When I first started paying attention to politics the Democrats had control of Congress, and had the Presidency at least half the time. I heard Republicans blame the rising deficit and rising taxes on those nasty “tax and spend” Democrats. Now I somehow doubted that Republicans were entirely blameless, but given that control rested largely [...]
Monthly Archives: June 2004
Tax and spend … er, Republicans?
24-Jun-04I am currently faced with a set of tasks that calls for the batch manipulation of potentially tens of millions of records (more in future) over a total pool of data that could approach or even exceed the total addressable memory on a 32-bit machine. Clearly I want to do whatever I can to provide [...]
Homosexual “marriage”
20-Jun-04A rather long essay from Orson Scott Card on Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization with which I largely – and on some points very strongly – agree. Simply put I do not see homosexuality as an “alternate lifestyle” or somehow an equivalent choice, rather I see homosexuality as a malfunction. Now there are lots of folks [...]
(sub)Urban planning
19-Jun-04From Philip Greenspun’s weblog a bit about Urban planning lessons from southern Maine. The first example along a similar line that got my attention was the social “liveliness” in college dorms. For some reason there were dorms that were very “social” – where everyone in the dorm seemed to how pretty much everyone else. Other [...]
Massively scalable wikis
19-Jun-04While out hiking yesterday had another inspiration as to how to make a Wiki site extremely efficient. The basic idea boils down to the web server returning three files for a wiki page: site.css links.css page.html The first file and the rationale behind it is pretty standard. The site.css is a static file containing all [...]
School of Management
19-Jun-04If your manager got involved in design, would you expect the result to look like this?
Hide that Elephant
18-Jun-04From a pretty much run of the mill missive about Microsoft’s behaviour, with a second-hand story at the end. That we can all get things so wrong was brought to mind for me recently when a friend sent me story about his experience in the original energy crisis of the 1970s. Read it and think [...]
A rather long article with which I largely agree: Joel on Software – How Microsoft Lost the API War This quote is a zinger – if true somehow I had missed this entirely: The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” If true this does explain [...]