mrclay.rg

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot [...]

This New Yorker article on health care proposes that we shouldn’t focus on who writes the checks, but rather that hospitals have a well-coordinated team in place keeping costs down. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he [...]

(updated 3/4 to include the “Serving from clusters” case) As I see more server scripts implementing conditional GET (a good thing), I also see the tendency to use a hash of the content for the ETag header value. While this doesn’t break anything, this often needlessly reduces performance of the system. ETag is often misunderstood [...]

Update Apr 8 2009: Apparently this bug existed in previous Safari versions (at least back to 3.1), i.e. including “must-revalidate” in Cache-Control means Expire and max-age will both be ignored by Safari. Here’s the Apple bug, if you happen to be an employee. I created an Apple account but still couldn’t find it. Short version: [...]

If you haven’t noticed, Juarez and many other Mexican cities are facing a violent crisis. The drug cartels are so well funded and armed that they can bribe officials and even threaten police chiefs into retirement. The drugs moved by the traffickers can, of course, cause harm, but Mexico’s problem isn’t a “drug problem” but [...]

Shameful law firm Jones Day sued real estate news site BlockShopper claiming “trademark infringement” over the way the site used link text, but really because the firm didn’t like how the site reported the home purchases of their partners (which is public record). The case should’ve been thrown out, but the judge allowed it, and, [...]

What if we had zero tolerance for laws that have a lot of ugly side effects? Like busting an amazing teacher in front of her kids… for finding a couple Xanax pills… in a suspicion-less search of her car. Herrick, 59, has taught at Roberts for 17 years. Parents describe her as “inspirational,” “talented” and [...]

If this National Review article is accurate, the stimulus bill is worse than I was imagining. It’s not that I’m against every piece of it, but wrapping up countless unrelated projects under one bill and/or pushing it through Congress as an “emergency remedy” is a terrible way to create laws. This is how we got [...]

What if Congress debated the prohibition of drugs for over 2 hours, finding surprisingly that most members already favored harm reduction policies and, in some cases, regulation over criminalization? This just happened in the U.K.’s House of Lords. On January 22nd, a debate was held (full transcript) to encourage the government to send a senior [...]

The deeper you dig into the history of the Drug War the more craziness you uncover. You’d think an office in charge of drug policy on a national level would monitor science and policy outcomes and work to refine those policies over time, or in the very least not break laws spreading misinformation about drugs. [...]

The Bad They tampered with the most important element of the game: the controls. The Flick It moves of Skate 1 all work identically, but the feel is definitely different. I spent countless hours perfecting a realistic style in S1, and even after 3 hours or so of S2 I still feel like I’m starting [...]

Daniel Rodriguez said there’s no such thing as a healthy discussion about legalizing drugs because young people take their cues from adult conversation. “There are things I believe should not be open for discussion, and this is one of them,” he said. [El Paso Newspaper Tree] Thank goodness we now have more excuses to stifle [...]

Dad forwarded an e-mail that tried to simplify the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and I wanted to add a bit to that. Think of HTTPS as a secure telephone line No one can eavesdrop, but don’t assume HTTPS is “secure” unless you know who’s on the other end. Evil and good-but-poorly-managed web sites can [...]

When a policy doesn’t work no matter how many dollars and officers you throw at it, how do you keep the lights on and the citizens engaged? Well, histrionics, demonization, war propagandizing, and hysteria have worked wonders in the past. Let’s listen to the President of the Philippines give them a shot: … she ordered [...]

Depending on how you navigate through the menus to get to the video replays, the game (and entire Xbox360) will tend to lock up in the waiting screens, requiring a manual reset on the console. Usually this is before you can view even 3 or 4 replays. Now that I’m capturing a ton of replays [...]

Interest in Minify seems to be picking up: Version 2.1.1 is approaching 51K downloads. This is almost 5x the total for all previous versions. More issues fixed. Several developers have cornered down bugs and submitted patches and we’re getting more experience on misconfigured servers (e.g. invalid DOCUMENT_ROOTs). There’s one particular bug I want fixed before [...]

Suppose the federal government were to cap nationwide speed limits at 40 m.p.h. with the honorable goal of greatly reducing crash fatalities. They reason that being a little late is small price to pay for saving lives, and the public reluctantly agrees.

In no particular order, I hope… the release of IE8 will spur organizations currently standardized on IE6 to finally bite the bullet and either upgrade their users to IE8 or move them to other browsers. Killing off IE6 (and IE7 really) will significantly decrease web development costs and reinvigorate CSS by opening up a world [...]