Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

And of course the mandatory railroad content....

The 2002 NRHS Annual Convention

The 2002 NRHS Annual Convention will be held in Williams, Arizona. ATSF #3751 will be the star of 'Canyon Rails 2002', pulling a special excursion train from Los Angeles and return.

See http://www.sbrhs.org/3751.html

The tentative Schedule is as follows:

August 19th- 20th #3751 will travel from LA Union Station to Williams, AZ. The train will overnight in Needles, California. Transportation and Lodging will be provided for passengers in Laughlin, Nevada.

August 21st Verde Canyon Railway Excursion. Transportation provided from Williams, Arizona.

August 22nd Grand Canyon Railway Locomotive Shop Open House in the morning. Sunset trip to Grand Canyon in the afternoon.

August 23rd NRHS Board Meetings and Seminars.

August 24th #3751 Railfan Extravaganza on Grand Canyon Railway.

August 25th - 26th #3751 Returns to Los Angeles via the BNSF Phoenix Subdivision and the Arizona and California Railroad. Overnight Lodging will be provided in Parker, Arizona.

Pre-Registration for the Convention is being accepted until February 15th, 2002. Ticket prices are yet to be determined.

See the official website: www.CanyonRails2002.com for more information and updates

comments < 7:12:12 PM        >

Wi-Fighting Terrorism: or at least the vestiges thereof. Wireless devices are used in airports to help provide rapid deployment and instant checks on people's status. Of course, having this much ready information available about any individual raises the hackles of those who believe that people should be relatively anonymous unless a specific profile is triggered (not racial: general threat and random screening). But who knows: maybe they'll use this form of instant background check at gun shows, next.

[80211b News]
comments < 6:53:17 PM        >

Sun's James Gosling on .NET: "You find stuff in it that has essentially loopholes for everything. They had this problem in their design rules that they had to support C and C++, which means you have to have a memory model where you can access everything at all times. It's the existence of those loopholes that is the source of security, reliability and productivity problems for developers. So on the one hand, they copied Java, and on the other hand, they added gratuitous things and other things that are outright stupid. That's amusing." Doesn't Solaris run C code?  [Scripting News]
comments < 6:53:02 PM        >

I was glad to see that my old compadre from Visi-Days, Dan Bricklin, is exploring the development environment in Radio 8. That's so cool. I sent Dan pointers to Matt Neuburg's work, documenting the programmer's view of our world. There are at least two docs people should add to their collection of links. The first is the full text of the book Matt wrote for O'Reilly that Tim has graciously allowed to be archived on the Web. It describes Frontier 4.2.3, which was a very long-lived version, Mac only. The second is the collection of Matt's The Doctor Is In! articles that describe many of the new things that came online after 4.2.3. BTW, for the curious, our animal was the bison. Very good choice.   [Scripting News]
comments < 6:52:41 PM        >

Back to Dan Bricklin, who eloquently explains the software ethic that we share what we learn. Radio is a lab for man like Dan to pick up some new art. This is how software development really works, but unfortunately it's not how the USPTO views it. In their view I should put obstacles in his way that penalize him from learning from my work. I once wrote a clone of Lotus 1-2-3 in C, keystroke for keystroke a clone, so I could learn the issues of spreadsheets. Mine was better than VisiCalc, because I used the sparse array trick that Lotus pioneered. I never published the software, but I wrote it so that I could have. Again, there's no shortcut for learning, you have to dive in up to your shoulders and take a chance at drowning. Luckily in software if you have good backups you don't actually die when you drown.  [Scripting News]
comments < 6:52:27 PM        >

We closed a serious security hole in Radio 8 this morning. Please update now. Details are here.   [Scripting News]
comments < 6:52:02 PM        >

Two new OS X books released. [mac.scripting.com]
comments < 6:51:48 PM        >

The NYTimes says Chrysler pulled a Jeep ad because it offended Deer Hunters, who are apparently big Jeep buyers. I wanted to find a video clip of the ad to attach to my RSS feed so I checked out adcritic. Whoops, looks like they bit the dot com dust. Lots of fuzzy words why they're off the air, except for this line: "The short answer: we became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat!" That's the bandwidth crunch for you. Totally killed by the centralized model. The more successful you become, the more bandwidth you have to buy. Too bad, adcritic was a good service. I would have paid for it too, but they never asked. [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]
comments < 6:51:31 PM        >