The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

Hotsoup.com appears to be attracting some large names from all over the political spectrum, as promised.

Their press release today drops a few names: John McCain, Lance Armstrong, Lloyd Hill, Bob Buford, and Mary Shull.

In case you don’t recognize that last one, Mary Shull represents the group that Hotsoup is targeting. Hotsoup calls them Opinion Drivers. They’ve also been called Influencers or Trendsetters. Mary is a stay-at-home mom who is also a political activist with a 1500-person contact list. Recently, candidates and committees have been contacting her regarding using this viral marketing/social networking thing to their advantage.

Mary has become an Opinion Driver. She’s influential, and now her name is part of a national story. Whether Hotsoup can deliver on its promise to connect Opinion Drivers with Policymakers and reopen a democratic dialog remains to be seen, but it’s a pretty cool concept.

It’s difficult to explain how to become a talented programmer.

Sure it helps to know some logic design, some common tricks and structures, and the theory behind what works well and why. Ultimately though, the ability to write elegant code, without making mistakes stems from the ability to write code for a non-production environment until you’ve made all the mistakes you can make.

For people who love coding, this is a non-issue really. We code in our sleep; we dream of data structures and clean algorithms. If you don’t code in your sleep, it can help to get some practice. That’s where Code Kata comes in. Practice KataOne in as many languages as you like, until you find the best and fastest way of solving the problem. Some tricks may reveal themselves that you haven’t yet thought of.

As you progress, try more advanced code and share your techniques. Without these, it could be possible to write only a few hundred lines of code before putting something to use into the real world. Why not use these and make it a few thousand? We can all use some practice now and then!

Should we win the primary election in 31 days, life will get a good deal simpler for a while.

I will find myself forced to face the logistics of finding a reasonably priced apartment inside the beltway, for example.

I’m stuck at the moment between this one, which is rather nice, and this one which vaguely resembles a tenement, but is a brisk jog away from the Capitol.

It’s a common enough problem. Broadband Internet access is everywhere. Wireless routers are cheap and commodified, and no one turns on encryption by default. When encryption is turned on, it’s trivially insecure. This naturally means that some piggybacking is inevitable.

It’s long been a solution of mine to divide wireless traffic into a separate untrusted subnet to deal with the security issues, and then take a lazier faire attitude to the whole situation.

Others, apparently, are BOFH vigilantes. I may pick this one up myself.

Lest you thought that my 60+ hour weeks were purely altruistic, I thought I’d share a list of the 50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill.

That’s right. If nothing else, working for peanuts in Washington as a congressional aide should at least give me a better dating pool. That is if I have any time at all. I suppose winning the primary should be my first goal anyway.

Okay. When we win, look for me on the 2007 list.