Saturday, April 12, 2003

Source: Troutgirl weblog One of the hardest habits for me to break after leaving academia was the drive to argue someone into the ground. That's definitely the way we were taught -- to show no mercy, to rip arguments to shreds by any means necessary, to fight back with everything we had if attacked in our turn. Every so often one of the female grad students would whine about how unsupportive and unnecessarily competitive the program was -- but those were the girls who invariably ended up stabbing you in the back anyway, so no one listened to them. Basically we were like battlebots, designed and deployed to kill, kill, kill! It took me a long time to internalize the fact that outside grad school, that's usually not a productive habit. It makes people dislike you. It comes across as unusually hostile and insecure rather than unusually smart. And in the workaday world, you need other people's skills and ideas -- often the more different they are from yours, the more you need to listen to them. You can write a book or teach a class solo; but to build a larger organization, it turns out to be supremely unhelpful to leap on your colleagues like a crazed wolverine every time they express a thought that seems weak to you. Who knew? Now, I'm not going to lie -- it's not like I dropped out of my PhD program and suddenly morphed into Gandhi. But I did learn a few techniques over time. Like: a lot of times it's more efficient to let your opponents have their way so their idea can fail more quickly, rather than arguing about it endlessly. Also: since I'm now roughly as stupid or smart as I'm ever going to be, what's the point of being insulted if someone calls me an idiot? Further: there are people who you can argue productively and amusingly with -- as soon as they say, "Well, I don't agree with you", you're running to buy them a fresh drink in anticipation of the fun to come -- and people it's pointless and unfun to argue with. And finally: that ultimately perhaps gladiatorial combat is easier and less interesting than self-revelation. This is by way of saying that I've gotten more blog-driven email in the past few weeks than I probably got in the last year. Quite a bit of it was flamage, although I got a lot of encouraging messages too. I don't know why anyone would conclude that I'm an idiot who's never known any H1Bs, a conservative, someone who is committed to silencing ideas I don't agree with, a naive racist, a paid lackey of some corporate interest, or any of the other things the flamers have suggested. I was going to reply, but the more I thought about it the less I could see why I should go to any effort to defend some idea or image or projection that has no relationship to anything I've actually said or represented myself to be. That doesn't mean you have to agree with me or even be nice to me, but I'm always kind of disappointed by the low quality of the flames I get. I do my best to write entertainingly on this site, and I don't think it's too much to ask that the haters put a bit of extra effort into their prose style in response. Perhaps it would be helpful if I offered a few tips: If you want to hurt someone, your arrows must hit the mark. It's better to make one simple charge that's on the money than wildly throw up a gazillion incorrect observations hoping one might stick. Go through your flame and excise every line starting with "You obviously..." unless you have unmistakeable proof of the rest of the sentence. If you start right out with the unsubstantiated personal assumptions and they turn out to be totally wrong, it casts doubt on your grip on reality. Overt paranoia is never good when you're trying to make a point. You don't want to sound like a nutjob, do you? Self-righteousness and clunky prose go together like green eggs and ham, especially in America. The British have a much more noble tradition of real viciousness that's still energetic and fun to read. Learn from the masters. Shorter is sweeter, especially if you're not a very good writer. It's no good if your victim's adrenaline hit has worn off by the middle of your 27KB screed and now they can't even be bothered to finish it. Flames often have extra-long paragraphs which defeat the punchy effect you're shooting for. Break it up every 4 or 5 sentences. Run it through the spell-checker, especially if you're making derogatory comments about the person's intelligence, education, or grasp of detail. Be sure to maintain plenty of email addresses and preferably domains so you can attack again after they get blocked. Hope these tips help you construct a more effective nastygram. Happy flame-throwing! 9:09:04 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Programmer vs. Developer. Programmer vs. Developer: My sister once asked me what the difference was between a programmer and a software developer. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I wrote her this reply: Programmer: A biological machine designed to convert caffeine into code. Developer: A person who develops working systems by writing and using software. [Hmmm, I'm not happy with these...] * [Archipelago] | 2:09:33 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Curiouser and curiouser!; 4/12/2003; 8:42:30 AM Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0. Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification.  ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds.  Why would you want to do that?  Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products. RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well.  We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications.  I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do: group posts from many feeds by interest. filtering posts I don't want to see scoring & promote posts recombine different feeds dynamically. I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer.  We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data. We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a Creative Commons License) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet. I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant.  At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed.  We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it. We look forward to your comments. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 1:59:32 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Keith's Weblog; 4/12/2003; 8:58:32 AM URL design. Via Simon, via Column Two, Pixelcharmer: Cool URI's. I even went through my archives and she has every link I've ever had on URL design and more. So, I hope she won't mind, but I'm just going to quote her whole list: * The User Interface of URLs (Paul E. Hoffman, 1995) * Cool URI's Don't Change (Tim Berners-Lee 1998) * URL's as UI (Jakob Nielsen, 1999) * URL's URL's URL's (Bill Humphries. 2000) * How to Succeed with URL's (Till Quack, 2001) * Making URLs accessible (Peter Seebach, 2001) * User-Centered URL Design (Jesse James Garrett, 2002) * Designing URIs (2003) Thanks Tanya. [Keith's Weblog] 9:01:17 AM    trackback []     Articulate []