Sometimes when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thomas Dichter has a critique of the overhype of microcredit. Picked up via BoingBoing and Futurismic. Yet microcredit is an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come to characterize much of development assistance – a widening gap between reality and propaganda. For […]
Jim Barton has an extensive article detailing the challenges faced in designing and rolling out the TiVo service. The two burdens that are probably most annoying to the user are a complex and difficult control interface and lack of reliability. Reliability is not just about whether a computer system functions or not. It encompasses expected
On the BBC, another article looking at the neglible impact of the US governement’s efforts to eradicate coca cultivation, despite spending $4 billion dollars since 2000. I especially like quote from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, who “insisted it was working” and more land was discovered to be under cultivation because the survey
The official World Cup fantasy game is announced. This isn’t a "pick the brackets" pool, more of a real fantasy game where you pick your squad of 23 players and gain points on their performance. Select a squad of 23 players, who you think will shine at the finals and decide on a formation, e.g.
The drupal site has a page on tuning server performance. While a few of the tips are specific to Drupal, the majority of them apply to anyone who’s using a LAMP server. Understanding LAMP performance. This LAMP performance study revealed that Apache is bandwidth limited, PHP is CPU limited, and MySQL is memory limited and
The dreadful allocation process for World Cup tickets is being looked into by the Observer. Suffice to say, and it should be no suprise, that the policy used by fifa benefits sponsors and the wealth at the expense of footie fans. Did you now, Coca-Cola, Budweirser, and McDonalds have one in six of all tickets
Sony is collaborating with Arsenal to equip their stadium with high-definition screens around their new stadium. I could see how these would be useful at a baseball or american football stadium, what with all the stoppages and down time during the game. I guess Arsenal fans can enjoy the high-def replays and keep up with
The NY Times has an article about Sunil Gulati, who’s taking the helm at the US Soccer Federation. Besides being an accomplished economist, he’s been involved with soccer from an early age, playing, coaching, and refereeing though high school. They get him to talk pretty frankly about the issues he has to deal with, not
D’oh, I had a huge post about my further experiences with Google Calendar but my dog ate it because my session timed out (yes its a bug I should fix, but generally I dont’ write very long posts). The summary, I like Google Calendar. I imported my ics file from Mozilla Sunbird with only
Google Calendar has launched if you want to check it out. There is also an overview of the features available. Will this be a compelling calendaring solution? After looking it over and checking out the website, I think it might be for me. I’ve setup DAV on apache before so that I can have a