Moxie writes about next week's anniversary,#

``As has been mentioned on quite a few blogs, the media's planned coverage is virtually nil. But why? Is it the liberal political agenda of big media -- "let's not give people a reminder of how well Bush handled the tragedy so close to the primaries?" Maybe.

Maybe not.

Perhaps it's a simple misinterpretation, "people are tired of seeing those images and want to move on." The possible reasons for lack of coverage are endless, but whatever the motivation the end score is a great insult.

I'm not going to get on a soapbox and get all of you sticky with sappy prose about why we should never forget. There are projects I have to complete and personal reminders of my 2 year anniversary of a life altering loss. On 9-11-01 a long term relationship officially ended. One that was by his account a few weeks prior, headed for marriage.''

Tony Pierce points me out. He's very nice. He also gives some more college advice...#

``if you get out of class at 11:30am, take your sandwich to a grassy noll and read till 130pm and youve already beaten everyone in your class. then take a piss. then read till 2:30 and youre the smartest person in the world. then read some more for a different class until 4:30pm and remind yourself that happy hour is coming. then write for a few hours. if you turn on the tv youre an idiot. listen to zepelin floyd and janes addiction.

and after dinner you go show people how its done.

and if youre in islavista heres a bonus tip, bring your own cup and before you leave the house, finish your beer, and turn your cup upside down as you walk down the road.

open container tickets are for frat dudes from uc san diego, not locals.''

Philip Greenspun asks the tough questions...#

``Record stores around the country have been closing; our local Harvard Square HMV closed a few months ago. Universal is cutting CD prices by 30 percent (but not for classical). The really interesting question is how did the industry survive for so long?

The record companies don't make artists happy (see Courtney Love's speech from May 16, 2000).
The record companies don't make government regulators happy, having been prosecuted for price fixing and other antitrust law violations. (see this Federal Trade Commission consent order)
The record companies don't make convenience seekers happy. [...]
The record companies don't make environmentalists happy''

Doug Miller writes about the joy of not being the one responsible...#

``Yesterday, just after lunch, our office lost 'net connectivity. I noticed it immediately, being one of the most wired people in the office. Timing things to a nicety, I approached the office manager just as she was returning from lunch:

"You may already know this," I said, smiling brightly, "but I've been waiting to do this for ten years. "

"I'm just coming back from lunch, what's up?" she asked quizzically.

"The Internet is down for the entire building!" I replied, and then just walked back to my desk.

I enjoyed not being the one responsible for sorting out the problem for the remainder of the day...''

Via Ole Eichhorn to Adam Curry to We take out soccer seriously in Holland (A short movie)#

Via Metafilter is news about the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act -#

``One in five men in prison has been sexually abused, often by other
inmates. Rates for women, who are most likely to be abused by male
staff, reach as high as one in four in some facilities. ''

Via Susan Mernit is some wonderful intrusive People News - #

``Should Demi Moore be keeping her beady eye on her toyboy Ashton Kutcher? The Dude Where's My Car? actor has been spotted chatting 'intimately' with party heiress Paris Hilton - usually the death knell for any relationship. Paris Hilton, who appears to be waging a one-woman war against happy couples in the US and beyond, was spotted 'canoodling' with Ashton in the corner of Miami club Prive, according to a spy.

[...]

Such spottings could make home-life very tense for Ashton. 40-year-old Demi recently moved in to his mansion, while hers is being redecorated, with her three daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallualah in toe. Ex-husband Bruce Willis, who is dating a 25-year-old of his own, completes the rather odd family picture by popping in for a cup of tea from time to time. Cosy. ''

Via Kim is the Windows NT Embedded Prolog Interpreter for Network Configuration - Weird!#

Darling Girl is amazing.#

``In other news, Affleck and Lopez are finally getting married. I'm obsessed with celebrity weddings, and the fact that People magazine always lists the extravagant minutae about the event: "Guests dined on rare Mozambique lobsters stuffed with wadded hundred-dollar bills, served on solid gold bricks. Each table featured a centerpiece of a single donated kidney, and a giant panda was sacrificed to signal the beginning of the couple's first dance."''

chromatic has a very funny post about if computer security "principles" were applied elsewhere,#

``An oft-cited theory of security says that the more popular a security solution is, the more it will be targeted.

Let's try that in the real world. Suppose you live in a neighborhood prone to breakins. You have the option of installing a security system.

The theory would seem to suggest that if all of your neighbors have security systems, you're better off without one. After all, houses with security systems will be targeted more than houses without a security system.''

Frank Boosman recalls an interesting comment from Joi Ito.#

``Interestingly, when I was in Japan this summer, Joi Ito took me out for dinner to a private club located beneath the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. Walking through the lobby, I mentioned to him my affinity for Canada. "You could be a Canadian," he replied. "You like to get along with people." True enough.''

Via Chris Winters is a funny Dilbert that makes fun of Vegans. I love it, I'm sad to admit that I eat vegan though.#

Rands In Repose writes about various kinds of managers in this post...#

``There are all sorts of intimidating titles surrounding the management caste. Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager, Director of Enginering, Vice President of Engineering, Chief Technology Officer. While these names are useful in determining where a individual lies in the food chain, the names are merely hints as to what that person actually cares about... and you should care what they care about. Your boss and your bosses boss effectively sign your paycheck every two weeks and that means food. Sure, you can leave and go somewhere else, but there's another manager there waiting for you with their own obscure agenda.

