So I was reading Steve Zellers' blog, from a blink off of Steve Ivy's blog, and Steve Z was waxing poetic memories about macsbug.

I used to have macsbug on my laptops when I was running the various flavors of the classic MacOS, and knew just about enough to be dangerous with it. I did keep the instructions for how to recover stuff from RAM (in case of a crash) nearby, and the two times that worked, plus the many times that killing off one poorly behaved app so I could save the work in the other open apps, I figure it was worth the trouble.

Anyway, the point of this is, I really haven't had the need to use macsbug since I switched over to OS X. Yes, I've force-quit a few apps this month, but fewer than the fingers on one hand, and I wonder how often those were due to my own impatience? This is one stable OS...

7:52:38 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    

DaveW talks a little today about the different views of young folks and old folks.

DaveNet: How to be a revolution. "[Older folks'] advantage is deep experience. Their advantage is lack of experience."

This advantage of youth is not knowing/believing that something can't be done or is impossible. Their view of the world is different, and it enables them to do things that older folks wouldn't attempt or might think to try. For instance, most mathematicians (the famous ones) tend to have done their 'best'/most famous work before they are 25.

In October, 2001 I had the chance to have an interesting conversation with Jef Raskin, while we were both in a limo headed to the Indy airport (He was in B-ton on a speaking engagement). He mentioned that he was using very bright, high-school-aged programmers for his new computing project, which sounded like a cross between OpenDoc and about elebenty-seven other ideas all wrapped up in a new way of dealing with data and documents. I wish the ride had been longer just so I could get a better grasp on what they were doing.

Anyway, he's using these young programmers precisely because they don't know the enormity of their task, and because many more experienced programmers might revert to an older mode of thinking, or subvert the design in some way (They had completely written all specs and design docs before the first line of code was written.). I hope he makes information about the project available online sometime. If there was someone who really needs to keep a weblog, he'd certainly get my vote...

5:33:17 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    

There was controversy this year at the official main event of the "Greatest College Weekend" in these parts. The event was the men's Little 500 bicycle race, best known to most non-Hoosiers as seen in Breaking Away. The controversy was one rider for a team was alleged to have been a Category I level racer, which is a violation of the rules, but an arbitration decision was made which allowed him to race. What does that mean, well, imagine if Jerome Bettis were allowed to play for a Pop Warner league football team...

Anyway, the big race was on Saturday afternoon, and I thought I'd check on the results that evening. I tried the website of the local "big" paper. Their site hadn't been updated since that morning, when the articles were placed in the paper edition. It wouldn't be updated until the following day, when they published their (same as paper) article on the race.

So I swung over the student paper. They had a stub article which announced the results, and the finishing place of the controversial men's team, along with a note that the Monday paper would contain more coverage. The article was posted at 9:12PM Saturday evening. Pretty simple, and really wouldn't need too much oversight from an editor, either. Could be done via phone or email, if they weren't using a web-based CMS that would allow the editor to officially bless the story from home...

Why don't more newspapers take advantage of the technology, and extend the paper edition on the web (add more articles from teh news wires, provide more information than the paper version for local stories, ...), not just replicate it for a few days? Duh. What a bunch of stupid-heads.

5:13:03 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this