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Last year, Australia became the first country to announce it would ban the use of incandescent bulbs by 2010. California is planning a phase-out by 2018. And on Tuesday, New Zealand said it would join the fray, ending the use of traditional lightbulbs starting in October 2009. Now Europe is talking about doing the same.

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How often do you visit a web site looking for information about some product or service -- even open-source software -- and encounter a Bad FAQ like those described below? Don't become part of the problem in your own efforts.

From the forward to the Subversion manual:

A bad Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sheet is one that is composed not of the questions people actually asked, but of the questions the FAQ's author wished people had asked. Perhaps you've seen the type before:

Q: How can I use Glorbosoft XYZ to maximize team productivity?

For the recovering perfectionists of the world, and I count myself among them, this bit of advice seems useful not just in software development, but in many aspects of life.

"It is important not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, even when you can agree on what perfect is. Doubly so when you can't. As unpleasant as it is to be trapped by past mistakes, you can't make any progress by being afraid of your own shadow during design."

--Greg Hudson

I recently read Robert D. Kaplan's book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. It got me to thinking and so I read some more books and white papers about military response, complexity, networks and collaboration. There were a number of related themes, one of which is to push power and knowledge to the edge of the network, in order to solve the complexity issues -- as well as to serve as a critical part of a transformational change required to address today's and tomorrow's terrorist threats to nations.

Original material is copyright © Chris Johnson and is under a Creative Commons share alike license. Contact me for attribution questions. All other materials quoted or used with permission remain copyrighted by their copyright holders.

It seems the real bloggers of the world -- well, at least the ones that get read or have their URLs forwarded from friend to friend to colleague to associate -- post something new nearly every day. Too few postings and people aren't interested. Too many, and the quality clearly suffers. So there is a sweet spot in there someplace.

But where do they find the time?

I was chatting with Allie, the mad genius behind pajunas interactive the other evening, and she mentioned her search for a second network operations center for her business. Not that the current data center where her servers are located is bad (they're ISO-9000 and ex-military perfectionists, really), but rather nobody is perfect and contingencies are always good to plan for. I got to thinking about the whole end to end business of providing web content to end users.

I don't know if the lack of comments up to this point was because nobody cared, or because of a software problem. I found the software problem myself when I tried to leave my own comment. I guess that's what happens when one uses the tip of the development branch of software just before the 4.7 release of Drupal. I've now upgraded to 4.7, and all appears well, including the comments.

So perhaps someone will do that. Or not. :-) This is admittedly among the least exciting blogs on the planet.

by Susan Hewitt and Edward Subitzky, from The Journal of Irreproducible Results, vol. 36, #1. Reproduced with permission.

As scientists and concerned citizens, we applaud the recent trend towards legislation that requires the prominent placing of warnings on products that present hazards to the general public. Yet we must also offer the the cautionary thought that such warnings, however well-intentioned, merely scratch the surface of what is really necessary in this important area. This is especially true in light of the findings of 20th century physics.