Via Adam comes a great rant about creating "grand" designs when simple ones will often do:
... it does beg the question, why is everyone so obsessed with the perfect design, the perfect framework, the perfect web methodology? Don't give me that bullshit about it paying off, or how it ensures the project is a success. Excluding the children amongst you, almost everyone has seen projects that have awful awful code succeed, along with projects using all the right buzzwords and cool frameworks fail. Out there in the real world, I'd be amazed if there's any correlation at all between success and anything that actually matters to a developer.
I think the reason that webmonkeys are so desperate to feel they're doing something grand is rather simple. Their work is simply....too....boring. All these frameworks and web doodahs are more often than not simply the product of a hopelessly bored mind desperate to inject some sense of meaning into their daily grind. All the business asked them to do was product an app that solved a specific need. Nobody told them to go invent a framework for it, or to maximise reusability, or to componentise the moving bits, or to use TDD, or to opensource anything.
Via LGF, this is a fantastic article so far at FrontPage Magazine: Spain's Surrender.
Great article at NRO about how the McCain Feingold regulation is having exactly the opposite of its intended effect.
Winds of Change links to Mike's recount and transcript of Cheney's comments about John Kerry. I've always liked Cheney 
Example.com is among the special reserved domain names that can never be owned or used by anybody. I have an e-mail address at old-school[1] sprynet.com that I still have as a backup e-mail address[2], but all that ever gets sent there is spam. So, I wanted to keep the e-mail address, but :blackhole: everything sent there. Normally, at my host, I could do just that (set it to send to :blackhole: ), but Earthlink doesn't allow that. However, they allow forwarding, so I set it to forward to example.com, and I should never get e-mail from it again.
What's interesting is that I've tested sending mail to example.com (as well as some of the other reserved domains) and I get no bounces. But if I send to a non-existent (but potentially real) domain then I do get bounces. So, it seems, example.com really is like /dev/null in that way.
Update: I got a bounce after many hours. Oh well. Maybe I'll set it to another one of the invalid domains that for me bounced immediately, such as foo.invalid.
Footnotes:
[1]: Internet in a Box (Sprynet) was independent at first, I think, then they were bought by CompuServe (or maybe they were always part of CompuServe). Then MindSpring bought CompuServe along with Sprynet. They sold CompuServe to AOL but merged the Sprynet accounts in with them. Then, of course, Mindspring merged with Earthlink, so now my Sprynet account is part of Earthlink. If memory serves, I think my first online service account was a CompuServe account, and then I switched to a PPP account, but stayed with the same company and went with Sprynet. So, I never actually bought an "Internet in a Box".
[2]: I also use it as the "anchor" for all my domain names (the one real address that goes to an ISP rather than my hosting provider), though that'll have to change now
Thursday, March 18, 2004
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Spider solitaire
Dont be silly - there are a great %​that cannot be won - freecell for​examp...
mZex: Aug 4, 6:57am