A scawchah heah in Boston; and Patriots Day

Starting from 42° F, climbing to 82°. This isn’t the April I know and love.

Having been a little flip yesterday about the Patriots Day holiday, I decided to do a little more research. Here’s what I found (courtesy this page): Patriots Day is a holiday in Massachusetts and Maine, celebrated on or around April 19. It commemorates the battles at Lexington and Concord that were the opening skirmishes in the war for independence. The holiday touches down in my neighborhood too: April 18 was the night that the light was set in Old North Church warning that the British were marching to Concord.

Given all the publicity over the Marathon over the last week or so, I’m disappointed that there wasn’t much in the way of reminders to those non-native New Englanders like myself what the holiday is really about.
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Weird holiday (not that I’m complaining)

I have no idea why Massachusetts has a random holiday called Patriots Day (no, it’s not about the football team), unless it’s to let everyone attend the Boston Marathon.

I have even less idea why MIT gives us two days off for that holiday.

But I’m not really complaining. 🙂

Sending instant messages to Google

Interconnected: Googlematic. You can now do a Google search using AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger; see the page for details. This is the sort of incredible mind bomb I was hoping to see when Google opened up its new API.

It occurs to me that someone should take the next logical step and create an email gateway to Google. There are times that it’s helpful to have a permanent record of searches, for instance when researching a topic for a paper. Email would be one way to automate that process.
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RIAA hoist by its own price-fixin’ petard?

Blogaritaville: Price Fixing Since 1996 Caused CD Sales Slowdown. When the RIAA is trying to blame consumers’ file-sharing ways for slumping sales in 2001, I think it’s worth looking at some other factors. Scriban compares average cost of a CD (from the RIAA’s own figures!) against CD unit sales and makes a fairly persuasive argument.

Of course, correlation is not causality. There are other factors at work, like the rise of lousy me-too bands in just about every segment and the inexplicable resurgence of teen pop (I thought Kriss Kross had been the final stake in that coffin. You remember Kriss Kross—fourteen year old kids rapping “I’m the mack daddy! No, I’m the daddy mack!”).
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Happy serendipity day #1

Tim Bumgarner: New Cocoa methods for loading data into a table view in AppleScript Studio. I was just starting to work on a new feature in Manila Envelope that required a table view and I was shuddering at the prospect of having to load it in a repeat loop in AppleScript (in my experience, loops in interpreted languages lead to severe performance problems). Tim’s method allows you to pass a list directly into the method, avoiding looping and making your code much cleaner and faster.

In my experience, further movements in this direction would be wise. Let us programmatically specify a relationship between a data source and a flat file. Or a data source and a relational database. Or a data source and a SOAP call. Features like this were what made programming PowerBuilder such a joy—you could specify the relationship between an arbitrary data source and a class to manipulate that data source easily, and the commands to manipulate the data through the class were consistent no matter what the original data source was.
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Watching the chicken coop

New York Times: Microsoft, I.B.M., and Verisign to Cooperate on Web Security. A preannouncement of WS-Security, “a standard set of extensions to … SOAP … [which] can be used to build security features into Web services applications.”

No detail of what is involved, except that WS-Security will “work with existing security software technologies … like Kerberos and public key encryption.” Apparently the spec will be published, but no words when.

I’m glad to see Microsoft and Big Blue working together on this, but with no substance behind the announcement it smells of a PR move to reassure nervous customer execs.
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Patent Madness!

Wired: Software Writers Patently Enraged. In a nutshell, software company A is awarded a patent for a specific method of doing something that lots of other software companies do (in this case, encrypting and decrypting documents). Company A then goes after Software Companies B and C to request license fees for infringement. Companies B and C argue that the patent should never have been issued, since their products considerably pre-date the patent application and since at least one has published “prior art” describing the technique in question.

There have been variations of this story written many times in recent memory, including such lulus as British Telecom claiming a patent on the hyperlink. In the Rambus case, the machinery of justice seems to be grinding against obviously fraudulent patents. But the more severe problem for most software companies seems to be these patents that many would argue never should have been issued in the first place.

Am I missing something? It seems like the PTO should be finding the prior art and refusing to issue the patents. Without this, all software writers would seem compelled to develop enormous patent application libraries on the off chance that someone will come along and patent something they wrote five years ago–a kind of IP Mutually Assured Destruction?
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Italy 2002 Trip Report: Rome

May 30 – April 2: In contrast to our previous trips to Rome, I don’t have that much to report about the four days that ended our Italy trip…probably because I was sick for two of them.

