8. 2006 August

8.1 Thursday, August 3

1. ``Timeline: Lebanon conflict''. At Aljazeera.net. [360]

2. ``THE SOFTWARE SIMPLIST: Web Services Wisdom''. By Udi Dahan. [53]

3. ``No, blame whoever uses WSDL''. By steve. [382]

4. ``Salesforce Web service API is crappy .. so blame the tools''. By Sanjiva Weerawarana. [421]

5. ``XSLT that transforms from XSD to WSDL''. By I don't know. [66]

8.2 Sunday, August 6

1. Buried Deep. Kristine Kathryn Rusch. [233]

   This is a remarkably good sci-fi mystery novel.

2. ``Optimized Java''. By Matt Love. [177]

   Basically, he says Java performance problems come from unintended abuse of the garbage collector.

3. ``Assurance & Agile Processes''. By Cliff Berg & Scott W. Ambler. [10]

4. ``Threading and .NET''. By Michael Taylor. [402]

5. ``Living By the Rules: Part 2''. By Pete Becker. [28].

   Discusses some changes in the new, as yet unfinished, draft of the C++ standard.

6. ``Initiating an Agile Project''. By Scott W. Ambler. [11]

7. ``The Data Domain, or Folie à Deux''. By Michael Swaine. [393]

8.3 Tuesday, August 8

1. ``Free Market Fraud - the myth of capitalism - Brief Article - Column''. By John Kenneth Galbraith. [93]

2. ``America's Blinders''. By Howard Zinn. At The Progressive. [437]

3. ``Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars''. By Quinn Norton. [205]

   I didn't see any concrete mention of why the software stopped.

   • Was the software aware of the contract, & when the contract ended, the software stopped working? It's possible, but few applications do that.

   • Is it possible that Robotic Parking disabled the software remotely after the contract expired? I guess, but it also seems unlikely, though the new story suggests that it's what happened. (Search for the paragraph containing ``Self Help Features''.)

   • Does the robot's software require a human operator, & the city of Hoboken did not ensure that any of its own people had that knowledge? This is more likely, & the news story suggests as much when it mentions that police escorted the employees of Robotic Parking of the premise ``with its manuals & the intellectual property rights''. However, the news story

   • What seems most likely from my own experience is that the software was cobbled together on-site, barely worked, & required human operators when it did work. Otherwise, why have Robotic Parking employees on site in the first place?

8.4 Wednesday, August 9

1. ``A Slanted Truce and Rice's Latest Obscenity''. By Matthew Rothschild. At The Progressive. [232]

8.5 Friday, August 11

1. ``Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3''. By Shashank Sharma. [245]

8.6 Saturday, August 12

1. A Mind to Murder. P.D. James. 1963. [138]

8.6.1 précis

According to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary...

précis n, pl précis [F, fr. précis precise] (1760) : a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts

8.7 Sunday, August 13

1. Less Than Human. By Maxine McCarthur. 2004. [184]

8.8 Monday, August 14

1. ``America adrift''. By Sandy Shanks. At Aljazeera.net. [244]

2. ``U.S. Military Increasingly Using Air Lifts''. By REBECCA SANTANA. At The Washington Post. [238]

3. ``It's (Not) All Been Done''. By Herb Sutter. [391]

4. ``Ant Colony Algorithms: Solving optimization problems''. By Andrew Colin. [46]

8.9 Tuesday, August 15

1. ``Risks relating to system compositions''. By Peter G. Neumann. [199]

2. ``Semantics to energize the full services spectrum''. By lots of people. [250]

3. ``Principles of problem solving''. By Peter Wegner and Dina Goldin. [422]

4. ``Ruby on Rails''. By Michael Swaine. [396]

5. ``OpenGL & Mobile Devices''. By Richard S. Wright, Jr. [223]

6. ``Heightmap terrain rendering''. By Mikael Baros. [23]

8.10 Thursday, August 17

8.10.1 Some sanity at last

1. ``Judge: Wiretap program unconstitutional''. By Sarah Karush. [143]

2. ``NSA eavesdropping program ruled unconstitutional''. [331]

3. ``Wiretap programme judged 'unconstitutional'''. [377]

4. Judge Taylor's memorandum opinion on the case. [401]

5. ``Warrantless Wiretapping Unconstitutional''. By justaperson. [142]

8.11 Tuesday, August 22

8.11.1 Video file formats & utilities

1. ``AVI Video File Formats: Resolution, Pixels, Colors and Compression''. By Douglas Dixon. 1999 May.

   Radius Cinepak for portability?

2. ``AVI Overview''. By John F. McGowan, Ph.D. [140]

3. MPEG Software Simulation Group

8.12 Thursday, August 31

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, & birds of their feather are drawing analogies between the US's current ``war on terror'' & the people who warned of the dangers of a fascist Germany.

Words cannot express the irony.