Dan Gillmor blogs his favorite gadgets of 2003: the Treo 600 and a new Sony Cybershot not yet available in the U.S. When Laura, Steve and I went to Mom’s for Christmas Eve, sister Anne had a Treo 600 to show off. Pretty neat little toy!
Archive | December, 2003
The 12 Days of Technology
From http://www.pacificnet.net/~mandel/joke.html. Merry Christmas Eve!
SOME HOLIDAY HUMOR……..The 12 Days of Technology Before
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The Night Before Crisis
‘Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house,
Not a program was working, not even a browse.
The programmers were wrung out, too mindless to care,
Knowing chances of shipping hadn’t a prayer.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of inquiries danced in their heads.
When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter,
That I sprang from my cube to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a SUPER PROGRAMMER, oblivious to fear.
More rapid than eagles, his programs they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name:
On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete!
On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete!
His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean,
From weekends and nights in front of the screen.
A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
Turning specs into code, then he turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger on the ENTER key,
The system came up, and worked perfectly.
The updates, updated; the deletes, they deleted;
The inquiries, inquired; and the closing completed.
He tested each whistle, he tested each bell,
With nary an abend, and all had gone well.
The system was finished, the tests were concluded,
The client’s last changes were even included!
And the client exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt,
“It’s just what I asked for, but NOT what I want…”
(attributed variously, my copy came from here)
Ken Levy posts monthly Visual FoxPro letter on Microsoft site
Ken Levy, VS Data Manager at Microsoft, posts his monthly December Letter from the Editor. There’s some interesting news on new features appearing in “Europa,” the next version, and also the announcement of a public beta of the product, in the first half of 2004.
Novell copyrights UNIX source code
An interesting step in the ongoing SCO saga: Novell Registers Unix Copyrights. “Novell has quietly registered for the copyrights on many versions of Unix code that the SCO Group says it owns.” By Laurie J. Flynn. [New York Times: Technology]
Cool animations of plate tectonics
From The Doc Searls Weblog:
Come along for the ride.
If you want a good sense of where this earthquake fits in The Big Picture, and you have a high speed connection, check out these animations from UCSB’s Geology Department. They’re amazing.
Plate Tectonic History of Southern California, 20 Ma to Present shows the Salinas Block riding up the West Coast of North Americal like a steamship scraping against a dock. Today’s quake was one tiny moment in the history of this travelling terrane.
This one, Southern California, 20Ma (million years ago) to Present, shows how the transverse (East-West) ranges, on which Santa Barbara rides, has rotated 180 degrees in a very short period of the Earth’s history.
Plio-Pleistocene Oblique Shortening against the San Andreas fault shows how we’re still in mid-collision between Baja and Southern California.
Apple iPod’s non-replaceable battery makes it an expensive disposable toy
Slashdot covers the Washington Post Covers Ipod Battery Ruckus with the usual Slashdot disclaimers – reading at a threshold of 4 or 5 improves the discussion and speeds the read. The article, a long one, was in the Concord (NH) Sunday Monitor as well.
Apple’s screwed up pretty badly on this one, while taking over the MP3 player field and making a cool tool. I hope they extract themselves gracefully – lowering the replacement battery costs as low as possible, and making future models with a user-replaceable component.
December Virtual FoxPro User Group newsletter available for free download
Download Free December VFUG Newsletter Now. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just sent out the December issue of its monthly newsletter to those who have chosen to receive it via e-mail. Articles in this issue include Setting up SOAP/WSDL by Grady McCue, Data-Aware Controls by Les Pinter, A Basic Introduction to Office Automation using MS Visual FoxPro – Pt 8 by Matt Jarvis, New Series on VFP by Fletcher Johnson and Hugh Winter, Wireless Devices, Part 11: Jumping the Big Pond by Tom O’Hare, User Groups and Their Support of the Developer Community by Margaret Duddy, Help with White Papers and Case Studies by William Sanders, assorted tips that cover Image Storage, VFP 8 and NT4, Autofit in Grids, Character Picker, What’s the Name of the Active EXE?, Create a file of a certain size in Windows XP, and even more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version or all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. 42,000 others did. [FoxCentral]
What is the Meatrix?
Joi Ito links to a clever parody with an effective message.
*POINT – COUNTERPOINT SPECIAL* What’s Wrong with the Open Source Community?
LinuxWorld has an amusing “Point-Counterpoint” debate with two editors decrying the same features as bad or good. The complaint that “there’s too much stuff” ignores the opposite problem of there being much too little. This debate is an interesting contrast to the article I pointed to earlier this week, arguing the cultural underpinning of the two sides are fundamentally different. It reminds me of a debate between a liberal and a reactionary where the liberal believes the reactionary is entitled to their beliefs, but the reactionary doesn’t believe the liberal has the right to believe what they do. Perhaps “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”