A new form of "Engrossing"

Law making revolves around a process called engrossing and so when it came to naming the Propylon band...Well the name "Tyson and the Engrossers" fitted the bill nicely. The Tyson here is Tyson Deines. A legislative business analyst with Propylon but also former full time musician/singer/song-writer.

Some videos from the Propylon XMas party here : Tyson and the Engrossers

The Engrossers are:

- Tyson Deines : Drums, Vocals, Guitar
- Bill Hastings : guitar
- Sean McGrath : guitar, harmonica
- Beth Rice : Base, Vocals
- Matt Smith : keyboard
- Warren Smith : vocals
- Alex Smith : vocals

GIS in the future of law/rule-making

Last year, I had the pleasure of presenting the closing keynote at the GIS Pro conference. The videos have been posted:

Main Talk Part 1

Main Talk Part 2

Main Talk Part 3

Main Talk Part 4

Also, lightning talk here.

Legislative Software on Netbeans

A short writeup on the LWB Legislative/Parliamentary Software Suite on the Netbeans Developer Zone website.

Leonard Cohen

New song. New album. 'Nuff said.

Another sad loss

My mum used to say that bad news and good news travel around in groups of three...We had Steve Jobs. Then Denis Ritchie, and now, apparently, John McCarthy.

Lisp was one of the great inventions in all of computer science. Its influence on all programming languages - including those that chose to make themselves not-lisp-like, has been immense. If ever a programming language embodied a paradigm - a way of looking at the world - .... that is Lisp.

Emacs, AutoCad, Softquad SGML Author/Editor, Interleaf...

Then of course there was SICP...

Boooookkkkkkksssssssss

Having a soft spot for paper books may seem odd for somebody in my line of work but I absolutely *love* books - paper books.

Join that with an interest in legal publishing and, well, this pic from inside the LoC is like a picture of Disneyland to a child.

I had the great fortune to get a tour of the law library in the LoC a while back and it is absolutely stunning place for a book/law nerd like me to visit. Amazing.

Denis Ritchie RIP

Wow. Today I learned that Denis Ritchie has passed away. Very sad.

I met him once at an Unix conference in London when the Plan 9 operating system was being evangalized as the logical successor to Unix.

I still have my copy of "K and R" - the book properly known as the C programming language book written by Kernighan and Ritchie. A true classic and, as far as I know, the worlds first "hello world" programming example.