31 May 06 Gideon’s Blog
This post on Gideon’s Blog is really interesting. He’s really into a lot of the minutae of politics – to a level that I don’t have time for but find fascinating.
I completely agree with him that Congress should just recess between now and January 2009. The current federal government is incapable of writing and passing good legislation (Medicare, Education, CFR, now this Immigration bill). There’s also something to his notion that President Bush might possibly not care whether we have good laws or not.
Tags: federal_government
30 May 06 Writing is a Lost Art
Notice how the title of this post is properly capitalized: All the Meaningful Words of a Title are Supposed to be Capitalized.
I am in the middle of reading a technical document at work. It’s the latest of several documents I’ve read at work that are badly written. One of the most annoying things I’ve found that people do here is capitalize words that shouldn’t be capitalized; like all nouns, for example. A sample:
Each Service publishes a Contract with …
and
Since the Kernel acts solely as a runtime environment for Services…
The document is littered with sentences like the above. It’s highly distracting. The word “Service” should not be capitalized. Neither should the words “Contract” or “Kernel”. They aren’t proper names nor do the refer to some individual object or idea.
The writing is too familiar (too many instances of phrases like “we did this…” or “You will find it easier to…”). It’s also very preachy; the document in question is supposed to be an overview of a particular application and the associated frameworks and libraries. Instead, it’s a rambling description of portions of the subject with whole paragraphs devoted to telling me why they think .NET is peachy-keeno and how they don’t use WSDL but have special interfaces for what they define as a service. Not only does the author seem to reveal a misunderstanding of services and what WSDL actually is, he couches it in a way that makes him seem willfully ignorant.
Anyway, I could go on and on about the poor quality of writing that I see on a daily basis. That’s actually one of the reasons I maintain this blog; it’s a way for me to regularly exercise my writing skills – with complete, properly capitalized sentences and other elements like good grammar and oft-unused vocabulary.
Tags: writing_skills
26 May 06 Shell Buffers in Emacs
snarfed.org writes about running shells inside of Emacs.
Tags: Emacs
26 May 06 Multi-TTy Emacs
This guy explains how to use Emacs over multiple TTys.
Tags: Emacs
24 May 06 Cubes vs. Offices [i]
Not sure how to categorize this. Maybe I’ll add a “business” category or something.
Anyway, as I’ve stated on this blog and elsewhere, I think cubes and “open” work areas are a Bad Idea (TM). Cubes have even been disowned by their creator.
…headphones help.
Tags: work_areas
24 May 06 Perfect Practice makes Perfect
Even heard the phrase “practice makes perfect”? I suppose if you accept a number of assumptions and generalizations, you might consider this to be true.
Better, though, is the following phrase:
Perfect practice makes perfect
Practice doesn’t do you a lot of good if you’re practicing doing things the wrong way. If you spend 10 years playing piano with your wrists resting on the lip of the keboard, you’re not likely to be as good as someone who has spent 10 years holding their wrists up, just like Mrs. Old-Lady-The-Piano-Teacher told them to.
I think the same thing applies to experience. I’ve noticed that people assume that experience in creating software is valuable. Experience can be a valuable thing, but not neccessarily. Some people are highly experienced in creating software the wrong way. For those people, I’d say their experience is as much a hinderance as it is a help.
Tags: software_engineering
11 May 06 The sheriff’s in town in Maricopa county
I wish sherriffs across all the border states would do this same thing.
We need more of this:
and less of this:
04 May 06 New domain name! Bloggo Ergo Sum.us
This just in! I have renamed my blog to be “Bloggo Ergo Sum”, and I have moved it to it’s own domain name: bloggoergosum.com and bloggoergosum.us.
Enjoy not having to type that ‘~’ character!
03 May 06 United Nuclear – Site Stats
Here we go. This page describes in more detail the action that the CPSC is taking against the company.
03 May 06 United Nuclear – Hydrogen Fuel Systems
This is a travesty. Anyone who cares about the problems due to our reliance on a commodity provided in large part from states that could easily be called our enemies (I believe they would be if we didn’t need their oil so badly) should write letters to their senators, congressmen, and any other individuals that you know of that have an official voice in government.
United Nuclear – Hydrogen Fuel Systems
Check out this site. This company is trying to develop inexpensive (relative to the cost of new automobiles or multiple years worth of gasoline, anyway) kits that will allow existing Ford, Chevy, and Dodge vehicles to run exclusively on hydrogen, and the federal government seems to be doing everything it can to block them. See below:
Instead of moving forward with our research, 100% of our time and money is now being spent on fighting a legal battle with the U.S. Government.
Some time ago, the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) recruited the SWAT team and other Government agencies to raid our facility confiscating all papers, plans and computers.
They are attempting to block all sales and use of the chemicals used in our Hydrogen storage system.
The materials in question are common Oxidizers and have never been illegal to own or purchase and are not even classified as hazardous materials.
They are also attempting to block all sales and ownership of oxidizer chemicals, and a wide variety of other substances that will actually make it illegal to own a chemistry set. Our scientific supply page has additional information on how the CPSC actions will relate to home experimenters.
Tags: hydrogen_fuel
