Quote: Lindows chief executive Michael Robertson, a longtime Microsoft antagonist, has also funded a $US200,000 hacking contest against Microsoft's XBox video console.

This is simply immature and anybody who supports Mr. Robertson is as much immature. How can we hold Microsoft to golden standards and accept such pathetic induhviduals as Mr. Robertson?

Advantages of working from home.

• Guzman was out at third with bad base running. The 3rd baseman missed the tag and Guzman scored on the next pitch. Good aggressive baserunning or dumb luck? Both.
• Guzman steps to the plate with the bases full, two outs. This guy is looking to be a hero. Mussina pitched right thru (3 strikes popup) Guzman for the 3rd out.
• Bernie Williams look like the goat in center field for the Yanks and he contributed with bad D to all three runs for the Twins.
• Stewart played great!

Notes:
The Twins were 44 wins and 49 losses at the all-star break, 4 games behind the Jays. They traded for Shannon Stewart and the rest is history. The Jays got Bobby Kielty and more disinterest from their fans.

This looks Dilbert-like. 

source Scott Adams newsletter.

and jobs are becoming plentiful. I tried to hire someone away from their current position the other day with a 10k raise. This person ended up taking another offer that was many 10ks more than my own offer. I also just got the following job description to fill.

A top financial company in NYC is currently looking for a Sr. VC++/C#/XML developer to work on their Electronic Financial Trading Systems. Strong GUI development work with Microsoft Foundation Classes, .net winforms and xml is crucial. Ideally looking for someone with 5-10 years of experience. Compensation 110-135k base + bonus.

That's USD. Things are rocking! It's like 1998 all over again.

I merged Bray's XSD content handling into my XSDs. It's starting to look ok. Still needs some work.

• Relaxed XSD
• Strict XSD

New validating sample...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://purl.org/atom/ns# atom.xsd" version="0.2">
  <title>iBLOGthere4iM</title>
  <link>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM</link>
  <modified>2003-09-25</modified>
  <author>
    <name>Randy Charles Morin</name>
    <url>http://www.kbcafe.com</url>
    <email>randy@kbcafe.com</email>
  </author>
  <entry id="1">
    <title>A blog entry</title>
    <link>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/1</link>
    <issued>2003-09-25</issued>
    <modified>2003-09-25</modified>
    <content type="text/html" mode="escaped"><![CDATA[This is my atom blog entry]]></content>
  </entry>
</feed>

Adword Optimization Tips provides two manners of improving your click thru rate. They are "Increase your daily budget" and "Increase your maximum cost per click". Neither approach has any affect on your click thru rate, they solely divert more cash from your pocket to Googles. Does Google think their customers are naive? Are Google's customers this naive?

My evaluation is up again. Time to buy. I can't live without it. How much? I don't want to know. Arg!

Download xmlspy® 2004 Enterprise Edition

Yes, a new version and another 30-days free!

source Robin and Wacked.net.

I like to click on the AdSense ads. Feel free to join me and support a great service.

Some companies have Toolbars. That was too boring for us. So, we gave you a Sushibar. As a bit of useless trivia, we're partial to Sushibars since we started Dude over a very tasty spicy tuna roll, and we continue to meet for sushi every Thursday. We're pretty sure that no one cares, but we're going to have fun with this Web site because we've funded it ourselves so we CAN DO ANYTHING WE WANT. Woo hoo. No Board of Directors: Watch out World!

You can use the different buttons to access different types of Dude functionality. Or, if you prefer, you can use bookmarklets. With bookmarklets you get the same functionality, the same funky names, but no funky sushi icons. You can download your own Sushibar by signing up.

A couple times in the last few months, I've seen bloggers take ideas from one blog and claim it as there own, not linking or crediting the original source. It's usually kind of funny, cause they blog it shortly after the originator or even worse, quote portions of the blog entry with the same typos.

Be sure to link your source. Cause you are not a Dude otherwise.

We are closing in on 24 hours left to vote on the Atom project name. Get your votes in. I votes for Atom :) Most everybody else did also. Only Nota, Feedcast and Zing were in the running. I suggested Nota back in early August, I really didn't think anybody was going to take it seriously, it was a joke.

