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Update: looking at the actual export XML, I’m disappointed. Each note is CDATA-escaped XML? Why???

Native Romance-language speaker: “How do you call yourself?”

Native RDF speaker: “How do you call what your name is?”

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The Onion Radio News reported on a new eco-friendly Hummer that kills its owners. (aired Aug 7, 2008) That’s not bad, but a tax on SUVs of one dollar per pound per year would be fine too.

On a more serious note, telecommuting could significantly reduce energy usage. Twenty percent of person-days should be doable within a year, averaged across all industries and workers. I wonder what percentage of petroleum usage that would represent?…

-m

Yes. Some are red. And some are blue.
Some are old. And some are new.
Some are sad.
And some are glad.
And some are very, very bad.

Why are they
sad and glad and bad?
I do not know.
Go ask your dad.

Not one of them
is like another.
Don’t ask us why.
Go ask your mother.

Today is gone. Today was fun.
Tomorrow is another one.
Every day,
from here to there,
shenanigans are everywhere.

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

The approach we ended up using for the initial documentation is essentially a narrative–telling a story. Narrative fills the gap between use case and solution in an engaging way. People are naturally inclined to listen to stories, and to expect certain story structures, such as having a beginning, middle, and end with suitable transitions. Thus, if the listener senses a gap in the story, it’s easy for them to speak up. When the story works, people find it easier to map their personal story on to the narrative, leading to better absorption of new concepts, and a more positive impression of the software.

And it’s working. So far we’ve gotten far more useful feedback than we would have otherwise. Even before showing others, the exercise of writing the narrative has exposed gaps and flaws in our thinking, leading to a better, more cohesive design.

If you think back about how you learned about, say, object oriented programming, or event-driven programming, likely there was a story or detailed use case involved that helped you get on board with a new way of thinking. Software + story: It’s a powerful combination, I recommend it.

BTW, my team is hiring full-time positions. Especially if you’ve got XML skills, you could be part of this team. Send me email if interested. -m

Room temperature (25 degree C) water, on the other hand, has only -12 calories per liter.

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Take the proceeds and give it to homeowners who did NOT engage in high-risk activities as a tax refund.

Since taxpayers will be bailing out wall street anyway, why not move the blame closer to where it belongs? -m

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Imagine you are writing a smallish widget app, in an environment without a standard library. When you need to sort your widgets, you’d write a simple function with a signature like sort(sequence-of-widgets). That’s great.

Now imagine you find your app to be steadily growing. An accumulation of smaller one-off solutions won’t work anymore, you need a general solution. What you’ll end up with is something like qsort in C, which takes a pointer to a comparator function. By providing different comparators, you can sort anything any way you like, all through only a single sort function. C and C++ have something like this, as do PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript, and even assembly language. XSLT has it, as proven by Dimitre.

XQuery doesn’t. It should, because people are now using it for more than short queries. People are writing programs in it. -m

P. S. Comment please.

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• The Watchmen
• Analog magazine (Nov 2008 issue featuring Robert Sawyer)
• Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
• Make magazine (issue 15, DIY music)

Check some of these out. What do you like to read when travelling? -m