Monthly Archives: January 2010

Review: Where Men Win Glory

Books, Reviews, Uncategorized, , , , ,
I’ve finished Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory: The Oddysey of Pat Tillman” in the air above the middle of America and I’m furious.  This story begins with the hero dying and it ends with his betrayal by the people who promised us all they would put our interests above theirs.
Krakauer builds a sculpture out of words, and it is an angry art.  In a flat, journalistic style he begins with the creation of Pat Tillman, the birth of the Taliban, and the disturbing story of their meeting in the Graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.   Instead of the hero meeting his enemy and vanquishing or being vanquished, he is destroyed by the common fuckups of scores of lesser men. He is part of a string of other common tragedies and Krakauer pulls together the infuriating betrayal of Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and scores of other men and women of the US Armed Forces by their leadership, carving a bleak relief of giants mired up to their knees in a vast, broken septic system.
The horrible coverup of his death is a crime that’s gone unpunished, and it’s only come to light because Tillman was a famous football player.  Joe and Jane Smith get no such scrutiny, and fall into the trash heap of history.
If you care about honor, this is a good book. If you care about truth or valor, this is a good book.  It’s well written, with a slow, burning build up that leads to an ashfield.  Because this is a story about real life, the villains are not caught, the hero isn’t crowned and the story doesn’t end at the climax.  If you’ve got friends in the US Armed Forces, please make sure that they read this.  When we send our heroes to war we know that they might die, but we don’t expect that they will be used so cheaply and with so little respect.

Mixins, Django, Python and adding to Models

Dev, Django, Python, , , , ,

I’m working with my buddy ADubs, esq. on a project where we make it easier to add federation to various models. We’re properly lazy programmers, so we don’t want to rewrite federation for each model we are creating, we just want to mix it in as a general set of functionality.  Below the fold, more details, sample code, etc.
Continue reading Mixins, Django, Python and adding to Models →

The NYC Government IT has given up.

Dev, Incentives, Pals, , , ,

My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.

Retweet by DOT of 311's tweet that parking rules are suspended

Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there.   The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses.  IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.

So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.

How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it

Pals, User Experience, , , , , , , , ,

The problem with Software as a Service is you don’t own it.

You get it for free, but you don’t have a stake and you don’t have negotiating power.  Instead, try to work with services that give you an exit plan or that have the safety stamp of an aGPL license. 1

Who cares?

Vim pretties up with the Vivid Chalk theme.Let me back up and tell you a story about a social network I created.  Two big-time development bloggers, Jeff and Scott, were writing posts back and forth about how what colors they liked in their text editors and what fonts they used.

I’m not kidding, this is important in a job where most of what you do is sip coffee and type.  I’ve certainly killed some time messing about with how I color my  source code. Continue reading How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it →

  1. The Autonomo.us project has a great list of alternatives that either AGPL or CC or something you can use.  Check out this guide to replacing what you are using now with services that keep you free.  (back)

How to make money from market volatility

Economics, Get.rich.quick, Money, Pals, , , , , ,

A friend recently wrote me about a strategy he heard for exploiting market volatility.  I get these questions sometimes because I’m in finance, and because I’m in finance let me be up front.  I’m not giving you financial advice here.  I’m not an advisor, I’m not competent, you should probably close this page now and burn your computer.  Past performance has no correllation with future performance, as everyone should have learned in, oh, 2008.

That said, let’s have a little fun with these ideas.  To paraphrase my pal’s email:

Apologies in advance for what I hope is a not-too-complicated financial question.  So you ever heard of something called volatility drag?  Something to do with how over time double- and triple-leveraged ETFs always lose money. I found an investment opportunity that uses this principle to make money.  The pitch I heard says that the strategy is sound and has data to back it up since the 90s.  I find it hard to believe that something that automatically mints you money (admittedly at a “watching paint dry” pace) exists, yet it seems so from what I can tell…

I hadn’t heard of volatility drag before but it was fun to learn about.  Under the fold:  Charts! Definitions! Sage Advice! Links to books!

Continue reading How to make money from market volatility →