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I was given free access to a review copy of this set of videos a while ago, but I held off on actually reviewing it because it seemed very likely that they hadn’t quite posted the entire thing yet. The rest has been added now, so I can go ahead and talk about it without worrying about it being incomplete!

Bash is both probably the most popular shell for most Linux and Unix and similar systems, and also a scripting language that’s used with the shell. This set of videos focuses on the scripting part by taking you through all of the major topics that you need to write a Bash script.

You’ll have a much easier time of it if you already have some comfort with the basic principles of working on the command line. He touches very briefly on what regular shell commands do as they come up, but command line novices aren’t the target audience here and will probably be overwhelmed by how much information they would need to absorb.

The nice thing about these videos is that you’re hearing his explanations of why he’s doing everything as it happens along with the chance to see all of the interaction that’s happening with the shell and how it responds at each step. There are good written tutorials of Bash out there for free, so watching these definitely isn’t necessary for learning shell scripting. Still, if your learning style leans more toward the auditory and visual, Great Bash will be a great resource in making the topic understandable.

There’s a lot that’s interesting about the early days of Google from both business and technology perspectives, but what grabbed me about this interview with an early Google employee is that when he’s asked about Google’s issues with privacy objections, he reframes it as a problem of rationality:

Google doesn’t have enough irrational people working there, and the rest of the world doesn’t have enough rational people occupying it.

The point that he comes around to is that, even if it isn’t strictly factually accurate that having Google automatically scan your email for keywords in order to choose the advertising it shows, people still feel like their privacy has been invaded. The unusually rational bunch of people who control a lot of the decision making at Google have difficulty grasping the fact that perception might as well be reality when it comes to how people react on an issue like this, and so they get themselves into trouble.

My mind went straight back to that article when I saw this claim today that half of the people who’ve used government social programs think they haven’t. There are some statistics about how many people who have benefited from different types of programs still think they’ve never gotten any social program benefits, but that’s not really the main thing that interested me here.

In the comments, you can see that people get into debating details like what constitutes a social program and what counts as getting benefits. Some of them actually are a little arguable, but the most interesting part to me is the stark line that people try to draw between the idea of the government sending you money and the government not taking the money to begin with (e.g. tax credits).

In the strictly mathematical and rational sense, whether I give someone $5 with an agreement that they were discounting it from $10 or I give them $10 and get $5 back afterward, we’re in effectively the same situation. The emotional nature of the exchange is very different in those two cases, though.

I’ve been busy for the past couple of months and not commenting on much, but I’m very curious what we’re going to be looking at as Google+ evolves.

Facebook may be losing popularity in some areas without any help from Google. Meanwhile, people are apparently trying to sell the opportunity to access Google+ via eBay.

It may very well go this way, at least in some circles.

I’m not saying that it’s a meaningful comparison that Facebook is losing users for its free service while there’s a sort of black market developing for access to Google’s, but I bet there are some comedians out there who are playing this situation for humor value.

It looks like they’ve been working on this for a while, so it seems like they just got very lucky that they happened to hit their launch at a time when Facebook is already showing some weakness. If the service turns out to be as good as some reviews are saying, there could be a lot of entertainment value coming up in watching how Facebook reacts.

I went out to participate in the untimed adult portion of the Race for the Cure today. My mother decided that she wanted me to go with her, and since she paid the registration I went along with it.

Considering the size of the event, it’s amazing that they manage to pull off the logistics. Bringing that many people into a city all at about the same time and arranging to have them park and get themselves to the right places so that they can do their various parts of the event must take a lot of work and a serious sense of organization.

If I ever go there again, I think I may have to try the timed run.

The book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is basically a collection of essays by a variety of skilled programmers who are each offering their personal view on the topic of what all programmers should know.

As you’d expect from such a large collection of authors, the value of the result is mixed. Some of the essays will probably be arguing for ideas that you hadn’t really considered, while others are probably things that every remotely competent programmer already knows (at least in theory!).