Current count.

1. Atom (50)
2. Nota (6)
3. Zing (6)
4. Feedcast (5)
5. Jazz (2)

• P&D Operations
• Life Sucks

The pre-paid 'debit express' system was developed by two-year old Toronto-based start-up Dexit. The initial launch of the product focuses on the Toronto downtown core and includes 22 national chains as well as almost 40 independent merchants.

A lot of good people have attitude. More often than not, negative attitude. A friend of mine recently interviewed for a position I arranged and I was given feedback on his performance. Seems he was actually trying to intimidate the interviewer, by putting them down.

Positive attitude is better.

Often, what I like to do at an interview or any encounter is find out what the other person thinks himself an expert at. Then, whether you understand the subject or not, and even if you understand the subject better than him, just let him have his ego. Tell him how you'd like to work with someone with those skills. Then you can go about braggin' as much as you want. Just don't make it sound like you think you're better than everybody else and especially the interviewer.

The puzzles are starting to form on NFL Sunday week #4.

• The big news is the Texans who move to 2-2 on 2 wins in the last seconds of the game. On 4th down, down 3 points and two seconds on the clock, Texans could've kicked a field goal to send the game to overtime but instead when for it on goal line. David Carr simply jumped above the pack stretching his arms toward to the goal line, but enough to clip the line for a touchdown. Look ackward, but style didn't count.
• The Bills proved that if you can't run the ball, Travis Henry is injured, you can't win with their second straight loss. The Bills lost this one from the sidelines.
• Chiefs pulled out the biggest win of the weekend, winning on the road in Baltimore.
• Dallas is looking good. Parcells is doing it again.
• The Lions have played well with Harrington, but fall to 1-3.

AFC playoff picture: starting to look like Chiefs, Broncos, Colts, Titans, either Bills (w/ Henry) or Dolphins (w/o Henry), either Ravens or Steelers. Raiders have only won at home against bad teams. Pats have lost two (in three) at home.

NFC playoff picture: Skins, Vikes, Panthers, Bucs, Seahawks and Giants. I have to bet again the Cowboys.

What do I use? SharpReader. What do you use? Post in comments. I get a lot of hits from NetNewsWire.

Just deny it! Of course, it is highly likely that Monkeys is telling the truth, but denial marketing campaigns are becoming more common and successful.

Monkeys has put a lot of effort behind their anti-SPAM campaign. So much so that they have been the target of DoS attacks. They had to take down their anti-SPAM page.

Quotes: Three Web sites that provide spam blocking lists have shut down as a result of crippling Internet attacks in what experts on Thursday said is an escalation in the war between spammers and opponents of unsolicited e-mails. ... Experts have speculated that spammers are behind a computer worm, Sobig, that surfaced earlier this year that can turn infected computers into spam relay machines.

It's been the summer of fear online because of the music industry's campaign to sue file traders. But after millions of instant-message warnings, some 1,600 subpoenas and at least 261 lawsuits, there's been no discernable effect on piracy. Traffic on Kazaa dipped thirty-five percent after the Recording Industry Association of America announced its new anti-piracy initiative, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. But roughly 4 million users each week are still on Kazaa, and many of them are beyond the reach of the law.

source Rolling Stone.

Quote: Ms. Persofsky also serves as a Director of [cut] Kinek Technolgies...

Along side Frank McKenna x-Premier on the Board of Advisors.

Project name: Dexit RFID Payments Solution

The Dexit RFID ("radio frequency identification") based payment solution will enable consumers to conveniently and quickly pay for goods and services, record loyalty points and manage their cash more effectively and simply with the wave of an electronic key tag instead of using cash, debit card or credit card. The funds the consumer spends are stored in a pre-paid account, which is established when the customer signs up for the service.

The goal of this project is to drive the adoption of the Internet and innovative e-business applications by small and medium sized enterprises ("SME's') in Canada. The expected result is that by 2006, over 10,000 SME's across Canada will establish net new IP connections and that once these IP connections are established, the infrastructure will exist for these SME's to easily and cost effectively introduce additional e-business applications to their businesses (such as inventory control, customer relationship management, supply chain management, loyalty applications, remote monitoring, logistics, on line shipping/receiving, scheduling and financial reporting).

