Monday, January 31, 2005

We got a little nazi state brewing up right here


Sunday, January 30, 2005

Ah, the sports commentator, has there ever been a more archaic breed?

Tony Greig, commentating on todays ODI between Pakistan and Australia mentioned the preponderance of spitting in todays sporting world, obviously alluding to the Leyton Lugie Incident ( thats one magic lugie ). His mechanised thinking machinery then clunked into the realisation that the Australian Open tennis is shown on another network, and competing with the cricket broadcast! So his 'special comments' spiel petered off into ...
Microsoft are not going to include XQuery with DotNet Framework 2.0, this isn't as bad as it may seem as there is almost sure to be a separate download available. Considering the screwy XSLT suport in the early versions of MSXML control its likely a good idea to wait until the standard is ratified.
Hey, I'm posting more than I ever did, the quality was bound to suffer eventually :-)

Pontification of the Week, same race couples are boring and dull. I dont get it really, I'm an Anglo, I rarely find Anglo women attractive ( Helen Slater and Catherine Zeta Jones being notable exceptions ). Its all Indian, Asian, Hispanic and Black women that do it for me ( well, they dont actually 'do it' but you know what I mean ). What's with all this racial purity, especially from minority groups, c'mon, lets get with the gene selecting evolutionary program people! Mix and match will help us all in the long run.

Guys like this shit me, but only because they do what I think but never actually do. How very cool.


I allways had a suspicion that present consenual morality didn't make much sense biologically.

Hehe, read this and find out how monkeys love porn, now if we could just find a way to get monkeys access to credit cards a whole new market would open up...

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Wow, add this to my list of cool skills I'm one day going to learn.

Friday, January 28, 2005

Hope Russell is getting this.

He's usually on the money ( IMHO of course ), but he wrote a while back that 3G would slay WiFi.

To quote Raiden, "I dont think so" :-)


Thursday, January 27, 2005

I have an 8mth old son. Something about me has changed since his birth. Previously whenever I heard of tradegy involving children I wasn't affected any more than most people, they were saddening occurances, but to live any sort of life I couldn't dwell too deeply on them.

Now I hear of a little 4 yo boy who died a few days ago, he was riding his bike and was crushed under a truck. The driver didn't even know it happened. The boys pregnant mother was confined to bed with back pain and didn't know he was outside. His 8 yo sister, whom he usually awoke was asleep, she wouldn't have let him go out on his own otherwise. The morning he died was the first morning in many that he didn't awake and ask to go with his father to the families fish and chip shop.

My heart aches for that little boy, and his family, and the truck driver.

Have you even heard anything so sad?

His name was Saad, his sister says he visited her in a dream, hugging her and telling her he loves her and his family. There is nothing I can take from this story, except this, never take loved ones for granted, never live a day thats not special.






Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Some people have a rare ability to string the obvious out over a great number of lines

Exhibit A

Getters/Setters, we all know what they are, we all know javas limitations, and we all know agile languages make explict getProperty/setProperty calls unecessary.

Whats next, Logging to a file rather than stdout ???



I'm a Java Certified Programmer, 93% no less! Hail to the King Baby!

Monday, January 24, 2005

I dont have to much to say on whats happening in Iraq

"The public slaying of Ismail is part of a new daring trend by militants. A video that surfaced late yesterday showed the beheading of two Shi'ites carried out on a street pavement in daylight. A crowd of people were seen in the background, gathering around the brutal slaughtering."

Suffice to say that the dehumanising effects of war are on show for all to see, the people who commit these acts are made of the same DNA as us, their brains are wired the same, something turned them into inhuman beasts. It could have happened to any of us but for the fluke of being born into a peaceful country.



Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Good post on application layering here

I've had a few passing thoughts in the past on building layering into my OneTrueLanguageWhichWillNeverBeWritten.

It seems a nice way of mandating decoupling, message passing API's like JMS are really a benefit here as they enforce layering.


Tuesday, January 18, 2005

TIRFH ( You figure it out ) - Part 1 of an occasional series.

Businesses that take your money for a monthly subscription, have downtime, and do not credit you back part of your subscription. To make matters worse, often there is no notification anywhere of system availability.

Now, maybe I sound cranky like I'm missing my porn collection, but thats not the case, this is oreilly safari I am talking about.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Friday, January 07, 2005

Maybe I'm about to show my ignorance here, but sally forth...

A quote from this article which is quite an interesting read on Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent.

"...Sites like Kazaa and Morpheus are slow because they suffer from supply bottlenecks. Even if many users on the network have the same file, swapping is restricted to one uploader and downloader at a time. And since uploading goes much slower than downloading, even highly compressed media can take many hours to transfer..."

Huh? I've used BT, and non-empirically, it doesnt seem faster than Kazaa. The explanation doesn't even hold water, as Kazaa downloads 'chunks' of a file from multiple source. I must be missing something no?

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Bill Gates says

"...We need to keep IE the best. We need to innovate in IE, do more add-ons, do improvements. We have some very exciting plans there. Some percentage of users are going to try Firefox and IE side by side, and use the one that's best..."

From this article.

Man thats funny, the guy is getting briefings from yes men, they left out the bits where the best HTML browser doesnt do things like

  • Start typing a URL and have the original URL overwrite it when the page finishes loading

  • Enter a URL when the network is unavailable, hit enter when the network is available and have the browser not bother to try and reload the URL

  • Hit enter on a URL and have NO feedback on the state of the load, no status bar, maybe a pointer change but nothing useful.

  • No tabs


Etc etc. This illustrates a real weakness in the corporate system, one that I've seen many times, a lack of reality in reporting to 'C' level executives.


Wednesday, January 05, 2005

This is interesting.

Hopefully it will get up the nose of a few dogmatic athiests ;-)

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Via David Galbraith, the worst of pseudo-intellectualism.

Link

Interesting logic from the link

"...The United States government, however, should not give any money to help the tsunami victims. Why? Because the money is not the government's to give..."

So by that logic, the govenment should never spend any taxpayer sourced money, as it doesn't belong to the govenment. What is the purpose of taxation then?

The same way 'The People' as part of their contract with 'The Govenment' give the govenment its legitimacy, the Govenment makes a wide range of decisions on behalf of the people.

There are other reasons that could justify the above quote, but I'm a little tired of devils advocate, he's a nasty man, and I dont even consider him fully human based on that article.