In a weird way, it’s actually the latter case where the book might actually be most beneficial. Some of the ideas offered are obvious, but easily forgotten. For example, the focus of chapter 3 is “Ask, “What Would the User Do?” (You Are Not the User)”. While almost anyone who’s ever written a program would probably agree that the goal of a program is to be intuitive and easy for the users, I think we’ve all had the dubious pleasure of using programs where it seems as if the user was given no thought at all. Even if this kind of idea isn’t at all new to you, it doesn’t exactly hurt to be reminded of it.

The essays in the book are licensed under the creative commons, and available through a website run by O’Reilly, so you can take a look at a few essays if you like to get a sense of whether it would be of value to you or not personally. I actually worked from an electronic copy that O’Reilly provided for review purposes, but I had looked over some of the essays on the website beforehand.

I put a new post up earlier this month over at BethLynn’s What Will We Use? blog, and then I forgot to mention it! It’s just a bit of speculation on Microsoft wanting to cut piracy in China and whether that — assuming they can even succeed — will do them more good by getting them more paying users than it will do harm by driving people to other products.

O’Reilly let me use a copy of the 1.1 version of their HTML 4 & 5 reference app so that I could have a chance to review it, and I was really impressed by its quality. It has both search and browse options to make it easy to find a feature, and you have the option of limiting yourself to HTML 4.01 or HTML 5 if you have a special need to stick to a single version. It includes information about elements, attributes, and character sets.

In addition to the listings that you can search and browse, there are other interesting features. For example, there’s a section that breaks down the elements by the type of task that you’re trying to do. This should make it easy to find what you want even when you’re a novice who isn’t quite sure what you’re looking for. I could also see the other listings being useful for learning since they just show the name of the element until you tap on them, which could be a good way to quiz yourself.

If you’re doing web development and you want something that will help you learn and reference information quickly, this is a useful tool at a great price compared to what you’d have to pay for a book and a lot easier to use on a touch screen than your typical reference website. It works with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Someone offered up a nice summary of thoughts when someone doesn’t respond on IM. He spends some time on handling these situations in a way that will make it more comfortable for everybody, but he only briefly references an interesting part of the problem.

Surprisingly, with all the technology we have to date, a lot of those IM clients don’t always update your online/ offline status in real time, so one can’t always tell if you dropped off before you got the last message.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t really thought about it much before, but it IS awfully strange that we’re so bad at keeping people up to date on whether the other side is available on a medium that presents itself as real-time communication. I’m honestly not really sure whether it would be better to pursue a better system of keeping track of connections (which would probably require a lot more traffic spent on just checking in with various clients) or if we’re just better off with a system that’s more like text messaging where it’s understood that the messages will arrive and be handled, but there’s not so much expectation that the response will be immediate.

Either way, this is a great point on a place where messaging systems could be doing better.

Programming Python is a book designed to take people who know Python and guide them on how to actually make it do things in the real world. It’s important to note that the material in here (In the December 2010 4^th edition) is for 3.X versions of Python only, so you’ll be better off with an earlier edition of the book if you’re working on a project that needs to work under earlier versions of Python.

The amount of information here is gigantic, and includes sample code to some degree on practically every page. I was working from an ebook that O’Reilly gave me access to as a review copy, and I can imagine how unwieldy the actual physical book must be given the 1600+ page count. If you prefer to buy hard copies of books, this is definitely not going to be the quick reference book that you carry around in your back pocket.

Since it’s so focused on how to actually use Python code to accomplish specific tasks, the best thing about Programming Python is that it comes from O’Reilly. It shares their usual policy for programming books that you’re welcome to reuse the code samples in your own projects, and the publisher also publishes errata for all of their books.

If you need a guide on how to do just about anything from creating a GUI to interfacing with an SQL database, Programming Python is a remarkably thorough resource. You can get more information and download example code from the Programming Python catalog page.