The tweet was deleted about 40 minutes after it was posted, which was even more silly than posting it in the first place. If you screw up in public, you recover in public. Don't just try to pretend it didn’t happen.

ORLY?

As both the owner of what is almost certainly the world’s largest general purpose computing cluster, and our self-nominated bastion against evil, I really hope someone at Google is keeping an eye on this.

Two hours after I wrote it, my blog post is in the index and showing up in search results. That’s just a little uncanny. It’s not even as if I update my blog that often any more.

I've touched on this before.

Say you're arguing with someone and there is a flaw in their reasoning, but you also know that their argument could be reformulated to avoid that flaw. If you attack their argument as is, you'll either win a hollow victory with an argument that you know is faulty or you'll just prolong the debate as your opponent makes the obvious adjustment. It's the kind of thing you do when you're more interested in scoring cheap debating points than actually advancing the sum total of human understanding.

Not that there isn't a time and place for scoring cheap debating points.

Beyond straight argument, the principle of charity can provide a nice set of assumptions that help streamline interactions with other human beings.

1. Assume intelligence. The person you are talking to has a brain, and knows how to use it.
2. Assume honesty. The person you are talking to honestly believes what they are saying.
3. Assume diligence. The person you are talking to, when given a task, will approach it with rigour and attempt to complete it to the best of their ability.

You could be wrong on any of these, that's why they're called assumptions. Ultimately, however, you're better off assuming the best and then adjusting your behaviour if you are proven wrong than you are starting off believing people are stupid, dishonest and lazy.

A very simple example. Someone else is working on a problem, and I think of a very simple solution. Do I walk over and ask “Did you think of X?”

If I do, I've just violated assumptions 1 and 3. If I could think of a simple solution, then someone else who is both intelligent and already diligently working on the problem is likely to have already thought of that answer and discarded it for some reason. Chances are I'm not even the first outsider to have suggested it.

If I rephrase the question as “So why didn’t you go with X?”, I’ve gone from assuming ignorance on their part to assuming I'm the one missing something. If X turns out to be something they didn’t think of after all, it’s a surprise for us both, and I sound a lot less condescending.

Now all I have to do is remember this sort of thing in practice.

Vegemite is very much an acquired taste; strong and salty. Those of us who love it tend to have either been indoctrinated as children or convinced by friends or family to work through the initial ‘what the hell is THAT?’ reaction.

After some research you come up with a new product that you believe is friendlier to the unfamiliar palate. You hope that this product will bring you new customers, and maybe even act as a gateway to lure people to try the original flavour. So how do you get people to notice?

Some publicity is a given. Any update on a product that is in some ways synonymous with Australia will make it into the nightly news bulletin and the daily paper. If you grease the right palms you might even get a longer segment on a week-night current affairs show. But you're ambitious. Can you make your product launch occupy not one tiny corner of one news cycle, but a whole week of headlines? What about a month of them?

Well, this week we found out.

1. Hold a competition to name your new product. That will get you on the news on release day, then a few mentions throughout the competition.
2. When the competition ends, choose the worst name possible
3. For extra points, pick a name that will be annoy people on the Internet, because ‘people on Twitter are upset’ is a flavour-of-the-month story
4. For extra extra points, play on nationalistic outrage by announcing your new name for that most Australian of products during the Australian Rules Football grand final
5. Once you've wrung as much attention as you can out of the “naming debacle”, apologise profusely for your “mistake” and announce a new competition to pick the real name from a pool of obvious candidates.
6. Finally, announce the new name

‘iSnack 2.0’ was so obviously a name for the week, not a name for the ages. What I find most amusing is that the current generation of consumers are, at least if you ask them, so much more cynical of marketing ploys. We're more clued in to how the media works and the Internet has taught us to mistrust authority and question everything we read.

Yeah, right. Someone in Kraft marketing is on track for a pretty big bonus this year.

For those coming in late, Google Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer that embeds the entire Chrome web rendering engine inside IE. Site authors can include a simple meta tag in their HTML that will tell the browser to use Chrome to render the page instead of IE.

(Let's ignore for a moment that when Microsoft introduced a meta tag that changed IE8s rendering mode, the web went apeshit.)

Ask any web developer and they'll tell you the biggest millstone around the neck of the web is Internet Explorer 6. Ask browser users, and they'll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can't upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won't let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they'll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6.

Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades, something Microsoft occasionally promised but never managed to deliver. In doing so, they've cheekily cut Microsoft out of the upgrade path of their own web browser.

