I haven’t been hit yet, but as I’ve seen Blue Sky On Mars show up in an increasing number of Google searches, I’m sure that comment spam is just around the corner. Though this is not a high-traffic, high-comment site, I enjoy having the comments turned on because I’ve received a lot of useful feedback. Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog provides some useful and easy to implement solutions to the comment spam problem.
Technology
In his most recent article, Joel Spolsky declares that exceptions are bad. He’s gotten a lot of pushback on this (Charles Miller has a nice collection of this), which is not surprising. Many of us have worked with error return codes and exceptions both and have a strong preference for exceptions.
I think it is a powerful testament to how much people appreciate Joel’s writing that so many people have spoken out on this one saying “I always enjoy Joel’s writing, but…” Joel has had a great collection of articles that show he really has a clue.
Contrary positions, like this one, from respected folks like Joel often encourage a rethinking of your position on something. In this case, I doubt there will really be much rethinking… I, for one, have been down the error code path before and don’t want to go back.
When creating methods, my current thinking on exceptions is to use checked exceptions for things that I think the application can gracefully recover from. Contrary to what Joel is talking about, in Java the programmer does know which exceptions can be thrown by a given method.
If the exception is the kind of thing that it really doesn’t make sense to continue after, throwing an unchecked exception eliminates a lot of messiness in the code. Just make sure that the UI catches the exception and provides a nice, descriptive message to the user so that support people can help if need be.
Software Development
Tim Bray’s Another Whack at Spam declares:
We can’t go on like just trying to live with and filter spam.
Though I agree with this sentiment, I don’t agree with his solution. I think the unmetered, free access to email is one of the things that makes it a successful medium. Tim mentions the one-to-many email newsletter… what about the many-to-many email lists? I think the Jakarta Struts list has around 2,000 subscribers. Does anyone who wants to post there have to pay $20? A vital form of communication will get damaged.
Beyond that, Tim’s recommendation will require changes to the client software. Sure, the changes may be relatively straightforward, but it would take a while before everyone is using a “registered relay” and you can stop receiving messages from people who aren’t. Other proposals require minor changes only to mail and DNS servers. That seems like a more tractable way to go.
I’m now getting considerably more spam than I would like. I’m considering changing my email address and giving the new address only to humans I know. Web sites and the like will get either temporary addresses or some other address if I have ongoing need to hear from them. Had I known to do this way back when, I may not have any spam today.
By the way, as soon as you get any spam, you’ve started your way down the track of having a useless mail account. Maybe Paul Graham has it right with his filters that fight back as a better approach to taking down the spammers. (Of course, the spammers can always just list fax or phone numbers instead of websites to get around the FFBs.)
Technology
The NY Times sums up the current view of online music pricing in What Price Music?.
After all, some say, antipiracy, anticopying technology may be available within the year.
If that happens, the industry is likely to back away from the kind of pricing innovations with which it is now experimenting. Already, a strain is evident between record labels that want to restrict what consumers can do with the music they buy and the new on-line retailers, which argue that people won’t use their services if they can’t use it freely.
That right there says to me that the DMCA is stifling competition and innovation. Beyond that, copy protection does not work. It doesn’t work techincally and it doesn’t work as far as relationship with the customer is concerned. This was proven with software years ago, and that was before the Internet. With the Internet, a protection scheme can be cracked and that crack spread throughout the world within hours.
Music
Periodically on Friday I went to Eclipse.org to see if M4 had been released (since the schedule date was for Friday). Not sure when exactly they dropped the release, but it’s out and the release notes list the typical variety of good things that you get in a new Eclipse release. There are lots of refactoring improvements, a mystery improved code formatter, some new coding style checks, a few nice CVS improvements, more things that happen in the background (yay!), improved auto-indent (which will hopefully fix some annoyances from the earlier 3.0 builds).
Oh yeah, and Eclipse finally has the ability to open files that are outside of the workspace! You no longer have to open JEdit just to look at a Java file on your desktop!
It sounds like they’ve added a nice bit of polish. I didn’t see anything about the Rich Client Platform mentioned, so I wonder if the planned goodies there made it in.
Software Development
Standardice - Mimicking Magazines shows several layouts that were inspired by magazines, done completely with CSS. They look great, and if you View Source you’ll see that the code is so simple! CSS rocks, as long as you’re using a Better Browser.
Technology
G. Richard Shell at Wharton writes that suing your customers doesn’t work, and there’s a precedent to prove it. The article draws a comparison between the RIAA’s current strategy of suing its customers and a similar strategy used 100 years ago against people who bought Ford cars. It would seem like you could apply this to the SCO stuff, too, except for the fact that SCO doesn’t have customers and are trying to sue people into becoming customers.
As Henry Ford once summed it up, lawsuits against new technologies provide “opportunities for little minds … to usurp the gains of genuine inventors … and under the smug protest of righteousness, work a hold-up game in the most approved fashion.”
Music
Apple has started taking preorders for Mac OS X 10.3, which has some nifty new features. It’s unfortunate that Apple doesn’t do aggressive upgrade pricing, especially given that I just got my PowerBook. But, the educational price of $69 is not too bad.
Technology
