Quoderat

I’ve just uploaded a spreadsheet of country codes (plain HTML view) to Google documents and spreadsheets. The spreadsheet includes ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, alpha-3, and numeric codes together with FIPS 10-4 codes, and the country names as provided in each spec. I originally created it to help me map FIPS to ISO codes from some air navigation data.

I’m interested in online data collaboration — what tools people need, how it will work in practice, etc. — and this seems like an easy way to experiment. If you’d like to make any corrections to the spreadsheet, let me know, and I’ll add you as a collaborator. I might also upload some spreadsheets of general geodata in the future, where there’s more opportunity for contributions.

Josh Kenzer has posted an interview with Alex Payne, a developer for Twitter, which is one of (if not the) biggest Ruby on Rails-based web apps.

A couple of years ago, when I was getting tired of working within the confines of the Java/J2EE bubblesphere, I tried out PHP and Ruby on Rails, intended to like Rails; instead, I surprised myself by preferring PHP, an ugly hack of a language optimized for script kiddies (I’ve been using it ever since). It looks like Payne is coming to the same conclusion, as his team has ended up working to keep Twitter running despite RoR instead of because of it. Here is an excerpt:

All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

There’s lots more in Kenzer’s posting, including Payne’s claim (I don’t know enough to verify) that Rails cannot support more than one database at once, and that “Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues — issues that any growing site eventually contends with — far sooner than I think we would on another framework.”.

Elliotte Rusty Harold is right that anonymity goes together with freedom, and I was happy to read his excellent posting How to Blog Anonymously. Rusty distinguishes three different kinds of anonymity — roughly “I don’t want to be embarrassed”, “I don’t want to be fired”, and “I don’t want to be hauled out of my bed by the secret police and shot” — and talks about the steps necessary to achieve each one.

Granted, anonymity has its ugly sides, like the disgusting online threats against Kathy Sierra and online abuse of Maryam Scoble, but it’s also sometimes the only conduit around the abusive authority of a government, employer, or even one’s peer group. As even Western democratic governments have become more authoritarian since 9/11, keeping these conduits open is more important than ever.

Granted, 99% or more of anonymous information is simply stupid or malicious, but if that’s the cost of freedom, it’s a relatively small cost to pay compared to the sacrifices our ancestors made to win us the freedoms in the first place.