After reading today’s piece by the New York Times public editor (i.e. ombudsman) entitled Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?, I was moved to reply to him by email: Congratulations to both you and the present NYT editorial staff on the courage to confront the isssue of the Times’ coverage of the WMD issue.…
Read More Deja vu at the NYTWhen I started this blog, I thought I was safe going with a budget hosting account that was limited to 300MB/month. So far this month I’ve served up 217MB. Time for an upgrade, I guess….
Read More Nobody expects the….No sooner does Tim Bray report that his OS X bitrot has been cured by 10.3.4 than I suddenly find it affecting me. Specifically, iChat refuses to launch; it bounces in a desultory fashion a couple of times and then exits. I’ve deleted all of the obvious prefs files, repaired permissions, run the iChatAV update……
Read More Tim seems to have passed his OS X infection to me…[Revised 5/30/04] My colleague Simon Phipps has just posted a lengthy piece entitled On Java and Openness. I agree with him pretty much 100%. A lot depends on whether you approach compatibility and interoperability from a “standards” position or not. The “standards” viewpoint is that there are going to be multiple implementations, that this is…
Read More Java, open source, standards, and conformanceI got back home to Boston late last night after an 8 day trip to Silicon Valley. This afternoon we [my wife, daughter, son-in-law and I] headed up to the Museum of Fine Arts, since we had tickets for the Gauguin in Tahiti exhibit. As it turned out, none of us thought much of that…
Read More Back homeTim Bray mentions in his blog that he attended a meeting of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers this week. As the organizer of that meeting, I was interested in his observations. One of the not-so-subtle reasons that I asked Tim to present was that I’d really like more of the DEs to start blogging: I think that…
Read More Tribal eyes? Interesting…There’s a transcript here of a speech by Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander of CENTCOM at the CDI Board of Directors Dinner on May 12, 2004. The whole thing is worth reading, including the Q&A that followed the talk. Here I’ll simply summarize the ten mistakes that he identified. The first mistake that…
Read More Ten mistakes on IraqEric Idle has just put a little ditty called The FCC Song up on the Monty Python web. The lyrics may be found on Lisa Rein’s website (which is also an essential repository of Daily Show and Bill Moyers video clips).
Read More Eric Idle's FCC SongMy last few posts have mentioned the importance of simplicity, so having praised IBM I now feel free to tease them. A few years ago I went to a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I sat in on a session given by a (US-based) IBM marketeer. He was trying to sell the ease of deployment…
Read More Simple, isn't it?I’ve just posted a review on Amazon.com of Autonomic Computing by Richard Murch. Yes, I know it’s an IBM Press publication, so dial up your “self-serving bullshit” filters – but not too high. Overall this is a really useful book. While it’s targeted at CIOs and their staffs (folks who have read, and bought into,…
Read More Book recommendation: Autonomic Computing