs. efficacy trade-off that needs to be acknowledged, and something that can increase efficacy (even if it decreases short-term efficiency) is to leave some slack. that’s not to say you should work 20% less, but that you may want to spend some percentage of time not working directly towards your main goal.

you can see this reflected, obviously, in google’s 20% time, where employees are free to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. but there’s a lot more to the book, and i don’t want you to get the idea that it is just a validation of the idea of google’s 20% time or anything like that.

like most good business books, it is a fairly quick read and at the end of it you’re left with the vague feeling that you knew, or should have known, all of what you just read.

here’s a quote that struck me as noteworthy: “it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.”

i sometimes feel a little silly about reading management books like this since i’m not management, and don’t particularly aspire to be. but that quote puts in perspective why i read them anyway. and although i don’t aspire to management, it is still a subject that fascinates me. i guess the role i aspire to is consigliere. at least when sinecure isn’t available.

• hotel by moby
• bleed like me by garbage
• electrified by dressy bessy
• the sound of music by pizzicato five
• take off your shoes and dance like a monkey by chin chin

the last was a bit of clearance-bin randomness. with a cover and title like that, how could i not buy it?

this is part of an ad that is on the wall at the pershing square station of the metro red line, and it always cracks me up. photographs of david hasselhoff are just always funny.

something i’ve thought about doing is a letters from a nut-style (or the lazlo letters-style) experiment in which i would send letters to various celebrities praising them for really silly and relatively obscure things they have done (“dear steven spielberg, i really enjoyed your acting in blues brothers, when can we expect to see you on the big screen again? i haven’t really seen much of you since then.”) and ask for a signed picture of them in return for the signed picture of myself i have enclosed — but the picture would be david hasselhoff with my name signed to it (or whatever fake name i used).

the other idea is more recent: a spoof of the huffington post called the hasselhoff post. it almost writes itself.

here’s a few resources that someone may find helpful:

• php’s htmlspecialchars() function, useful for encoding user input that may contain characters like <
• php’s addslashes() function, useful for escaping user input for putting into an sql query (even better is to use a parameter-based query api)
• a list of the top ten php security vulnerabilities

and don’t forget that in php, variables like $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] are user input.

i saw something on the gold line yesterday that was funny — a sheriff got on at one of the stops, and started walking towards the front of the car (where he turned around and started checking tickets). as he was walking up to the front, a guy hopped out of his seat right after he passed by, and ran out of the train.

it cracked up all of the passengers that saw him take off, and what made it a little bit funnier is that the guy looked perfectly normal, even respectable. the two skate punks who took his seat looked more like the type you would expect to be riding without a ticket.

i think it is a little amazing how crash fails in spite of its shortcomings. a lot of the situations it sets up are pretty hackneyed (a latina lashing out because she’s been called mexican and really has puerto rican and el salvadoran parents? so not new). but the film pulls them together in an interesting way. and there’s a few scenes that really propel the film to great heights.

when i came back from seeing crash, they were shooting a movie near my building — but they were shooting it with a camera mounted on a remote-control helicopter. so there was a car driving around the block, followed by the helicopter, followed by a truck with a camera operator standing on the back of it with a big remote control.

and i thought the shoot up the street from that was interesting — they had cartoon-looking cars with winding keys mounted on them.