From Industrial Radio Podcast #20:

I gotta make sure I make this announcement: The ladies dig industrial music. The women like Industrial Radio Podcast. And all of them like the host, Jon. And guys, don’t say otherwise, because they will kick your ass. I made that statement, I don’t know where I heard that from, I read it someplace that chicks don’t necessarily dig industrial music. Guess what: that article was wrong. Alright, ladies, it was wrong. I admit it, it was wrong; I was misinformed. I have a lot of female listeners, because a lot of you guys sent me e-mails — I got a ton of e-mails. So, guys, don’t say the gals don’t dig the music and the podcast and the host, because they’ll do, and they’ll kick your ass.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Sharrukin’s Palace » The Most Influential Conspiracy Theory You’ve Never Heard Of

This very interesting post traces the history of “Gnosticism” (see the post for why I put that in quotes), and its connection to modernism.

Keep this post in mind…I’m putting together some thoughts about modernism and reactionary calls for a New Enlightenment.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Coding Horror: Choosing Dual or Quad Core

Go. Read. Be Enlightened. Understand why the functional revolution is inevitable.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Another podcast that I listen to is WebDev Radio. One thing that was advocated over there is to strip out the whitespace and comments in order to save bandwidth, and thereby speeding up the web page. In particular, he advocates using a PHP function to apply a regular expression to shrink all whitespace down to a single space. I’ve heard this recommendation a bunch of times, but I don’t give it much credit.

The example he gives is a file that went from 31k to 27k. That means you’re saying 4k. Assuming worst-case scenario, where your users are reaching across a 56kbps modem to your site, that means you’re saving less than 1/10th of a second for the request and response. Meanwhile, you’re spending time in that PHP output stream munging, increasing load on your server, and reducing site performance overall.

So this stunt is probably not actually worth it. If you can get whitespace/comment stripping for literally free (no additional CPU cost), maybe. But if you’re in any kind of scripting environment (PHP/Perl), I’d be shocked if you actually gain anything. If you have to maintain your own code, it’s definitely not worth it to lose the readability.

Popularity: 3% [?]

While I talk about functionality vs. code, Venkat gets into “relevancy” in software development, and demonstrates that there’s a lot of code which isn’t business functionality.

Popularity: 2% [?]