Entries by Writer

Falling Down seems to be a big reason people click through to my site. So to keep them happy, here is some trivia about falling:

philophobia: falling in love

Hypnophobia is a morbid fear of sleep and falling asleep.

Newborn giraffe calves begin their lives by falling 6 feet to the ground

Carl Clark of Vermont, USA has invented Emergency Underwear that contains Inflable Airbags for senior citizens afraid of Falling!

A falling cat will always right itself in a precise order. First the head will rotate, then the spine will twist and the rear legs will align, then the cat will arch its back to lessen the impact of the landing

The Home Safety Council reported that in 2002, 19,324 people died in the U.S. from injuries sustained in the home. Of those, 521 were in Wisconsin. More than half the deaths in Wisconsin were caused by falls.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fatal falls increased by 17 percent to a new high, led by increases in the number of fatal falls from ladders and from roofs.

So, as SCO faces additional setbacks in the months to come, losing more motions
and receiving additional sanctions, losing appeals, not to mention being faced
with the Everest of evidence that their claim of any kind of proprietary rights
to Unix and it's derivatives and "children in spirit" is wishful
thinking at best, the thought of settlement negotiations arises.

So, kiddies, let's hear your suggestions for IBM's counsel. What should they
throw on the table to help SCO and friends avoid the penalties and costs they
face by losing at trial.

I'll start it off:

No costs, no penalties (to SCO or it's lawyers), not one dollar. They can stay
in business (if you can call it a business, whatever it is that they sell).

All they have to do is place ALL (I mean every last line of code, piece of
documentation, even their logo) under the GPL.

That's all. No big deal.

In her ruling on IBM's motion to strike a portion of SCO's claims, Judge Wells said that she did not consider the merits... yet. All that she was ruling on was SCO's adherence to discovery rules, and especially the orders she issued on discovery to both sides.

The time has not yet come. the Judge has said,
To speak of so many things.
Of methods and concepts,
And how The SCO Group sings.
But the time will come for legal precepts,
And whether pigs have wings.

That's when the rest of this nonsense will be thrown out.

(sorry, mr. dodgson)

The Senate has voted not to move forward with a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. On the face of it, this seems like a defeat for President Bush and his right-wing strategists.

But is it?

An amendment to the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both houses in order to be presented to the legislatures of the various States where it then requires a three-quarters majority. It takes a long time for all 50 States to ratify or reject an amendment.

So there's no chance that this amendment would come anywhere near ratification (much less effectiveness) until long after the next congressional and presidential elections. Maybe not even for the elections after those. The proposed Equal Rights Amendment expired after 7 years before it could be ratified.

So what was behind this late-term push? Did the White House expect this to fail? Could it be possible that the White House and the Senate GOP leadership agreed for it to fail before the the amendment was even presented? That senators whose upcoming re-election was expected to be close could engineer their votes to appeal to the swing voters in their constituencies? That the White House (as chief fundraiser for the next GOP elections) could go back to the right-wing Christians who provided significant funding over the last few elections and say "Hey, we did what we could!. You need to support us even more strongly now. See how the evil influences of the Left and the Democrats are affecting even loyal GOP senators!"?

No way. They couldn't be that duplicitous, could they?

Stringing together the search keywords that have brought people to this site, and the sites that came up when I searched on these phrases.

caddyshack quotes falling down

bush trivia police

business steps are high


I like Bush trivia police. It has a nice ring to it.

If you can't be bothered to visit this site every day to figure out if I've let another 2 months go by without a post, or if RSS/Atom feeds haven't reached your level of conciousness yet, there's an alternative.

Down on the right you'll see a place where you can enter your email address. Submitting your address will get you an email feed of new and updated articles. Isn't it wonderful and amazing?!!??

FeedBlitz powers this little feature, and appears to be winning out over Bloglet which has been accused of less than reliable service.

Enjoy!

I saw Tarzan on
Broadway the other night. Not the ape-man, but the
pallid Disney
pablum.
If anyone suggests going to see this particular entertainment, kill them. The 8 to 25 years in jail (assuming no one in the jury has seen it) will be infinitely preferable to the 2 hours of abject misery in the theatre.


