Blog Day 2008

The 4th Blog Day was held yesterday, but I was too busy to notice this, so my contribution was postponed to today.

More information about the yearly Blog Day.

I apologize to my fellow Hebrew language blog writers for not mentioning any Hebrew language blog this time. To my defense, I’ll point out the common denominator of the following blog recommendations. They all deal with various aspects of bullshit. Good and bad stories about disaster recovery (some of the bad cases are accompanied by bullshit), bullshit as “security theater” (which is a nefarious kind of bullshit), IT project failures (again, frequently due to bullshit), amusing software related bullshit stories, bullshit gadget designs, and bullshit in general.

  • Amanda Ripley’s Blog
    Amanda Ripley wrote the book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why” about behavior of people, who were caught in natural and human-made disasters. Her blog expands upon the theme of disaster recovery.
  • Schneier on Security
    Bruce Schneier is the foremost computer security expert in the world, and is also the author of the book “Applied Cryptography”. His theme is that security is a system property. No technological means assures security if there is a security vulnerability in the rest of the system. He blogs, among other things, about stupid security policies.
    Not related to security, he blogs also about his hobby – squids.
  • IT Project Failures
    Informs the readership about big IT project failures and their causes.
  • Worse Than Failure
    Amusing stories about the foibles of less than top notch computer professionals and software developers.
  • Commonsense Design
    This blog has the slogan: “Nathan Zeldes writes on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design”. I cannot improve upon this slogan.
  • The War On Bullshit
    Opinions, which are sometimes politically incorrect, about various bullshit attitudes in sociology and politics.

Blog Day 2007

Today it’s the 3rd Blog Day.

More information about the yearly Blog Day.

Five of the blogs, which I read and recommend are:

  • Freedom to Tinker (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) – … is your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.
  • Lauren Weinstein’s Blog (http://lauren.vortex.com/) – about Internet topics, privacy and other issues relating to technology and society. The author has been active in the Internet privacy scene ever since its inception.
  • I’m just a simple DBA on a complex production system (http://prodlife.wordpress.com/) – Writing about all things production. Especially Oracle databases. The author writes about her work life as a DBA – tips, difficulties, conferences, etc.
  • Web2Spot (http://web2spot.blogspot.com/) – Covering Web 2.0 news, trends & companies made in Israel.
  • Hope is the thing with feathers (http://israblog.nana10.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=150892) – Shira Horesh’s Hebrew language blog about her life and struggles as a young woman, who got deafened at late age.

The above are only five of the 88 blogs which I routinely scan and read via their RSS feeds, using the Akregator. The first two blogs are relatively famous, and are important to follow because the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The other three are less known.