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You must always caulk the wagon. Never ford the river.

I think it was a Thursday when I first saw Don's map. From Friday to Sunday, we discussed possibilities. I drew some rough flowcharts and set aside line number ranges for the various parts of the program. If I ran out of lines, I used subroutines to do some of the tasks instead of putting the code in-line. I wrote a lot of code on paper over the weekend.

Technical competence matters for managers.

The TL;DR is that technical competence is very important for managers in keeping their staff happy. From experience, I think this is true, but is really a couple of different things rolled together.

1) Understanding the work to be done means that it is more likely to be handed to workers over in a decent workable state (or it would be pushed back before they get to see it). This is effective delegation. Staff can get things done, the manager can support them and mentor as necessary, everybody is happy.

2) Conversely - Managers who want something done which they can’t do themselves will probably not communicate what they want in language and terms which make the task actually workable. This isn’t really delegating work at this point, it is much more of a client / consultant relationship. To me this means that there will probably need to be a couple of iterations to get to a solution.

The trick is to understand when you can delegate and support, and when you are really a client to your team so that you can get the best out of them. Too many times I’ve seen management criticising workers performance or micromanaging when really they are in a client/consultant workflow and it should be recognised as such.

#managing people

George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984, has suddenly surged to the very top of the Amazon's bestseller list. Though first published in 1949, it's back with a vengeance. And George only has the new administration to thank. We'll have more on Orwell's 1984 tomorrow.

There is a really interesting letter from George Orwell in which he talks about, well, I’ll just leave this quote here :

Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.

“Alternative Facts”

Related to the court judgement between Microsoft and the US DOJ - this is a tiny anecdote which says that the Indian Government wanted the ability to do a MITM attack on Facebook (anywhere in the world) for allowing them to host in the country.

Utterly staggering.

Outcome means hot-button privacy topic could reach US Supreme Court.

An evenly split federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that it won't revisit its July decision that allowed Microsoft to squash a US court warrant for e-mail stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland. The 4-4 vote by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage for a potential Supreme Court showdown over the US government's demands that it be able to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector.

Good news, lets hope that when this eventually reaches the Supreme Court that sanity will prevail.

As we close the door on 2016, I thought it would be useful to look back at the year gone by and ask a panel of my peers who pay attention to Apple and related markets to take a moment and reflect on Apple’s performance in the past year. This is th...

“All great companies struggle with who they are over time, and they have periods where it’s hard for them to connect with their audience,” said Rick LePage. “It seems as though Apple is in that place right now…. This is a company that has had one of the greatest boom cycles of any modern company I can think of, and I can’t imagine them being turned into a bit player in any way. I do think, however, that Apple needs to figure out how to reconnect with their diverse audiences of today, the ones that they’ve been able to connect with in the past over phones, Macs and music.”

I had the enormous honor of interviewing legendary game designer Rand Miller, the co-creator of MYST, Riven, and Obduction about how he made some of my all-t...

#needsound

A listener asked Ed Sheeran if he could sing the 'Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air' theme tune on the Capital Evening Show with Roman Kemp...and he didn't disappoint!...

#needsound

Or: How to stream video using 1.2 million console button presses per second.

After that, the scene somehow transitioned to a Skype video call with a number of speedrunners speaking live from the AGDQ event through the SNES.

No one on the AGDQ stage acknowledged how weird this all was, leaving hundreds in the Herndon, VA ballroom and nearly 200,000 people watching live on Twitch temporarily guessing at what, exactly, was going on.

I don’t normally embed videos, but when I do, it’s because they are of shows I am fond of..

#critical role

High-calorie drinks paradoxically switch on hunger circuitry in mice.

In boozy mouse brains, alcohol specifically turned on hunger-signaling neurons that are usually only activated by starvation. With the neurons activated, the tipsy rodents ate like party animals. When researchers deactivated them, the mice stuck with their normal diets.

“Honestly, watching the movie would just be a let down after this. https://t.co/EVgRNk4iIz”

Just. Just awesome.

#needsound

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in…

‘He lies like an eyewitness.’ Russian proverb.

Myles Sr. pauses, takes a heavy breath, and shrugs. On the mantel behind him is a picture of Zac sitting in the back of a pickup, cradling the ten-point buck. When he speaks again, his voice is a stew of pride and guilt: “He was my type of guy.”

Liberty seeks funding from supporters of legal challenge against bulk spying powers.

The UK government's recently enacted Investigatory Powers law faces a fight from human rights group Liberty, which has launched an appeal to crowdfund a legal challenge against what it described as "indiscriminate state spying" on Brits.

It comes just weeks after the so-called Snoopers' Charter suffered a sizeable setback when the European Union's top court ruled that the "general and indiscriminate" retention of citizen's data communications was unlawful where it's being slurped for anything other than serious crime cases.

The home office told Ars in December that it was disappointed with that ruling—which followed a challenge to the government's Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) that was rushed through in 2014, after the EU's Data Retention Directive was found to be invalid—adding that it would submit "robust arguments" to the Court of Appeal in its defence of those sweeping powers.

Perfect supervillain dialogue

#needsound

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