There are three distinct classes of managers, each with their own agenda. The common names for these classes are first line manager, middle manager, and executive/senior manager. Again, these names do a good job of giving you a clue where your manager sits on an organizational chart, but they don't tell you what they actually do... how they are motivated... we need a different set of names for that. We need a set of names which don't confuse us with an implied hierarchy.''

The Yeti writes about Why Women Tease, and why it is a deep function of who they are...#

``We know now that men are supposed to be able to control themselves. I say supposed to, because there are times when there is physical and emotional necessities that creep up on us that remove our ability to function as higher-order beings. I've often lamented the powers of cleavage and their effect on my behavior. There are times when I'm discussing a sterile topic, only to be entirely derailed when the sight of a woman's breasts touches something deep inside of me. It's not just breasts. Take three men discussing business, and the sight of a woman in a thin cloth skirt will make each of us stop talking. We become incapable of even continuing until one guy shakes free of his reverie and points out that it's not our fault.

That speaks to something innate within even the most focused and decent of men. To some extent, I understand why certain cultures hide their women away. It's fear. Fear that men cannot reach the pinnacle of thought when they are distracted with the ideas of sex. The early Christians turned this into misogyny. Paul was the most famous, and the ideas of women as the embodiment of Original Sin took deep root in early Christian communities. ''

Just A Gwai Lo links this article in the NYT about "Sex and The City" as a Feminist Nightmare...#

``More dated still, especially for a show that supposedly celebrates the joys of single life and female friendship, is its preoccupation with snagging a man. The characters are a walking compendium of modern female angst — the quest for a relationship, the ticking of the biological clock, the fear of aging out of the marriage market. Not that these aren't sometimes true and even potentially funny themes of single life. But when did haute couture fashion and prêt-à-porter men come to eclipse all the other elements of independent womanhood?''

Just a Gwai Lo also writes about his shyness and how it affects him,#

``Thee one thing that gives me the willies is making phone calls. Especially to females that I like—in that way—but even with calling my parents, calling a homey, or something as simple as calling the record store to see if a certain CD is in. [...] Receiving phone calls isn't a problem, and I've had some great conversations when on the receiving end. It's just that *whenever I make a phone call, it always feels like I'm interrupting something.*''

I hate interruptions and I hate thinking that I'm doing it to someone else.

Morendil writes about the definition of "type" with regards to typing/OO conversation...#

``Mostly an OO language, any OO language, is an embodiment of somebody's preconceptions about "typing" in the broad sense - how "things" in the world are to be "classified". It's taken me years of having my brain beaten upon by postmodern texts, but I've finally grokked that there simply cannot be One Right Way of classifying things. So there cannot be a single meaning for the word "type".''

Slashdot has a funny series of sites about "The Most Famous Geek in IT"#

Chris Double writes about state in continuation based web servers...#

``I had an interesting side effect when moving the continuation based server from storing and retreiving the continuations from a hash table (keyed by url) to storing them on disk and retrieving them from disk. The positive side was the fact that shutting the server down and restarting it still allowed the resumption of sessions in progress.

The unexpected bit (but obvious in hindsite) was code that held object references in the continuation between page views was being 'recreated' on deserialisation. So whereas previously a vector holding data between page views was the same vector, now they were different vectors.''

Peter Lindberg links to some comments on his recent "Good vs. Bad Code" post...#

Edward Bilodeau - ``Just because your downstream activities will cause you to revisit upstream planning activities does not mean that you should abandon those upstream activities. You just have to build that reality into your process.''

Mentor Cana - ``Perhaps it is this concept of the moving target always in flux that Tesugen has in mind when stating that Good software adapts, and for adaptations to take place gracefully, the code must be susceptible to changes. So, if by Because software can't be planned it is meant to say that the initial plan is never modified, than [sic!] it is justifiable to say that software can not be planned. Indeed, such planning that does not modify itself throughout the process of software development from inception, to functional requirements, [etc.], is no plan at all because it wrongly assumes it knows all there is to know about the final software product. In most instances this is not true. To act otherwise leads to bad software functionality.''

I think of it like Karl Popper thought about science and government. We cannot know everything, and thus changing our mind is essential, indefinately. So the best way to think and organize is a way that encourages and allows change. So, like democracy is the "best" form of government because it is the most malleable, a development strategy that uses plans and design documents a foundation is also equally useful.

Via Susan Mernit is a Britney Spears interview,#

``CNN's Tucker Calrlson has a way with the poptart:
Britney on George Bush: "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that."
Britney on her tongue kiss with Madonna at the VMA: "I didn't know it was going to be that long and everything. I've never kissed a woman before." ''

Charles Miller writes that "The URL is Not Enough"...#

``Most web-browsing is purposeful. Even when we're doing what looks like random browsing, we're doing it purposefully: starting at some point we know has interesting links and branching out from there. The web is such an enormous place, there's little incentive for me to visit some site just because I saw the URL on the pavement.

URLs are cheap. Give me a reason to want to go there.''

Werner Vogels writes about a mistake in his article about Web Services misconceptions...#

``I made a mistake in the article about web service misconceptions by including a paragraph on how distributed object systems and web service technologies both appear to enable different approaches of handling state in a distributed computation. I stated that even a most basic DO system enables state-full computing, but often could also be used for a state-less approach. WS in their minimalistic form only supports a state-less approach.

[...]

Now where was I wrong in the article? By including this discussion of state at all. I had forgotten how religious the state-full versus state-less debate was and how people are still not capable of reading passed it without shouting fire! My mailbox is full with responses that show me examples of how you can build state-full web services and how to do state-less distributed objects. Although I agree with both statements, if we look at the basics of both technologies we see that both have their roots in these different approaches.''