Thanks for Spam Karma 2 and WordPress’ built in anti-spam features, I don’t have much of a problem with comment spam these days. It looks like Blogger must still be dealing with it, though. As far as I know, they’ve always required you to sign in to post a comment. Apparently, that’s not enough, though. Now you have to log in and respond to a CAPTCHA. Gadzooks. I’ll stop posting comments on Blogger sites when they require a blood sample for verification.
Random
Cookies have some pretty severe limitations in terms of the amount of data you can store. Besides, they get transmitted to the server on every request, so you don’t necessarily want to store a ton of data in there anyway.
On the other hand, using sessions on the server to store data for the current user is also a bad idea unless you have a small or very predictable user base. If you’ve got a heavily dynamic app and you want to scale it up somewhat linearly, you need to work with HTTP’s generally stateless model.
The Ajaxian blog points to a couple of posts by Brad Neuberg about keeping session state in the browser. Using AJAX and Brad’s techniques, you’re only sending the state back to the server when you need to, not every time as you do with cookies.
The quick trick (it’s worth linking through to Brad’s original article) is to store your “session” data in a text field in a form. (It must be in a form.) Brad tested in IE, Firefox and Safari and found that he could store data in all three, and it would still be there when he hit the back button. Additionally, he tried storing 1MB in both IE and Firefox and had no problem.
That can certainly solve session affinity problems, couldn’t it?
Software Development
John Jantsch has a great tip for getting quality testimonials for your product. The key is rather than asking for a testimonial directly, have a prospective customer ask a current customer for an opinion. You’ll end up with a better-written testimonial than if you had asked for one directly. I’ve never tried this myself, but I do believe this would work wonders.
Product Management, Software Business
John Scalzi provides an excellent perspective piece on Whatever: Being Poor. Something to consider, though: this is being poor in America. If you’re talking about poor in India, China, Africa or almost anywhere else in the third world, you can downgrade just about every one of these even further. Seriously, if you think “Being Poor” sounds depressing as written (and it likely does, for those of us reading and writing blogs), just transplant your brain to Africa as you read.
Being poor is not having a TV. Or a phone. Or electricity.
Being poor is walking miles to the market or to school, because there is no car.
Being poor is rocks and sticks for toys.
Being poor is thinking $1 an hour is a really good deal.
I’m not writing this to belittle the poor in the US. It is rough to be poor anywhere, and those of us above the poverty line are blessed. I just wanted to add to John’s excellent post a bit about just how good we have it here in the developed world.
Money
I’ve been following DRM in music files for a long time now. The EFF does a good job of deconstructing exactly what you’re paying for when you buy songs from the most popular online music services: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music. The EFF does provide a list of services that sell their music in unrestricted MP3 files. Unfortunately, that Kelly Clarkson song that just got stuck in your head is not going to be found on any of those services.
Strangely, they didn’t mention AllOfMP3.com. As near as I can tell, it is still legal to import music from another country. And, as far as the folks in Russia have been able to figure so far, AllOfMP3 is legal there. Take advantage of it before the RIAA throws so much money at the problem that it just goes away.
Let’s just hope that the entertainment industry figures out the folly of DRM before the tech companies all bend over and cripple their devices. America as a country will lose out if we let our technical edge be compromised by people who are having trouble adjusting.
Music
As promised when he released it, Seth Godin’s ebook KnockKnock is now available for free.
It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively.
I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve enjoyed Seth’s work in the past. All of his books have at least one powerful idea that makes the read worthwhile.
Product Management, Software Business
I hadn’t been paying attention to the TextMate blog, because the editor itself always notifies me when new releases come out and tells me what’s in them. I’ve been missing out, though! Here’s a Tips and Tricks posting that provides a couple of solutions for Python triple quoting and TextMate’s smart quotes (along with a few other tips, like a convenient diff against current saved file command).
Even more recently, Allan wrote about the Power of Snippets, which is a hugely powerful feature of TM. Pretty much anything you find yourself typing frequently can be easily turned into a snippet.
If you’re a Mac user (and particularly if you’re also a unixhead), TM is a great text editor.
Python
The definitive collection of idea generation methods is Martin Leith’s large collection of techniques that people use to generate ideas. The idea may be cheap when compared to the execution, but you’ve still gotta have one.
Product Management