The project is innovative because: (i) Dexit is acting as a true catalyst for the development of a broad community of interest; (ii) the system leverages existing banking infrastructure in numerous innovative new ways to create a truly unique service at a cost effective price point; and (iii) the resultant product of the Project will be able to be quickly expanded internationally once proven in Canada. The structural barriers that this project will help to reduce are the adoption of Internet connectivity by SME's and the adoption of e-business applications that such Internet connectivity allows.

Canada will benefit because numerous Canadian companies (in addition to Dexit) will be launched which will go on to become international e-business application leaders, creating thousands of jobs in Canada, as well as foreign exchange and significant tax income for all levels of government.

And if you find one on my site, tell me. I'll get rid of it. Bloggers should make this a habbit. I won't even mention the offenders in order to avoid directing traffic there way. I also don't blog URLs that make you log in. Again, tell me otherwise, if I do.

I'm tired of viruses, SPAM, popups. These things are killing the Internet. We have to start penalizing companies that are contributing to this problem. If you get a popup or SPAM, then send the webmaster an email telling them you will never buy from them again. And don't buy from them ever again. Otherwise, you are inviting more SPAM and popups.

If anybody needs me, I'll be at Marineland and Marvel's Spiderman and Friends.

Closest Campground to MARINELAND and the FALLS

King Waldorf's, a delightful country setting with grassy meadows and large shade trees right on the bank of the wide, historical Welland River.

Had an interesting morning. Met my team at Harvey's in Union Station Toronto. This Harvey has a Wifi signal courtesy of Bell.

Then we headed over to 40 Univerity Toronto the site of our new office. Not finalized yet. Great office.

Finally, we lunched at Armadillos where I stumbled into Pierre, Jason and Steve x-of-724. Last week three 724ers ended up at Chuck E Cheese. This week five 724ers ended up at Armadillos. Fun!

Quote: But many industry observers are taking a skeptical view of Microsoft's motives, arguing the software giant is playing the part of a moral crusader to ease the impact of a money-losing service.

I'm guessing that it's immoral for Microsoft to close down money-losing services. Obviously there are many reasons why we do anything. It's the compounding of those reasons that makes us take action. If the chat rooms were profitable, then surely they would not have closed. If the chat rooms were not the haven of the filth, then surely they would not have closed. The argument of the skeptic is simple, they just don't like Microsoft. Whatever!

I was just hacking around with creating an Atom XSD and a sample that validates while referring to it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://purl.org/atom/ns# atom.xsd">
   <title>iBLOGthere4iM</title>
   <link>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM</link>
   <modified>2003-09-25</modified>
   <author>
      <name>Randy Charles Morin</name>
      <url>http://www.kbcafe.com</url>
      <email>randy@kbcafe.com</email>
   </author>
   <entry id="1">
      <title>A blog entry</title>
      <link>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/1</link>
      <issued>2003-09-25</issued>
      <modified>2003-09-25</modified>
      <content type="text/html"><![CDATA[This is my atom blog entry]]></content>
   </entry>
</feed>

I struggled with the various conflicting examples on the wiki and in the specs. The Atom effort seems to be struggling in its definition phase.

Quote: Scoble is definitely full of shit today. I don't see evil, and my disk is full (of shit), so it seems like it's time to start cleaning out the temp files. And geez Louise, how would an ordinary user know these files even exist. So many Microsoft people take even the appearance of criticism as condemnation. Get a sense of perspective. My software has bugs too. Sheez.

Randy: Dave blows another gasket. If you don't like Windows, stop using it. Oh wait, the alternative is worse :)

Woah, Wait a Minute, Hold It!

We could go through the voting process for the hundredth time. We could say that, come September the 30th, this format is called Nota or or Zing, or whatever wins this vote... but with under 20 votes per name? We could go through all the rigmorale of properly vetting the candidate that actually wins, just to find that really it's no good anyway, and have to start voting for the [too much]+1th time.

But let's not, okay? Instead, Just Use Atom.

