I would rather ask my clients to spend their money wisely on things that will improve their business, than to waste it on hours of unnecessary development.

From Andy Clarke at Stuff and Nonsense.

I completely agree. The rest of the article is cool, too, by the way.

Being a programmer sometimes has interesting side-effects on every-day situations.

Today, for instance, I was doing a lot of automation related programming, and some basic shell scripting. Only the shell scripting was really out of the ordinary. I arrived home after work, and found a nice frozen treat to hold me over until the movies tonite. It’s instructions called for defrosting before cooking. My first instinct was to somehow script the microwave to defrost for a time, then immediately begin cooking.

It was almost reactionary to the thought of having to come back to the kitchen to interact with the microwave a second time.

Perhaps I’ve been working too hard?

http://simonwillison.net/2008/May/22/debugging/

Includes:

• Making the most of the error page
• Logging to the development server console
• Using the debugger (pdb)
• Handling errors in production

How many feeds can a speed reader read if the speed reader does read feeds?
Not as many feeds as my Feed Reader feeds, so I’m deleting a bunch of subscriptions.
That last line didn’t rhyme, sorry.

Okay, so most anti-piracy methods are rediculous and annoying. There are plenty of arguments and stances to take on DRM in music and software, but let’s leave that for another conversation. Despite rather the very existence of such a thing might make youi grind your teeth, let’s step aside from our own opinions for a minute and answer this question:

What’s the coolest anti-piracy method you’ve seen or heard of?

For instance:

… The City, also featured a novel anti-copying technique. The program disks could be copied though the standard methods and the copy would appear to work. However not long after the player began the game, their character would become weaker and weaker and then die from an apparent disease. The Dungeon, if loaded with a pirated copy, featured two “FBI agents” as encounters during the beginning of the game, who attacked with “the long arm of the law”. The two agents were overly powerful and unbeatable, so as to kill the character before being able to play the game.

Link.

Doh!

 
At this point, whatever the DRM or anti-piracy method, to come up with something like that is pretty crafty – and funny. So what’s yours?