Dear corporate IT departments. Your last tie to IE6 has just been neatly routed around. At my most conservative estimate you have twelve to eighteen months to either bite the bullet and adopt a real modern browser, or make Google Chrome Frame part of your default desktop image. Beyond that, I guarantee large chunks of the public web are going to stop working for you.

‘They’ are trying to keep us calm by telling us it's a dust storm, but I'm not so sure…

Next day, the dawn was a brilliant, fiery red and I wandered through the weird and lurid landscape of another planet; for the vegetation which gives Mars its red appearance had taken root on Earth. As Man had succumbed to the Martians, so our land now succumbed to the Red Weed. (*)

Foreach takes probably the most common use of Smalltalk blocks, the internal iterator, and creates a syntactic special-case for them. Once again, it's a band-aid solution. Foreach removes the annoying duplicated syntax for the simplest case, but it does nothing to give programmers the chance to remove duplication on the more complex cases.

So it seems now for Java 7, closures having been dropped from the roadmap, it's time to apply the next band-aid. This time the recipient is the next in the line of usual suspects, resource management:

Absent a language change, you must close resources manually. That is why Java’s competitors have automatic resource management constructs (C# has using blocks and C++ has destructors).

Back to me from seven years ago:

Once foreach is implemented, the precedent has been set: whenever the lack of [closures] causes us to lag behind C#, don't fix the underlying problem, work around it with a variant on what we have already.

The funniest part, of course, is that C# 3.0 has had closures (or at least succinct lambda expressions with type inference) since 2007.

Can we get an export of our DATA, eg. which tr.im urls goto what fullsize URLS?

So that I can rewrite the thousands of links in my blog which point to tr.im soon to be nowhere.

— A comment on the blog post announcing the closure of tr.im

I’m pretty sure this isn't the last URL-shortening service to be closing its doors over the next year or so.

1. New product is set to unseat market leader
2. Company is about to be bought by another company
3. Apple might be doing something cool, but we don’t know for sure

All other stories must be spun until they fit one or more of these narratives.

“We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.” — Steven Metalitz, legal representative of the American motion picture and record industry associations, in a letter to the Copyright Office.

Required? Of course not. But both Apple and Amazon prefer DRM-free content in their music stores as consumers learned repeatedly that any music they bought could stop playing just because the company they bought it from lost interest in the market. That same lesson is now being relearned by early adopters of electronic books.

Required? No. But if you don't sell products people want to purchase at a price they’re willing to pay, you’re going out of business,. Unmourned.

I've always balked at writing such a letter myself because, after stumbling through my borderline depressive self-loathing 20’s, I've managed to turn against all odds into somebody I'm quite happy being. There are all sorts of things I could have done better, mistakes I could have avoided and different directions I could have taken, but all the things I've done wrong contributed as much to who I am today as the things I did right. If I changed them I'd be somebody else, and I don't want to be somebody else any more.

Sure, I could go back and tell my teenage self not to give up playing the piano, but would that just leave me in my 30’s dreading another gig in the bar of some hotel waiting for the inevitable tooth-grinding moment some drunk tourist requests ‘Piano Man’ for the sixty thousandth time? Would I hunch over the keys, bang out those first chords and wish to my core I could go back in time and advise my teenage self to teach himself Perl?

So I pondered. And I thought. And I finally came up with the one important, nay vital bit of advice I would give myself if I had the chance.

Charles,

This is your future self. I'm 33 now and I've been given the opportunity to reach back in time and give you one piece of advice. You won't understand it today but if you hold it close to your heart you will one day thank me for it.

Whatever you do, prefer composition over inheritance.

See you in 17 years,

Charles.

Colour me not particularly surprised. A couple of days ago I spotted this advertisement gracing the right-hand side of my Facebook page:

“Wait a minite!” I thought. “That fellow in the picture looks remarkably familiar. I wonder if I can find something like it on the Internet?”

If you were playing at home, you’re absolutely right. It's Edward Norton playing a skinhead murderer in the movie American History X. That little black blob carefully cropped out of the frame? A swastika tattoo.

Oh dear.

Reputable sites often run disreputable adverts, but generally they blame their provider and take steps to avoid the offending ads appearing again. Facebook, though, is the provider. The fact that this sort of thing is a par for the course on the site is a bad sign. It suggests Facebook is so desperate to get anyone to advertise that they can’t afford to exercise any quality control.