U.S. Inquiry Cites Missteps in Iraqi Reconstruction.
As money runs out for Iraq's reconstruction, there is no clear source
for the additional funds needed to operate finished projects. By JAMES
GLANZ. [NYT > Home Page]

Issues for Young People and Blogging.

Some schools are asking students or creating policies requiring students to remove their blogs from the public internet.
The article
is about a Roman Catholic high school ordering its students to remove
personal blogs from the Internet. They are not talking about
censorship, they are trying to protect young people from
cyberpredators. I've heard [...]

'The Assassins' Gate': Occupational Hazards. In his chronicle of the Iraq war, George Packer describes a poorly planned and executed takeover of Iraq. By FAREED ZAKARIA. [NYT > Books]

The Vice President: In Indictment's Wake, a Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role.
The indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr. lifts a veil on how aggressively
the vice president's office fought to discredit Iraq war critics. By
ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT. [NYT > Home Page]

Learning to separate value from cost.
I
spent three years at the Copenhagen Business School to largely acquire
one skill: The ability to price something at its value, not cost, and
feel damn good about it. It sounds trivial, but it can be the hardest
thing. Russell Beattie gives you the guilt version:
Let me make an aside for a moment [...]

Mike Arrington's new stream.
Most of you know Mike as the editor of TechCrunch,
a phenomenal new weblog that tells the story of new web services,
written from the heart of SiliconValley. I met him for the first time
in a meeting in NY, in May, when we got together to talk about the sale
of weblogs.com.
Today Mike starts [...]

The top 5 red flags of software development.

“Wouldn’t it be easy to…” (the hidden cost of change)
“This shouldn’t take long” (artificial time frame)
“Can you make this small change real quick?” (“small” and “quick”)
“Before you finish X, could you do Y?” (the mental costs of interruption)
“Let’s push this today” (artificial scope)

[Signal vs. Noise]

Lind on “processing” failed states
Lind.
Another reason the WMD lie matters is that the real reason the
administration invaded Iraq, “to redesign the Middle East,” reveals
(officially) a truly breathtaking hubris, coupled to a monumental
ignorance of the region in question. Redesign the Middle East? What do
the Bushies think it is, a Chevrolet?

At it happens, the war [...]

Swan song?.

My first reaction to Delta to Eliminate Discount Carrier Song
was, “of course it failed.” It failed because they didn't burn their
bridges, didn't really commit, didn't do anything but a pale imitation
of Jet Blue.
But then I realized that Song wasn't a failure on at least one
level… it allowed a stodgy brown company to move [...]

Optimizing Rails Resource Usage.
Hi,
my name is Julik and I'm one of the new guest writers on the
TextDrive weblog. Jason has given me the privilege to talk a little
about performance-tuning Rails applications for deployment on TextDrive
or anywhere.
I've been doing Rails development since
April 2005 and have deployed 3 applications already, all for client
use. Since then I have [...]