Proof That I Am Gullible

I recently posted about my blog's readability when I encountered a tool that purported to do this analysis.

I just went to see how it was faring. It got worse. Maybe I should just embrace it. I need to embrace it if I am going to use words like "purported":



So then I got curious about how this worked, where it came from, who did it, and all of that. Google quickly led me to this story about how this tool is just a scam to gain page ranking.

The good news is that I have the sense (and ability) to read HTML snippets before I paste them in my blog. So I trimmed out all of the silly bits. The bad news is that I posted the thing even though I knew it had silly bits. Shame on me. And I just did it again. Just there above. Shame on me again. This time I did remove all links, but when I posted it the first time I left the link back to the test live so that other people could play with it.

And therein lies the genius of the thing. It is a page ranking virus (for criticsrant.com) and I caught it. But then all of these link gadgets are viruses. They are soooo tempting.

The geniuses that read this blog may be interested to know that the actual generated HTML that I got does not contain references to cashadvance1500.com as stated in the article. Here is the actual text:

<a href="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/readinglevel/img/genius.jpg" alt="blog readability test" /></a><p><small><a href="http://www.criticsrant.com">Movie Reviews</a></small></p>

I can no longer remember what I trimmed out the first time.

Google reports right now that there are 10,800 pages that link to "http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx". Nice virus.

David

Change my clipboard?

Despite the fact that Jeff Atwood has some cool stuff on his keychain (and therefore obvious geek credibility), I am not entirely certain that I agree with his recent clipboard post.

His thesis is basically that it is about time to add some more functionality to the clipboard because, well, it is about time.

I am not so sure though. I would definitely want any new clipboard functionality to be very well thought out. Sometimes the power of an idea (clipboard, unix pipes) comes from its simplicity.

More often than not I find myself desperately wishing that I could remove functionality from my Windows clipboard. It used to be that every application supported a "paste special" function that was always available and worked smoothly, but that is no longer the case. I guess people found it confusing or something. Even applications that support "paste special" often have it greyed out at times when it would make sense for it to be available, or it has no good keyboard shortcut (in MS Word to paste plain text it is "alt-e, s, up-arrow, enter" - not exactly convenient. There are options if you want to go to some effort).

More than 99% of my copy/paste operations between applications are either pure unformatted text or image. To get the text functionality that I need I have to run PureText or keep a notepad window open, so that I can paste text there and re-copy it sans formatting. I would be very happy if only unformatted text and images worked between applications.

I don't want it to be more complex. I want it to be simpler.

On the other hand I can't find anything wrong with the idea of adding ClipX functionality. But I can already do that by installing ClipX (and I probably will if it doesn't conflict with anything else I run). Why change the operating system?

David

Antique Ouch

My grandfather once described this exact circuit as one that he used to train a dog not to pee on a certain post in front of a market. Needless to say this would not go over well today...

David

Cool Coffee Products

It is not that often that new products come out in the coffee world that are truly novel and potentially useful. I mean coffee and the art of drinking it is old.

But here are two.

The first and coolest is an espresso maker that is completely hand operated. It works kind of like a bicycle pump. I would love to see a non-pod option, but even with pods it blows my little camp stove-top espresso machine away.

The second is the "I am not a paper cup..." cup. Yes, it is just another travel mug and it isn't even as well insulated or as spill resistant as most. But I like it because it is a really nice visual design and because it is completely dishwasher safe. The last is important to me because I use a travel mug every single day. I am so tired of hand washing these things that there aren't words.

Tips for other dishwasher safe travel mugs will be appreciated.

David

Hiring Programmers

This is a great list of things to look for when hiring a computer programmer.

This, of course, should not be confused with a list of things to look for in a new hire in general. You have to add all of those on top (or you'll be mighty sorry).

These are the things I look for now when I interview someone, but I have never been this explicit about it. Maybe I'll make a checklist.

David

(here is an old related post)

How evil are you?

This is me:


How evil are you?
It probably has something to do with the conflict between my libertarian attitudes in general (1) and my fascist attitudes towards software development (2).

Or maybe it is because of my love of charcuterie. I'm not sure.

David

(1) So long as someone is not hurting anyone else they should be left alone to do whatever they want.
(2) There is a right way and a wrong way to develop software and if someone isn't doing it my way, they are probably doing it wrong.

Sweet, Sweet Reason

Why, oh why aren't there more people like Radley Balko?

Who? Yeah, well, I'd never heard of him either. But based on this article over on FOX News and this YouTube footage I like him. These are two of the best counters to the UIEGA that I have heard.

And of course I had to subscribe to Reason Magazine after that introduction to one of its Senior Editors.

My thanks to Bill's Poker Blog for pointing out the articles.

Always remember: UISGE is good, UIEGA is bad. (I really need to get a T-Shirt of that made)

David