TORONTO, September 23, 2003 – CaseBank Technologies Inc. ("CaseBank") has today announced the signing of an expanded agreement with Bombardier Aerospace, to provide an integrated one-stop diagnostic service for the aircraft manufacturer's regional airline customers. CaseBank's SpotLight® diagnostic decision support system was chosen to provide Bombardier's new integrated technical support service offered to customers worldwide.

Most every app has the funny little flaw. Why wouldn't you have a login button go to the login screen? When I logout, I want that application to disappear. I don't want to have to then click exit or any other button.

Caveat. If one of your goals is to encourage the end-user to continue using your application, then this doesn't apply and returning to the login screen can convince the user to continue. 

Quote: Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing software, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday accusing the entertainment companies of using unauthorized versions of its software in their efforts to snoop out users.

source Pirotcar.

I just hired Valentin. He starts today with Opence.net.

The Pic was from Valentin's camera (3.2 mp). You can see him holding the remote. We had lunch and beers yesterday in Oakville.

Two articles with my friends from 1X in this months edition of eGaming Review.

Top referring search engines for KBCafe.com

1. Google 91%
2. Yahoo <7%
3. MSN 1%
4. Altavista <1%
5. AOL 0.1%

Top search strings

1. ping icmp
2. base64 encoding code in c
3. smtp howto
4. base64 encoding algorithm
5. howto smtp
6. microsoft netmon
7. base64 encoding
8. C++ tricks
9. CriticalSection UNIX
10. encoding base 64

Crude, but it'll do for now. I just needed something quick. It works on all the RSS in my blog. I doubt the resulting Formerly Echo would conform to the Feed Validator expectations. I just followed the example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="channel">
    <feed xmlns="http://purl.org/echo/" version="1.0" xml:lang="en-us" >
    <title><xsl:value-of select="*[local-name()='title']" /></title>
    <summary><xsl:value-of select="*[local-name()='description']" /></summary>
    <link><xsl:apply-templates select="*[local-name()='link']" /></link>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="*[local-name()='item']" />
    </feed>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="item">
    <entry xmlns="http://purl.org/echo/" >
    <title><xsl:value-of select="*[local-name()='title']" /></title>
    <link><xsl:apply-templates select="*[local-name()='link']" /></link>
    <content type="text/html" xml:lang="en-us" mode="escaped">
      <xsl:value-of select="*[local-name()='description']" />
    </content>
    </entry>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The form on the right doesn't actually work. It just a replicat of the form over on Google News Alerts (BETA).

West on the Bloor-Danforth Line
Generally speaking, the Bloor-Danforth line gets more and more modern and less and less interesting the further one gets from its centre. Kipling, at the westernmost end of the line, is pathetic and boring. Its tiny little tail tracks are outside, of all places, and extremely unimpressive. The situation does not improve much as one travels east past Islington, Royal York, Old Mill, Jane, Runnymede and High Park; there's nothing special to see in these stations or their tunnels and the tracks often run outside for long stretches. Icky.

I ducked into this St. Georgian crawlspace for a minute while two trains passed simultaneously.

source Timothy Campbell. Tim is also a host of the bloggers meetup in Toronto. I joined the meetup, but I don't know if I'll actually have time to show.

Visual C# PM @ M$FT. His blog.

Programmers love to write wrappers around everything. I've seen programmers wrap other programmer's API that in turn were just wrappers of some system function. The justification is that you could switch the underlying functions without affecting any code other than the wrapper.

About three-four years ago I became aware that this effort is simply wasted. The reason is that nobody ever changes the underlying function while maintaining the wrapper.

This was especially true while I was at 724 solutions. Wrapper after wrapper was written and never reused. When we changed underlying functions, we also changed the overlying wrapper and changes were required throughout the codebase. What made the situation worse is that these wrappers were often the root cause of bugs. 

The moral? Think twice before exerting wasted effort. Wrapping is what you do with x-mas and b-day presents.

Toronto, September 23, 2003 – A new payment system that aims to make pockets full of loonies and toonies a thing of the past was introduced in Toronto today. The launch of Dexit allows consumers to make small value purchases quickly and easily by tapping an electronic tag on a merchant’s reader.

The initial launch of Dexit focuses on the downtown core and includes 22 national chains as well as almost 40 independent merchants located in Toronto’s underground PATH.

