The Man sticks it to The Man; or, the Country-club Revolt; or, Whitey’s Revenge

So Fake Steve, who I like, thinks it would be funny to try to overload AT&T network tomorrow. Which, fine, OK, but consider this. ..

Amazon’s core competency? Pricing.

I think it’s quite brilliant that Amazon has introduced spot pricing for servers. Great way to exploit unutilized CPUs and bring prices down. Nicholas Carr explains it in utility terms: At the end of the nineteenth century, Samuel Insull, president of the then-tiny Chicago Edison, started the electric utility revolution when he had the counterintuitive realization that to make more money his company had to cut its prices drastically, at least for those customers whose patterns of electricity use would help the utility maximize its capacity utilization.Amazon Web Services is emerging as the Chicago Edison of utility computing. ..

Speeding up localhost in Visual Studio

I recently put a new SSD in my system (yay!) and did a clean install of Windows 7, Visual Studio, etc. I found that when viewing my web app on localhost (using the Cassini web server built into VS), it was very slow. This was true across browsers. ..

Tegra notebooks wanted

I would love to see notebooks based on Nvidia’s insane Tegra chip: ..

Wi-fi cafes in NYC

I’ve begun compiling a list of wi-fi cafes in New York City, with a bias toward those in my neighborhood. Hope it helps, and let me know of your finds. ..

100% data loss at Coding Horror??

This can’t be good: Can servers really fail that spectacularly? I mean, yes of course they can but something running on RAID 5 should be recoverable. For this to happen, it would require a lot of neglect plus a healthy dose of bad luck. Yikes. ..

Schneier and Schmidt

Schmidt: if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have no need for privacy ..

Shorting Firefox

If Firefox were a stock, I’d be shorting it. That’s what I said a few months ago, too, and one of the Mozilla guys took issue. ..

Browser-specific CSS without Javascript or horrible syntax

So, we all know that browsers have differing levels of CSS support. Working around them can be a pain in the a**, requiring non-standards-based hacks which are very hard to read and debug. ..

Logic as data, and a case where strong typing impeded learning

These days, I am doing a lot of Javascript, or more accurately, a lot of jQuery. A concept I have gotten comfortable with is the idea of passing logic as data. ..