The New Yorkers leaving the theatre all had looks of stunned disbelief on their faces. The out-of-towners, of course, loved it and gave it a standing ovation. Well, not
all
out-of-towners loved it.

Best line leaving the theatre: "I liked the movie better". They were referring, obviously, to the cartoon.

I think I remember seeing a play on Broadway once. It was an uplifting experience. No music. Just some very talented actors making the audience think and feel. Back
downtown to off-off-Broadway, I guess.

No other technological breakthrough has demonstrated the power of individuals more than grid computing. By donating your unused computer time, you can begin to change the world for the better.

That's what is says on the World Community Grid website. And they're right!

Your PC at home or at work is in use MAYBE 5% of the time. So, assuming you have an ancient Pentium III processor runnning at over 1 BILLION Theoretical Operations per Second, each day that goes by sees 82,080,000,000,000 potential calculations NOT being performed.

Now, suppose that you could install a piece of software that knew when you weren't using your computer. It would communicate with a central source, download some work to do, use a few trillion of those available calculations, and report the computed results back to home base.

Now suppose that this is done every day by hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, and that the work being done allows scientists and other researchers to avoid hundreds of thousands of hours of trial and error research. IMAGINE the things that might be achieved!

The World Community Grid offers a screensaver which will use the available, otherwise unneeded computing power of the machines that sit idle almost all day long while you sleep or are at work or anywhere to develop new anti-AIDS treatment, to analyze the human genome for potential disease prevention, or for any of the other projects that will utilize this platform.

Get this screensaver now. Think of the lives that are lost because of every second you delay!

Seriously. This is a GOOD thing. It's not a security risk, it's not spyware. It doesn't impact you when you're using your PC. Do it. You have no idea what you might be accomplishing.

If the projects at World Community Grid aren't to your liking, break out your favorite search engine and look for "screensaver distributed grid computing".

The New York PHP Users Group has announced that it will hold a PHP Conference in New York City in June. NYPHP is not the typical techie user group where a bunch of spotty geeks sit around telling war stories. NYPHP has monthly presentations with substantial content on a variety of topics, offers classes, not only in PHP syntax, but in practical implementations as well, including security issues.

To find out what PHP represents as an full-strength solution to enterprise-class problems and as an alternative to that bloated, (see also) marketing hype whose name we won't mention, attend this conference.

-- Sign-Up Now To Lock in Your Early Bird Discount
http://www.nyphpcon.com/attendee_registration.php

-- The Call For Papers is Now Open
http://www.nyphpcon.com/call_for_papers.php

-- Official Press Release is Available
http://www.nyphpcon.com/NYPHPCon06PR.pdf

Reuters reports today that a male high-school student in an affluent Boston suburb has filed a federal civil-rights complaint against his school because "the girls are treated better".

OK, the obligatory "Get used to it kid. Wait until you're married!"

Aside from the whiny complaint "Aw mom, Tiffany gets a better seat in Hegelian Dualism than I do!", we have to note the principal's reaction to the filing of this complaint:

"I don't understand any basis for that complaint. Milton High School does not discriminate against males, females or anybody else for that matter."

So exactly which genders, other than male or female, is Dr. Drottar, the school's principal, concerned about here?

As the school's own Affirmative Action Plan shows, the 2000 census did not find any genders in Milton, MA other than male and female.

It's heartening to see diversity and inclusion go beyond even the known human genders, although it apparently doesn't apply to everybody who wants to be included.

Brian Coyner has an entry on the O'Reilly weblogs about bad database design leading to even worse code.

First, let me say: Here, Here! and Huzzah!

When you design an application, you must spend time over-designing your database before you write any code. Assume that every requirement that you have been given will change before the bits are dry in your inbox. Assume that every time your business analyst or user liason or boss said "That's as far as we will ever go with this product", they're wrong (or lying, your choice). Modifying code is a thousand times faster, easier, more reliable, and cheaper than a database modification and conversion. Studies have indicated that maintenance consumes up to 85% of the software budget. My experience has been closer to 98%. If you can move effort from maintenance to development, you move expenses from the cost center to the profit center.

