Monday, March 25, 2002

As users of the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) (see Google Directory), and frequent consulters of Karl Fogel's book, we have never been able to help feeling that CVS fell short in some regards. Oddly enough, neither could Karl, and neither could Brian Behlendorf of Apache renown. So they decided "to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community," and Subversion (gotta love the name) is the result. Here at the Inquisition, we can't wait for v1.0! 8:40:04 PM

Mathematicians often say that they feel as if their theorems and laws have an objective reality which they do not create but merely discover. By Dennis Overbye. [New York Times: Science] Yeah, sure, physicists say it, too — even when what they describe is essentially unobservable. 7:30:01 PM

The RDF Core Working Group has released a Working Draft of the RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised). With new support for XML Base, the document updates the grammar in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification in terms of the XML Infoset and RDF Model Theory. Read about the Semantic Web Activity. (News Archive) [The World Wide Web Consortium] Y'know, we never really have understood the Deep Magic of RDF.  Maybe we should start finding out.  Or maybe we should stick with what we get paid to find out about. 5:08:55 PM

Let us second the opinion of First Blush: God bless Ted Rall! We concede that Rall's comic poking fun at "Terror Widows" — those who lost loved ones on 9/11, as well as the widow of Richard Perle — is in rather bad taste.  We point out, however, that the bickering and whining about who should get how much "compensation" for those losses — as though a human life can actually be assigned a monetary value and as if differences in levels of such compensation cast judgements of moral value on the lives of the deceased — is itself in bad taste. But Alan Keyes's un-American, contra-Constitutional excoriation of Rall goes beyond mere bad taste.  It is wrongheaded, dangerous, and evil. We are, in fact, so outraged by Keyes's facistic rhetoric that we are moved to anathemize him (not for the first, nor the last, time).  While we work to perfect that declaration, however, we commend Ted Rall's comic in response.  Rall's juxtaposition of Keyes's own words with four stark images from the history of the world's struggle against German fascism in the 1940's is brilliant and on-target.  Ted Rall, we commend you. (A more reasoned [if still, to our minds, ultimately unconvincing] response to Rall's original "Terror Widows" comic comes from A. R. Torres, writing in Salon.) 8:59:23 AM

The original Stanford research paper for Google. via MetaFilter.com [Dog Door of Death] 12:42:55 AM