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Ted's Radio Weblog Mission: Interoperable. Competition breeds Innovation. Monopolies breed stagnation. Working Well with Others is Good. |
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Twiki Blog Archive 2002-07 Wednesday, 31 July, 2002 There's an old Bill Cosby routine where he plays Noah and teases his neighbor about the ark is his driveway. "I can't tell you. Ha, ha, ha." Went to the Crabpot in Bellevue with Steve Sawyer, Doug Hennig, Gary DeWitt, Bonnie Berant, Mike Helland and Eric Moore. Nice place, scenic views, good service, good beer, good friends. Ah. A nice end to three busy days. Steve gave me a ride out to SeaTac, and I did the marathon redeye home from there. Tuesday, 30 July, 2002 Cookout tonight, so I might not get too much blogged.Monday, 29 July, 2002 First day of NET training. Drinking from a firehose. Good material. Brian Randell is knowledgable and funny. Material is good, but complex. Will the average Joe Programmer be able to use this stuff? Time will tell. Sunday, 28 July, 2002 Long, long, long day travelling to Seattle and dealing with the time zone difference. Great to see old friends, though. Saturday, 27 July, 2002 A busy Saturday. Did a few domestic things, like mow the lawn and turn over the compost, but goofed off a lot, and spent a fair amount of time packing for the trip to Redmond tomorrow. Woohoo. Friday, 26 July, 2002 Spent nearly the entire day working at a client. Paid work! Imagine that! Maybe the economy is turning around. Cringely's column this week is on eBay. I did not know that eBay was the third largest retailer in the US. Thursday, 25 July, 2002 Great UG meeting last night. Darn! I lost text and links again. I am sure I had saved them from Opera. Shut down and restarted today when updating the virus checker, and *poof* no text. Rats. No recall, either. The Internet and Interpersonal Relationships has fascinated me since the days of JOIN XYZ conferences on the Dartmouth College Time Sharing System.Wednesday, 24 July, 2002 The fourth Thursday of the month, and time for the Boston Area FoxPro? Users Group meeting tonight. No need to sweat Social Security, I guess. The BBC says a huge asteroid will destroy the Earth in 2019. However, they're quite likely mistaken. Friday is System Administrator Appreciation Day Some useful links for DNS stuff: Daniel J. Bernstein, author of qmail, explains Internet mail wonderfully here. Tuesday, 23 July, 2002 A great history of Microsoft at http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_1975-1998.htm. For example, "11/12/90 Bill Gates unveils his vision of the future of computing in his keynote address,"Information at Your Fingertips,"at Fall/COMDEX '90. " How to Run a Microsoft-Free Shop and another 12-step article on advocacy, with some good insights, here.Bill Gates emailed all his friends, except me. Reaction was not all positive. Monday, 22 July, 2002 James Gleik, author of What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, spoke on New Hampshire Public Radio this morning. Gleik's books "Chaos" and "Genius" are among my favorites. This article on window repair gets added to the HoneyDew list. Rasterman says "Windows has won. Face it." in this article Sunday, 21 July, 2002 Happy Birthday, Anne. My baby sister. Spent the day working on the screen restoration for the home I'm starting to think of as "The Bungalow Project." I can't approach the million dollar restoration of "This Old House," or even hope to be featured on "American Bungalow," but I'm hoping I can make this a better place to live. Midday, Steve and I saw "K-19: The WidowMaker" Great flick. War heroes, the Russians on the first nuclear sub. Well done. As a former bubblehead, had my adreneline flowing. Saturday, 20 July, 2002 Worked on restoring the original porch screens on my Arts & Crafts Bungalow. Not an easy task. Signed up for, and downloaded, the SOAP API for both Google and Amazon. The Amazon one required complex, multi-string data types, and I haven't worked out how to send those just yet, from VFP. More experimentation tomorrow.Friday, 19 July, 2002 TGIF. Cringely at his best in this column, telling us that Palladium ain't gonna work and isn't what we want, anyway. Microsoft's Gentler Approach to Linux is the claim of this article. Actions speak louder than words. We shall see. The MSNBC article on Palladium has been archived here. I discovered that IAYFT.com hasn't been registered. Hmmm. Ars Technica published this "blackpaper" on wireless security. Forbes is publishing a special report on Linux. Thursday, 18 July, 2002 Thursday. The weeks go by strangely in the summertime, without the usual mad rush of user groups. Digital Consumer is another site fighting the poorly-thought-out, over-reaching efforts of the music, movie and tech industries, in controlling piracy by crippling our fair use. This Seattle Times article details the lifelong avocation - violin collecting - of Dr. Dave Fulton, the genius who ran Fox Software and sold it to Microsoft. Wednesday, 17 July, 2002 Steve Jobs presented a two-hour keynote at MacExpo?, NYC, this morning. Jaguar, OS X 10.2, a new .Mac set of services on the web - pundits say it competes with .NET, but I see it more as a portal. Gotta learn more. The new iMac has a 17" 16:10 screen ratio machine. Very pretty. Tuesday, 16 July, 2002 Designing a New Version Control System was a very interesting topic on SlashDot today. Microsoft fights Apple with FUD. There's a surprise. Steve Jobs delivers the keynote tomorrow. Should be a good show. Andy Kramek pointed out this handy Win32 resource for VFP Developers in a posting on CompuServe. Monday, 15 July, 2002 Are Mac users smarter, richer and have less cavities? This article thinks so. They may be right. I like the iMacs. The idea, the design, appeals to me. Darn! Lost a bunch of links and good prose.