Brian has a little example in this article, though, which I just have to jump on. He promotes the use of non-mutable key values for tables. That is, the key should not contain any business information which could change. I agree 100%. The example shows that by moving an account number from a key column to a non-key column, only an update of the non-key column is required.

What is a column update? It is the destruction and loss of data by replacing it with new data. What happens when someone (auditing, marketing, business intelligence applications) go looking at this customer or vendor? They see a history of events (payments, orders, disciplinary actions) against the current account number. It may be that none of those events pertain to that account. They occured when the value in that column was something different.

So when you sit down to overdesign the database for your next application, think about how you will preserve and track all the daily little changes to your application's datastore. That store is not simply a snapshot of the current state. It must represent the changes that have occured and the timeframes in which they occurred.

A television program in Iceland learns the dangers of live programming.

I have no idea what's being said, but I think that the couple may be describing the difficulties of intimacy. The interviewer seems to find the man's voice hilarious.

He'll be doing the weather at the Arctic Circle real soon now.


Update:
Well, looks like I got taken in along with a few others. The real story appears to be that this is a sketch from some time ago on a Belgian TV show called "In De Gloria". The people being interviewed are victims of medical mistakes. The language appears to be vlaams (?), a dialect of Dutch.

Look here and here for more info.


This has gotten a lot of play at big-boys.

Since I'm sure I've added even more misinformation to this, please feel free to correct me.

A graphic (see below) on the FEMA website seems to show that the next step after Preparedness is Disaster.

Jeremy Zawodny has an entry that talks about this, but I think Jeremy is slightly off when he describes disaster leading to response, which leads to recovery, etc.

If you look carefully at this image, you will see that, except for Preparedness, in each of the phases of this diagram the arrows miss the next phase. Preparedness is the only phase which leads directly to the next one, which is Disaster.

Maybe the artist knew exactly what they were doing.




Update:

Garr Reynolds takes all the fun out of this by actually doing a professional analysis of the image and it's failure as a graphical presentation of FEMA's mission.

Great quote, though: "Powerpoint should do no harm" (Edward Tufte)

Once again we hear from Stone, this time they reprint the Caddyshack quotes page from IMDB. If they really wanted to bring that wonderful movie back to life, here are the links they should have used:

CarlSpackler.com: Your source for Caddyshack Trivia, Games, Videos, Sounds, and much more!

Warner Brothers: Caddyshack - Official site for the movie.

And for more quotes:

Wikiquote's Caddyshack page.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has generated a proposal to cut subway and bus fares by 50% between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. According to the Authority's 2006 Financial Plan, as a result of the Gap Closing Program, their New York City Transit division will save $43.7 million with a reduction of 432 positions. These positions are involved in the delivery of new subway cars, the design of new electrical and signalling systems, and, of course, station, car and bus maintenance.

"Gap Closing Program"? Why does a organization with a billion-dollar surplus need a Gap Closing Program? Or is there really a surplus? Will we hear next year about the deficit? Sounds a little too Enron/Worldcom/Adelphia to me.

The money New York City residents have been paying in increased fares, which we are told is needed for system upkeep, will go to subsidize the tourist invasion of Manhattan during the holidays, but also to buy your votes on the Transportation Bond Act. I happen to be in favor of this bond issue, since I haven't been able to find where they've hidden the line items which will actually go to operational expenses instead of capital expenditures. As a rule, though, I just don't like vote buying.

So, the trains, buses and stations will be dirtier, the new trains will be delayed another year, signalling improvements will take a few more years to design and even more years to install. And we'll take on more debt.

So, thanks MTA Executive Director Katherine Lapp, for a thoughtful proposal. And I'm sure the suburban commuters (of which, Katherine, you would be one if you didn't have an Authority provided car and driver) whose rides are subsidized at the expense of city dwellers will continue to thank you. Oh, and how's that 22% salary increase from Pete Kalikow holding up?