Comment on a previous refutation post from Phil Barker:

I was going to ask when you would start refuting your refutations, but I see you’ve already started :D

If I haven’t stopped before then, I imagine that refuting the idea of refuting old ideas would be a good place to kill the project. I have noticed a slight increase in desire to refute whatever I’m communicating, post beginning this series.

Another from Jon Phillips:

Omg, I need to do a post like this or probably better is to kill more bad projects. I have successfully killed many, a skill I learner well from you Mike. Its healthy!

Surely more local value may be obtained by killing bad projects, but consider sharing refutations of previous ideas and projects as akin to publishing negative results: a social responsibility rarely followed through on, such that I’m confident that at this juncture, even weak efforts are worthwhile.

Only two foolish posts from 2004 April:

The other $1 business model refers to $1/track music stores and says that $1 stores are a bigger business than the recorded music industry. Apart from gross use of the term business model (“pricing strategy” would’ve been much better) the point that the recorded music industry is smaller than yet another sector of the economy is hardly insightful. The recorded music industry is high status, near the commanding heights, while dollar stores are at best low status. Even if we were to generously include Wal*Mart in the class of dollar, that is very low cost, stores, such that the class is an undeniably major part of the economy, all of cheap retail is merely where people go to purchase the products of the recorded music industry, and to listen to piped-in-music, courtesy of the recorded music industry.

alias grep=’glark’ advocates using glark, an enhanced grep (a command line tool for matching and displaying text in files against a match pattern) written in Ruby. But there’s no reason to install yet another slow scripting language that you don’t want (unless you already depend on it, but even then you might not in the future). Instead:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto --perl-regexp'

Addendum 20120421: Use an alias in place of setting the environment variable:

alias grep='grep --color=auto --perl-regexp'