I wish I could have written The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution — but alas. That was a task addressed, with enthusiasm, by Greg Mankiw and Matt Weinzierl.
Funny stuff. Unless you’re tall, I suppose.
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
Ramit Sethi wants you to know he hate[s] bloggers who waste their time on stats.
I’m not sure he really, truly harbors an intense personal hatred towards specific offending individuals, but his point is a very good one: content is what brings readers, assuming that readers are something a blogger is looking for.
I’ve occasionally fallen into the trap of looking a little too much at website stats myself, and spending maybe a wee bit too much time tweaking design elements of my websites that really don’t matter. (On the other hand, I am a geek, and tweaking HTML and CSS can be fun; sue me.) I’ve also (especially lately) succumbed to the trap of posting Not Very Much New Interesting Content At All.
So despite the simplicity of the information, (nutshell: to Gain Readers, Write Lots of Great Content), it’s completely true. I look over the list of blogs that I read regularly, or even semi-regularly. There is not one site that I read because of the software it uses, the web design prowess it displays, or the graphics which adorn it. I have no sites which I have added to my RSS reader due to their impressive use of Ajax and scriptaculous effects. Nope, not even one.
I realize for a lot of bloggers, getting a worldwide audience isn’t really the goal; they just want to continue sharing the things they think with the audience they have, be it friends, family, other like-minded netizens. In that case “good content” is just to continue doing what you’re doing. My friends may be interested if I just sold a house (no, I didn’t, just an example) or installed a new Linux or a learned about a new programming language — the rest of the world? Not too interested in this.
So for what it’s worth: I concur. If readers are what you’re looking for, content is definitely the only thing that will draw them. Period.
If you are running Mac OS X, you should invest a few minutes into visiting http://www.caminobrowser.org/ and downloading Camino.
Camino, in a nutshell, is a port of Firefox to Mac OS X. It uses Cocoa (Cocoa is Apple Computer’s native object-oriented application programming environment for the Mac OS X operating system (wikipedia)) and Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine. It integrates perfectly with Mac OS, and is very, very fast. It reminds me a little of using Phoenix (anyone remember Phoenix?).
Again, if you are using a Mac… take a moment and give this browser a spin. It’s very nice.
While I’m on the topic of vim, text editors, and windows, I just discovered cream, a “modern configuration of the Vim text editor”. Looks interesting, and there’s a windows binary. Bye bye, notepad!
Is it a bad sign or a good sign when you start trying to type “ESC:w” to save a file… when you’re in notepad?
Okay, just using notepad is a bad sign, but you work with what you have… I’m on a Windows laptop in a coffee shop on a wlan, and cygwin is just going to take too long to install.
Cygwin, by the way, is practically a mandatory install if you are using windows. Just saying. ;-)
Gnome 2.18 is out, which means, of course…
It means that I need to get that KVM soon so I can attempt to break my Gentoo system by trying to install it. ;)
In an April Fools joke that should have been true, Creating Passionate Users announced Head First Scheme.
I have a modest proposal; I propose that all those who want this book to be a reality: we should create it ourselves.
We will only need a few things:
- A collection of stock photography of people from a close-up, bird’s eye perspective.
- Another collection of stock photography comprised mainly of 50’s type people in their homes, wild animals, and other Things That Are Fun.
- A large font collection.
- Some use cases that involve using Scheme to create programs about snowboards, wooden duck decoys, and hang-gliding companies.
- Somebody with Adobe InDesign to help us lay it out.
Oh, and the book will need to be written, of course. Hmm. This could be a lot of work. Let me get back to you all on this later.
We’re all friends here, so we can be honest:
The default terminal in Mac OS X is… well, how can we put this? It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, but I don’t know what it is…
Actually, I know exactly what it is, for me. In Gnome I’ve grown used to a terminal window having tabs, and now I’m spoiled. I want my tabs back in my terminal.
There are a few choices out there:
Terminator is a Java terminal emulator that looks promising.
iTerm is a Cocoa terminal emulator, with tabs. I’ve seen complaints that it is slow, but it bears a trial run.
multi-aterm is a X11 app, but since Mac OS X can run X11 apps, it bears a look as well, and the opportunity to test out running X11 apps in the Mac OS, which I haven’t done yet.
I’ll append or follow up this post once I’ve tested these.
[The creative process]’s like translation. Anything that has to travel all the way down from your cerebellum to your fingertips, there’s a lot of things that can happen on the journey. Sometimes I’ll listen to records, my own stuff, and I think god, the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at. What I’m trying to do now is get what comes and keep it alive. It’s like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all, and sometimes by the time you get to the studio you have nothing.
Tom Waits; from Tom Waits - in conversation with Elvis Costello Interview, emphasis added.
