You should not ever have to figure this out: the difference between the Unix and Visual Basic epochs is 2212147696. This will come in handy if you ever find yourself in a position where you need to call VB methods from Perl, and then process the date in Perl. I, for example, find myself compelled [...]
So this particular video has gone completely viral amongst the newspapers-are-hilariously-dead crowd: To-dos for you: Advance to 0:28. Compare to this picture, which I took earlier today: Advance to 0:31. Note that the framed pictures in the background are, at this very moment, hanging on my boss’ wall. You may now enjoy the rest of [...]
Thursday, January 1, 2009
I’ve been trying to put together some thoughts on a new model for news businesses. I’ve run in to a couple problems: lack of data jargon The publication I work for is privately owned, so financial information is hard to come by. I’ve looked around for what other “knowledgeable” people might think, and it turns [...]
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008
2. The culture of newspaper management is a dysfunctional relic of a low-bandwidth, monopoly era. It still hasn’t adapted to the lessons of Web 2.0, it’s generally beholden to a short-term stock price instead of a long-term re-investment strategy and it simply refuses to accept that you can’t expect 20 profit margins in a competitive [...]
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Monday, December 15, 2008
A while ago Julian sent me this list of reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news. I’ve elected to give it a little more analysis than I did initially, given a few months recent tenure at a daily newspaper. 1. Newspapers’ core audience still doesn’t want change, but they’re aging and they like a product that [...]
Thursday, November 20, 2008
I was sure I had already posted this, but a search reveals I have not. Here is another commandment: Thou shalt not use mail to send data. In my work for a Major Media Organization (Major Metro Media Organization?) we support the publication of horse racing results and betting lines. As a non-betting person I [...]
OK more commandments. In no particular order: Thou shalt not put database connect() statements inside a loop. For real people! If you have a loop on a page, and it has a connect statement inside it, and you use pconnect() (we’re talking PHP, for what it’s worth), you should not disconnect after every iteration of [...]
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I hate to rag on people for not having technical skill or knowledge, but when your title is “Senior Technical Lead for Content Management” you don’t get a free pass. And when you also happen to be a professional, pinkie-ring wearing engineer, that raises my expectations too. I expect that you understand some basics about [...]
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
For the past two years, my job has had me intimately involved with things that start with http://. In this capacity, I have seen some pretty striking things done in ways that I could never have imagined would seem appropriate to anyone. So I’m starting to collect commandments. I found a couple links on the [...]