My wife recently got into Stargate: SG-1, a high quality science fiction television series that I was already a fan of.
The premise is that the United States Air Force is in possession of a "Stargate", a device that connect to other Stargates throughout the universe, analogously to a phone system, and send things there, including people. There are a wide variety of aliens in the universe at various technology levels from "
We have a new telephone system coming in here at work. It is uniformly an improvement over the old system, at least on a technical level. It did, however, require purchasing new phones to go with the new system.
I want to shoot whoever designed them.
Or at least make him sit in this room with us for a week or two.
He (and I highly doubt it's a "
In my previous posts, I've answered the question "What Is An Outline?" from the point of view of Iron Lute. The resulting data structures are somewhat complicated. These data structures are at the heart of Iron Lute; if they fail, the entire program can come crashing down. Moreover, if nobody is capable of correctly using the data structures, they are still useless. It's worth discussing Theory to Practice: How Do We Hold This Together?
One significant advantage a more conventional outline has over the outline structure I've built up here is that it is much easier to store the traditional outline in a file. Using XML, traditional outlines are almost trivial to store: <node text="A"> <node text="B" /> <node text="C" attribute="D" /> </node>
Even if you don't read XML, you can quickly learn to read this format. About the only difference between what I just wrote and the official OPML specification is that OPML adds a <head> section that includes some metadata about the outline, and uses "
And now for something a little different: Dos and Don'ts for DVD commentaries. I enjoy them but it seems somes producers need help. DO include commentaries, unless it's a DVD set of some television show that just can't sustain interesting commentary for an entire season. (For example, Friends, which correctly only includes commentaries for three or four episodes per season, which based on my sampling is almost three or four commentaries too many.
I just had pretty much the worst week ever at work, which accounts for my not posting anything this week. How bad? I just finally noticed today that I didn't post my Monday Iron Lute post. I can only hope this week is better. Unfortunately, it doesn't show any particular signs of improving, so posts may be slowed up this week too.
This week instead of continuing on with my outline series of posts, I think I may jump ahead and discuss the file format for my outline model, which is what I'm working on right now.
Hey, good news! A federal court upheld the constitutionality of the National Do Not Call Registry on Tuesday, finally settling a legal battle around enforcement and leaving the popular list in place for the 57.2 million registered.
You can read the opinion yourself from the court, which is graciously providing it online (PDF, Text, WPD).
The summary from the beginning of the opinion:
The four cases consolidated in this appeal involve challenges to the national do-not-call registry, which allows individuals to register their phone numbers on a national "
Atom has a big hill to climb, but through skillful PR it may not look that way. What this does, as others have observed, is put a freeze on development, while we all wait for the dust to settle with Atom. We must not allow this to happen. The most important thing is to keep the ball rolling.
I support Dave. Let the Atom folk do their own thing but do not let them impose anything on us, no matter how loud they may be.
Everyone's so worried about the Microsoft source leak. "It could open new security holes!" they say. But check this out, the source for Linux, a popular Microsoft competitor, has always been available, and this is promoted by its advocates saying it makes Linux more secure, not less. More programmer eyeballs looking for bugs. Maybe some white-hat types will try to check in some fixes for Windows 2000? Stranger things have happened.
There's no question that it was extremely fortunate that this multi-nation plan was exposed when it was, even though it's likely that either Iran or North Korea have already managed to create enough fissionables for a few weapons. It would have been far better if it had been exposed earlier, but an additional ten year delay would have been catastrophic.
There is equally no doubt at all that those revelations were a direct consequence of the war the US is prosecuting, most especially in Iraq.