A glorious day. Hot, but not too humid, with a nice breeze and plenty of sunshine. Spent the day cleaning out the garage. Spent the evening on Part 1 of PBS' and Jane Austin's "Pride and Prejudice." Friday, 12 July, 2002 TGIF. from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,368868,00.asp: "Microsoft Readying 'Avalon' Framework for Longhorn By Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft WatchWhere do these journalists get off? IAYFT was a decade ago, a lame promise come and gone unfulfilled, up there with "user friendly." It was followed by equally unmet though less memorable phrases. What a crock. Harvey Reid, a local guitarist of great talent, explains what ASCAP and BMI are here. Thursday, 11 July, 2002 And Courtney Love does her RIAA math here. The MIT Technology review suggests treating commercial-skipping viewers as criminal might not be the right answer, either. Wednesday, 10 July, 2002 A debate betwen Lawrence Lessig and Jason Matusow of MS here Tuesday, 09 July, 2002 Peter Thoeny, author of the Twiki software that produced this page, has a presentation on Twikis at his web site, here. There's a lot to this tool, and more I need to master, particularly on Topic Classification. Janis Ian weighs in on the music industry's confusing attempts to eliminate themselves. This article describes the chilling progress that biker gangs have made in getting with the Internet. Monday, 08 July, 2002 "The entertainment industry must acknowledge that it is marketing its products to an empowered body of citizens who consider themselves users, not viewers." says Jonathan Greenblatt in this article. Bravo! In my spare time, I've been reading ISBN:0140296468, "The New New Thing," a book about Jim Clark and his Healtheon venture, his life, his past. Good stuff. I ran across this story, mainly about web designers giving up on true browser compatibility and standardizing on IE, but holding up Clark's latest venture, ShutterFly as the poster child. How sad. Sunday, 07 July, 2002 The WS-I seems determined to kill Web Services with the threat of future royalties on patents. In this latest episode, Sun is being sidelined as a second-class citizen. "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" asks this New York Times Magazine article - maybe fat-free isn't such a good idea. Saturday, 06 July, 2002 Another quiet day around Camp Woebeme. Cleaned the garage. Friday, 05 July, 2002 Man, am I sore. Ripped out brothers basement today, with the help of Laura and Steve, and tore up a dozen and half deck planks. Ow. Thursday, 04 July, 2002 Spent the day cleaning the cellar and turning over the compost. The joys of home ownership. Wednesday, 03 July, 2002 Got the fit-and-finish right on the application, and sent off the final version to the client. Geneer (formerly RDI) closed on Friday. Article in the Chicago Tribune, registration required. RDI was used as an example corporation in Whil Hentzen's Developer's Guide. Tuesday, 02 July, 2002 Work on my client's app was interrupted by a desparate call from an old friend. They needed to deliver a version of IE that acted like the kiosk version, but would display the taskbar. Today. Took four hours, mainly fighting with InstallShield and trying to nail him down on specs. In FoxPro, of course. Monday, 01 July, 2002 July!!! When did that happen? (I know, midnight, I was out walking a restless dog). I'm not ready!!! DotNetWire is reporting that the Gartner Group estimates that porting an application to DotNet will cost 60% of the original cost of the application. It seems like they are talking about a straight port, which I am not sure I've ever seen. Why do it?
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