I’ve been dragging for a few days, my energy level is still down, and I have a devastating cough, but I’m back at school and feeling about 200% better than I was. Now I just have to catch up. 🙂 First priority is email correspondence; second is classwork; third is Manila Envelope. I’ve let the app languish too long while I stumble around with figuring out how to call Cocoa methods, and it’s time to make some steps.
Month: February 2002
Emergency landing
This is pretty funny: Passenger lands plane in dark after pilot passes out. My question: They couldn’t have told her how to lower the landing gear?
more…
More of my former professors in the news
This article on CNET talks about the work of Loren Hitt, who co-taught my course on E-Business. I knew it was him even before I read the article; as he told us, “If you see anything about poaching, shirking and opportunistic renegotiation, you know it’s from Wharton and from me or one of my students.”
“Clemons and Hitt conclude that poaching offers new and formidable challenges as the global economy becomes more knowledge-intensive. According to Clemons, it is ‘a newly significant form of opportunism’ and it represents ‘the growth opportunity in e-commerce white-collar crime.’ Poaching requires different analytical models and remedies, many of which still need to be developed. Only partly in jest, he quips: ‘Maybe companies should actually encourage poaching of their own intellectual property–but figure out a way to get paid for it.'”
One side of the story
I’ve been wondering when Eve Andersson would speak up about the fall of Ars Digita. Waiting no longer…here she is. I’d love to hear the VC version someday soon.
more…
A fuller context for that quotation
A more complete version and a citation for the quotation I just posted, courtesy the Bully Pulpit:
” The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”
“Lincoln and Free Speech” in The Great Adventure – vol. 19 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt New York: Scribner’s, 1926 Chapter 7, p.289
That damned inconvenient history
Beautiful quotation from Theodore Roosevelt in today’s Doonesbury. It is perhaps noteworthy that Roosevelt said this in 1918, when he was an ordinary citizen. Are you listening, Mr. Ashcroft?:
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Trading ideas
Good article at the New York Times describing the research of one of my marketing professors, Ely Dahan, using trading simulations to determine consumer preferences for features of goods or services.
“The closing prices were generally consistent both with consumer sentiments culled from more traditional market research and with previous trading experiments at M.I.T. In just minutes, for example, the trading echoed the disappointment with the Aztek and enthusiasm for the MDX demonstrated by car buyers over the last year. ‘General Motors might have been able to save itself a lot of pain if it had run trading like this a couple of years ago,’ Professor Dahan said.”
Turnabout is fair play
A funny little judo response to all the fundamentalists who burn Harry Potter books because they promote witchcraft: “Harry Potter fans warn against dangerous effects of Bible.” One excerpt:
“Reading the Bible teaches children to believe in the supernatural,” said one English Literature academic from Oxford University, Lewis Williams. “The tales of Jesus turning water into wine are fairly harmless, but there is a serious risk of children drowning if they try to walk on water,” he said. “And the chance of serious bodily harm isn’t exactly minimised by that whole ‘resurrection-from-the-dead’ story either.”
Sad news from the tail of the bubble
Yep, ArsDigita has gone the way of all startups. At least the assets have been bought by Red Hat, meaning that the community system software still has a shot at commercial life.
more…
What color is your Kleenex?
Urrgh. I feel like I’ve been hit with a sledgehammer. Yep, folks, it’s that nasty cold/sinus infection that I’ve been avoiding all season. Aside from the pretty colors when I stand up too fast, it’s a very unpleasant experience. Expect minimal, and highly grumpy blogging today.
Now playing
Currently playing song: “You Are Invited” by The Dismemberment Plan on Emergency & I.
Man, I had totally forgotten about this song until the other day. This was one of those songs that hung around on KEXP forever but no one on the east coast seems to know. Kick-butt song…
I really didn’t stay too long there
Cause no one was having much fun
I made my way to a party all the way cross town
That was thrown by the friend of an ex-thing
I wasn’t sure if I should go
But when I got up in the place there were smiles all up and down
I grabbed my ex in the kitchen
I told her I was sorry I came
But she looked at me with a glazed smile and said
“You are invited
By anyone to do anything
You are invited for all time
You are so needed
For everyone to do anything
You are invited for all time”
That’s what’s up with AOL and Fire
A reader wrote in to point me to this information on the news site for Adium, another AIM client: “It looks like AOL shut down their TOC server at toc.oscar.aol.com.” The author also reports that connecting to java-aim-vip-m.blue.aol.com at port 5190 mostly works.
Actually, I just tried it and it looks like toc.oscar is back up. But it’s good to know about other people who are providing alternatives to the commercial client–especially ones that provide source code.
more…
On the importance of modeling Manila
I did the preceding UML (Unified Modeling Language) sequence diagram with a little tool called ObjectPlant. It’s a shareware UML tool that just became my new best friend. There are times when you have to stop and draw what you’re doing in a project, even a moderately complex project like this one. I’ll be posting some more pictures like the one below as my version of the “Busy Developer’s Guide to ManilaRPC” that Daniel put together.
more…
Inconsistency and bugs
I’ve finally figured out why Manila Envelope occasionally gets stuck in spinning progress bar hell. It has to do with how I handled user notification in the code.
Basically, there are three types of function involved: one gets user input, one executes a series of Manila function calls, and one wraps a SOAP call to a particular part of the Manila API. Unfortunately, I was reporting user errors via dialog boxes in all three functions in the chain.
This sequence diagram shows the problem–I was letting the Manila handler do the notification to the user. This caused timing problems in the window controller that kept it from successfully stopping the progress indicator and returning control to the user.
Parties and HDTV and Harvard, oh my
From the New York Times: “Two members of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals were accused of embezzling about $91,000 from the 207-year-old student group for drugs, a party and entertainment equipment.”
Two thoughts spring immediately to mind:
- $91,000? And it took the club that long to notice?
- I’m attending the wrong university. If you multiplied the annual budget of the two clubs I’m involved with by each other, it wouldn’t be a tenth of the amount that these two jokers embezzled.