Entries in category “Philosophy”
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Persistence
The last couple weeks have been rough, on a personal level. Nothing I can’t get through with a little help (and thankfully, there is help), but nothing particularly fun to get through, either. I’ve spent a lot of time going over and thinking about some old issues. Part of that has involved digging up a bunch of things I wrote years ago; a minor crisis occurred this past weekend when I tried to power up an old laptop — its hard drive is the only place certain archived emails ...
Advertising and me
Recently I received an email from a company that’s in the online advertising business; they run a network that places targeted ads on a collection of sites, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in running them here. I just finished writing a reply and, since I’ve gotten a couple such offers in the recent past, I figured it’s probably time to make a public statement of my policy toward ads on sites that I personally manage. It’s very simple:
I don’t run ...
The why and wherefore
So, let me straighten a few things out.
First off, this is my personal blog. What you see here is me speaking my own personal mind, and I neither represent nor want to represent anything larger: not Django, not Python web development, not my employer, not anything except me and whatever I feel like writing about. This is an important point to keep in mind, because I don’t have any claim to represent anything else:
- My role within Django consists almost entirely of bureaucracy. I’m not as smart ...
The future of web standards
The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days; Andy Clarke’s “CSS Unworking Group” seems to have opened the floodgates to expressions of dissatisfaction with the current method of progress (or lack thereof) in developing and standardizing new features for web developers and designers. Alex Russell’s “The W3C Cannot Save Us” and my friend and former colleague Jeff Croft’s “Do we need a return to the browser wars?” continue the theme, as does Stuart Langridge’s “Reigniting ...
Python framework design
Lately I’ve found myself being baited into the same old debate over and over and over again, and I’m getting tired of making the same arguments each time. Usually it begins with someone lamenting how Django is anti-community or too inflexible or generally suffering from a raging case of NIH. From there it progresses into people proclaiming how TurboGears or (more often) Pylons is objectively “better” because of how they’re designed, and how it would be nice for Django to follow their lead.
Before I go any ...
That’s not Popper!
In an entry posted the other day, Aaron Swartz expounded on a general observation that the “scientificness” (if I may coin a word) of a theory or discipline is roughly inversely proportional to the number of times the word “science” occurs in its name. Good examples include “creation science” and “Scientology”. This is certainly relevant material, and there are quite a few good, recent books on the subject (many of which, if you’re looking for an author to get into, have been written by Michael Shermer). But I couldn ...