Grandma did not have an iPod at the prom

Grandma did not have an iPod at the prom.. This week's ITWorld article is about the increasingly abstract concept of property in an increasingly digital world. Biological evolution is having trouble keeping up with technological evolution.

Never ascribe to theft what can adequately be explained by human evolutionary hysteresis.

Static typing belly laughs

A good start to today on the homour front.

Martin Fowler's report on OOPSLA contains these gems:
This one I put in the typecasting-is-a-bug-not-a-feature category

Dynamic types are stronger than static types, as they don't flee the field at runtime. --Brian Foote

and this one in the safety-needs-to-be-tested-not-intuited category

Static types give me the same feeling of safety as the announcement that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device.

--Don Roberts

Autamata, Woody Allen, Mayo, Postscript, Normalistion. Hmmm...

Factoid : After the XML Summer School in Oxford during the summer I did a deal with my family. I agreed to take them to London's Chinatown if they allowed me to take them to the Science Museum.
Things worked out well because as well as good food, Woody Allen was sitting next to us with an entourage. This created hushed-tones and eye-darting on all the surrounding tables including ours. I found watching the people that were watching Woody Allen more interesting than watching Woody Allen himself.

Factoid : Todays Sunday Times has a headline featuring the word "Autamata"and the name "Woody Allen". I read the headline initially as "Automata" like any self-respecting geek.

Upshot: There is a little known Irish band called Autamata which is newsworthy today because of Woody Allen's use of some of their stuff in a film of his.

Factoid: Ken McHugh of Autamata hails from Mayo.

Factoid: How could I resist investigating further when the initial geek-laden overtones of Autamata are followed up by "Postscript", "To be a robot", "Registered User" and "Lets Normalise".

Note to self: Investigate further.

WTFs - Beyond FAQs

FAQs are great but I've yet to come accross one that groups questions by blood pressure which would be ideal.

Some times I'm reading an FAQ quite calmly getting up to speed on something. Other times I'm reading an FAQ in an agitated state. Stunned by an error message. Shocked into silence by bizarre application behaviour. Suffering 6 times normal atmospheric pressure between the ears because I'm totally at a loss to know WTF is going on.

It would be great in FAQs had a WTF section to direct the eyes of the exasperated to Q's with a high desparation index :-)

Make sure to use a mirror

...because there will be a lot of downloads of Open Office 2 in the days ahead.

A la carte VM's in the future of Python

Children of a lesser Python does a good job of setting out the status and value proposition of PyPy.

Time

"Technologies like Atom and RSS, originally heralded as tools to allow diary-oriented web-pages (weblogs) and diary-oriented feeds to be mass produced, are something much grander to my mind.

They are nothing less than the addition of a new dimension to the web.

The dimension of time."

An atomic sense of time.