Monday, May 13, 2002

Bill O'Reilly spins facts and statistics
Props go to Tom Tomorrow for this one. I have to admit that I tended to watch The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel when my cable service in Virginia expanded to include FNC. I was never quite sure what to make of it, but it was at least entertaining.

Saturday Night Live did a great parody of him. I can't remember what the guest on the show was talking about, but somehow Carbon Dioxide came up. The SNL Cast Member doing O'Reilly said "So you're telling me that Carbon and Oxygen atoms are bonding together? Frankly, I'm just not buying it."
4:50:44 PM  blips[]    

Elegant Simplicity
Via Haughey, a great quote from Pascal inventor Niklaus Wirth: "People seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication." Tatoo that on your forehead, post-it on your monitor, send it to the editors of XML.Com, and to the leaders of the W3C. [Scripting News]

A corollary is that people also misinterpret simpleness as elegance. SOAP has a lot of pros and cons as it's now being managed by a growing body of seemingly headless chickens, but at the same time - it's hard for me to find any good use for XML-RPC besides rudimentary (and poorly designed) blogging API's and cute little services like getStateName. Again, Zope has long served both REST-ian and Web-RPC ideas, long before they were ever a battle ground. It should be a better player in these services. Some of this is the fault of Zope, but some (or more) is the fault of what I see as some design flaws in XML-RPC. See my story (which needs updating) Zope, Web Services, why it should work, and why I'm frustrated it doesn't.

While a lot of people may attain simplicity, very vew attain elegant simplicity. It's the difference between "yeah, it's simple but it works pretty good" versus "it's so easy to use! and I can still do ...!"
11:20:26 AM  blips[]