We arrived around 2:30 pm Saturday afternoon and checked into the hotel. (Aside: If you can save the money to go there, the Hotel De La Ville Intercontinental in Rome is a decent place to stay—atop and to the side of the Spanish Steps, five star service…<sigh>.) We grabbed a late lunch at a trattoria around the corner from the hotel. I was tired out from driving and flopped while Lisa took her parents in the direction of Trastevere. She woke me up later to go down to the Piazza Navona with her and grab a glass of wine at our favorite enoteca/café.

Sunday we went to Santa Maria di Trastevere, a thirteenth century church that’s pretty distant from the crowd at the Vatican. After we went to lunch at Romolo, built in a fifteenth century palazzo (with a walled garden) that was the home of Raphael’s mistress. Afterwards I started feeling unwell. Thinking it was heatstroke, I walked home ahead of the family. And then it started. At one point my distress was so bad I was shaking (though not with fever). By Monday I was some better but still had to spend the day in bed. Tuesday morning we flew back. So all I really saw of Rome was a little bit of Trastevere, the Piazza Navona, and the inside of our five-star bathroom.

Free speech (if you say something I like)

Salon: Killing the Messenger. Consider William Harvey: arrested for peacefully carrying a sign and handing out leaflets in New York City. Okay, so his message was that the US brought 9/11 on itself with its handling of relations with Islamic countries, and he was bringing it within a few blocks of Ground Zero.

Naturally there was a crowd and it got ugly. Harvey was arrested for disorderly conduct, although his conduct was apparently pretty calm. Harvey filed a motion to dismiss, which was struck down in mid-February. The judge doing so, Judge Neil Ross of the Criminal Court of the City of New York, argued that disorderly conduct could be charged given “the reaction which speech engenders, not the content of the speech.”

Thanks, judge, for giving the crowd the power to criminalize my speech. I thought protection from that was what the First Amendment was about.
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Does software development evolve?

Salon: A unified theory of software evolution (via Slashdot). The upshot is that software development (a) goes much more slowly than a linear rate; (b) is driven by various feedback loops including market demand, internal debugging, and the whims of individual developers; (c) can be characterized as a tradeoff between debugging and growth. The author of the theory, Meir Lehman, characterizes the issue as managing entropy.

While this doesn’t seem groundbreaking on the surface (heck, even Microsoft has figured out the last point), it’s a fact that escapes most managers of software development efforts, often with disastrous consequences (remember Rhapsody?). It’s also funny that, even in a surface examination of this question, you run into the most painful problems with software engineering: how do you measure software development? how do you manage the trade-off between specifications and adapting to the unknown?
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(phew) for a minute there I lost myself

Currently playing in my skull: Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” I dropped a course on Friday that I thought didn’t look promising, and that I thought I didn’t need. Over the weekend, I got paranoid and checked my requirements again. Good thing; it turned out I needed the course after all. I got in early Monday and was able to pick up my drop form and shred it before it got processed. Score one for paper-based processes. I complain about them being in place, but there aren’t many information systems that are designed to allow that much time for second guessing.

I never really understood “Karma Police” and am not sure I do still, but yeah, for a minute there…

Italy 2002 Trip Report, Day 6

The fifth in a series of transcriptions of my experiences traveling with my wife and her family in Italy. The originals were scribbled on whatever pieces of paper were handy and are presented here unedited.

29 Mar 2002: Lisa’s dad has decided to take the day off; he will remain behind in Positano while we take the boat to Capri. A wise choice, it turns out, given the amount of wind and rough water we face in the next hour.

Capri is as beautiful as I remember it, though colder. We start in the town of Anacapri, which is smaller than the main town, tourists everywhere, fewer stores. A poster on the wall of a store shows an unusual lion and a little less high-brow style than is normal on the other side of the island.

The other side of the island: expensive pottery, good food, limoncello. Sitting in a café it occurs to me that I enjoyed the island more when I was able to hike around it on the previous visit and get away from the pottery, food, limoncello, and cafés.

That night in Positano, we try to go to a restaurant I remember on the cliff path above the town. But our early dinner plans don’t fit the Positano lifestyle and we return to La Cambusa. The food is still excellent… and the staff seem actually happy to see us.