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It’s All Latin To Me!

Lorem Ipsum is dummy text used in the printing industry and has been an industry standard since the middle ages. Its now used mainly for display purposes to render pages and see how they will look, when building pages or developing a site in HTML and CSS.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

The text originally came from the work of Marcus Cicero 45 BC in his “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”.

Linux Rules. OK!

The article was written by Neal Stephenson circa 1999. Its a good read and quite long.

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”

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Bad Is Good

This article was written by Richard Gabriel. Its such a good piece.

I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase “the right thing.” To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:

• Simplicity – the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
• Correctness – the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
• Consistency – the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
• Completeness – the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

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Oh No… Not Me. Why me? Argh!!!

I finally restored all the old posts. Slowly over the last couple of weeks, I managed to reconstruct the blog posts the were lost when I did the upgrade.

I was running Wordpress 2.6 and hit problems, and decided to upgrade to Wordpress 2.85. Things didn’t go as smoothly as planned.

I made a backup of the 2.6 MySQL database that contained the blog text, but when I restored the database file, several errors occurred. Next problem was theme formatting was lost. Then images didn’t display and I couldn’t access the dashboard. Enough is enough.

I installed Wordpress 2.85 which runs fine. The problem remains, getting the data out the old MySQL database and into the new. I decided to recreate the posts in the new version.

I had all the data and images saved, so it wasn’t such a big job to copy and paste each post as a new entry. The only thing I lose are the date entries, but I can live with that, as I added an original date entry at the bottom of each post.

Let this be a lesson to all you bloggers out there. Back up your data.

Babelfish Wins Again

I tried to translate a few simple Spanish words into English with Google Translate.

Google Translate failed spectacularly, offering the untranslated Spanish words as English.

Babelfish had no problem in accurately completing the translation that Google Translate couldn’t handle. Google Translate was a very poor second. A spectacular failure. This isn’t the first time Google Translate has failed and I had to look elsewhere.

Google should buy Babelfish from Yahoo to add to its portfolio of usable products. Yahoo seems doomed to be consumed by Microsoft or to wither on the vine.

Babelfish is a great product.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Originally Posted: August 13th, 2009

The Me-Too Company

Microsoft is always carping on about how great they are and all their great innovations. How untrue can it get? Nothing but lies and “propoganda”.

For such a big company, their list of achievements are rather slim. When you check out their true contribution to technology, what they add is “NOT A LOT”.

Yes, their products are competent, but nothing a bunch of part time unpaid coders could not match. Look at Linux and its achievements. And how good that has become.

Microsoft latest earth shattering “Innovative” idea:

Microsoft Office Takes To The Web. Nice joke. Now get back to work.

Google got her a couple of years ago. Time for Microsoft to play catch-up. For years Microsoft has been trailing rivals, technology wise. David Wheeler has an interesting article examining all the major technology innovations and lists them along with their originators. You would expect Microsoft to kinda dominate the list. Ya know with all their brilliant technologies over the years. But your expectations would be dashed. Microsoft do not even make the list.

Show’s how good their research labs are. Maybe the $7 Billion they spend each year on R&D is gonna produce something soon. Sit tight. The inventions are coming. David Wheeler’s article gives an idea of how poor Microsoft’s innovation record is. In another article, over at Fastcompany.com, they ask the same question.

The lack of true innovation and creative products hasn’t stopped Microsoft’s marketing machine lying and exaggerating. Microsoft is often late to the party. Standing outside peering in, nose pressed against glass. I want to be in there and I want every one to know it.

Apple on the other hand is a creative and innovative company. Microsoft may be bigger, but is it better?

Originally Posted: August 10th, 2009