Tab Gleanings · A rare gaggle-of-interesting-links fragment. Don’t look for a unifying theme, there isn’t one. Item:Lauren Wood bemoans the ephemerality of blogs, specifically the late great Enplaned. This is Internet Vandalism, and it’s happening all the time. Item:Lauren Weinstein rings the alarm bells on the anti-piracy facilities in Windows Vista. This sounds terrifying; every black-hat in the world, and I mean every one, will be thinking up cool extortion scenarios around this technology. Item:Rebecca Bollwitt reveals that greeting-card categories are outta control; outta control, I tell ya! (Example: “Suitable for Remarriage”). Item:Shelley Powers has some mesmerising autumn-leaf pictures, with a subtext. Item:Il a neigé sur la Réunion. Item:Rob Bray on interesting government lists; for example, terrorist organizations.[1 comment]
5✭♫: Brahms’ First & Haydn Variations · If I were asked to pick my favorite symphony, well, I couldn’t. If I were backed into a corner and really pressured, I still couldn’t. But if it were a matter of life and death and I were making short lists, Symphony No. 1 by Brahms would be on all of them. Some have argued that the First isn’t really his first symphonic work; that would be Variations on a Theme of Haydn. Which, if granted, might not change my answer. (“5✭♫” series introduction here; with an explanation of why the title may look broken.) ...[5 comments]
Thanksgiving · Today was Thanksgiving in Canada. It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking this New-World-only holiday; we all have lots to give thanks for and dedicating a day to acknowledging it has to be a good thing. Along with the big things, a couple of small thanks-worthy events. First, at the outstandingly-beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park Pitch & Putt, I hit a hole-in-one at the tenth. All of 70 yards, mind you, and completely level, but still. And later on, I undertook management of the turkey and the dressing and the veggies on my own for the first time ever, and they came out not too bad at all. I also got a successful gravy-making lesson from Peter Sharpe. Then there’s the family and the weather and the job and all that other stuff too. Dear Universe: thanks![2 comments]
On Comments (II) · Thanks, everyone, for the high-quality discussion and suggestions about comments and dates and updates and so on; if this were an IETF Working Group, I’d be comfy declaring “rough consensus”. I’ve made the obvious changes; herewith a description, along with general remarks on how this whole commenting thing is going ...[13 comments]
Grief Lessons · This is a recent book by Anne Carson, a poet and scholar of whom I’d previously never heard. The subtitle is “Four Plays by Euripides” ...
Anansi Boys · This is the latest paperback from Neil Gaiman. I read it on the plane back from DC and it’s good enough that I had to sit up late doing some work that I’d planned for the plane. Gaiman’s novels don’t Shift the Mass Understanding Of The Human Condition or Plumb The Depths Of Postmodern Subtextuality, but the people in them are always real interesting and the things that happen to them are entertaining and plausible (well, in the sense that stories which routinely involve gods and alternate universes and the working of magic can be plausible). He’s got a decent blog too.[6 comments]
On Comments · I’ve had comments running for a few days here now (I prefer to say “contributions”, but whatever). People are irritated at me because an ongoing fragment shows up as unread in their feed-reader whenever a new comment comes in. I’m not sure what the right thing to do is. This piece outlines a few options and asks the community for discussion ...[34 comments]
Transparent Business · I spent a couple of fascinating hours Tuesday at a round table hosted by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The subject was Interactive Data, a term which is hardly self-explanatory but really means “Business Transparency”. This in the same week that Jonathan sent a letter on the same subject to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who was also around the table. Mr. Cox and the SEC are definitely on the right track; I expect bumps in the road, but there’s a chance that Accounting As We Know It could be blown up. Which would be a good thing; and not just because Open Source is creeping in ...[7 comments]
Practical Transparency · A few days ago, our CEO Jonathan Schwartz sent a letter to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox calling for SEC financial-disclosure regulations to allow for publishing material financials on the Web. It’s obviously a good idea, but there are some implementation issues. (Hey, I’m an engineer, I can’t help it.) ...[10 comments]
Web Hacking With Real Money · Looking for some new data for your next mash-up? How about playing with real money? The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Interactive Data Initiative has an RSS feed of company financial filings; not just the text, but in a highly-structured XML format called XBRL. I glance at the feed this morning and see data from ADP, Dow Chemical, Molina Healthcare, Xerox, GE, Infosys, 3M, Bristol Myers Squibb, and lots more. XBRL isn’t the world’s easiest format to grok; that’s partly because the formalisms that govern accounting are non-trivial in the extreme. But I’m quite sure there are fortunes to be made by people who combine hacking chops with financial savvy, and figure out how to automate digging insight out of this data. Of course, in most gold rushes, the best business angle is selling tools and entertainment to the miners; so there is obviously more than one way to work this territory. And a great big tip of the hat to the SEC for getting this stuff on the air.[1 comment]
Pilings · On the weekend, we visited Steveston, a touristy little waterfront town in the south suburbs. It’s got some mildly-interesting shopping and a lot of good food. Some of the restaurants are elegant, but we prefer Pajo’s; fish & chips on a floating dock at the west end of town. Good fish & chips are not that easy to find. The waterfront was formerly industrial (fish-canning mostly) and is becoming recreational/residential. But there are a lot of old wooden pilings left in in the water ...[1 comment]
Interview, with Snarls · James Gray of Linux Journal has published a lengthy email interview with me. Those who visit ongoing regularly won’t find much to surprise them; but I did take the chance to fulminate about dastardly DRM and Microsoft’s odious Office XML. And now that I think of it, I’ve been stingy with the polemics around here recently, maybe a little bland even; aren’t bloggers supposed to be ruthless attack puppies? It’s having a cute little girl baby around that does it I guess.[2 comments]
‘Waterlily’ Autumn Crocus · We came back from the Botanical Garden with pictures; along with that Gunnera, there was this dramatic pink flower that I wanted to run but couldn’t remember what it was, so I asked Daniel Mosquin, the main man behind Botany Photo of the Day, and he told me; it has two pretty names, of which one appears above ...
Oooh, Cédric · That’d be Cédric Beust, who, writing both in my new comment system and his own space, declaims “The bottom line is that IDE’s for dynamic languages will *never* be able to perform certain refactorings, such as renaming” and asks “Who wants a refactoring IDE that ‘works most of the time’?” He closes with a major dynamic-language diss: “I'm convinced that they are not suited for large-scale software development”. Obviously a fun-loving fellow. Geek girls and boys, I think that man is getting in yo face.[21 comments]