TD Canada Trust, National Bank and TELUS Mobility are also part of the Dexit launch. TELUS Mobility will be issuing special Dexit tags that can be placed on client mobile phones and used in the same way as the regular tag. The tag itself uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to allow consumers to make their purchases.

CANARIE, Canada’s advanced Internet development organization, is a key contributor. “CANARIE funds innovation,” says Andrew Bjerring, President and CEO. “Dexit’s innovation in payment methods will help Canada stay in a global leadership position in these types of technologies and we are proud to be part of the project.”

I got 4,000 impressions today for 75 cents. I went for mega impressions with little to no click-thrus. It's quite easy. Use a very unspecific word. Coolage! I was paying 5 cents per click and I did one click and a friend of mine another. So, I'm unaware of only 13 clicks.

When: Registration will begin October 1, 2003
Where: http://www.topcoder.com/googlecodejam
What: Solve increasingly difficult coding problems within a set time period
Who: Sponsored by Google, powered by TopCoder

Isn't great code its own reward?

Sure, but it never hurts to have a little spare change for a new mousepad.

1st Place     $10,000
2nd Place    $5,000
3rd Place     $3,500
4th Place     $1,250

My new Dude blog, called RV Dad.

My sister really likes her Mac, but we just can't communicate because ... well ... she has a Mac.

1. Her customer tried to send her a JPG, but instead sent a BMP. The customer doesn't understand the difference. The problem is that my sister can't read BMPs on her Mac. I'm sure you can, but then nobody said the Mac is easy to use (ok, maybe they did).
2. So, I told her to email it to me and I'll convert it for her to a JPG.
3. After a half hour, I called her back and told her I didn't have the email yet. She said she sent it a half hour ago.
4. I said, MSGer it to me. Ends up that the only version of MSGer that runs correctly on her Mac doesn't support sending files. Really old.
5. Finally an hour after she sent the file, it arrived in my email.

Why do people insist in using Macs? Stubborness?

Is looking awesome! Check it out!

Quote: NHL teams posted record losses of nearly $300 million last season, according to figures distributed to owners this summer.

Definition of gullible. Easily deceived or duped. Easily gulled; that may be duped. Easily deceived or tricked. Easily tricked because of being too trusting.

Not me!

Tried to add my first AdWords today. Failed!

Quote: We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. Please note that using your browser's back button in AdWords can increase the likelihood of errors. If you think this was the cause of your error, please try again without using the back button.

I'm getting about one Swen every 20 seconds. This is twenty times higher than Sobig. Has Microsoft's strategy of securing their OS failed?

1. Not having kids earlier.
2. Not giving more time to my book and article writing.
3. Not giving more time to my Website (KBCafe.com).
4. Not giving more time to my own business.
5. Not giving more time to my class library.
6. Not giving more time to Juice.
7. Not giving more time to project x.
8. Not giving more time to project y.
9. Not giving more time to project z.
10. Not having more than 24 hours in a day.

Actually, you'll have to click thru, find the image again on the page and click it a second time.

Quote: The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism.

I always suspected there was something communist about the Mac ;)

Easy wisdom to live by, but most don't. For instance, I've often encountered situations where I can't believe somebody's action. What did they think my reaction would be? Or otherwise, the lack of reaction to some behaviors. Sometimes, people do really stupid things and then compound the situation by reacting more and more negatively. My reaction is usually to end my relationship with the person or entity. Pretty much every job I've ever had ended with me quiting because I simply thought the companies actions were ridiculous.

• At A.C. Nielsen, I sat around for four months with little to nothing to do, except pick my nose.
• At Opencola, the CTO argued that we had really really bad programmers, many of which he knew were good friends of mine.
• At 1X Inc., I was offered a 33% pay cut. They did change the offer to a 4% annual raise, but too late, I had already decided to leave.
• At 724 Solutions, I was offered a 3% annual raise and they reneged on 9k new stock options only months after I was named a key employee.
• At Omniterm, I was owed back pay of more than $10k for 3-4 months.

What did they think my reaction would be?

Here's an interesting signup form. They offer a free IQ test, then when you want your result, you have to signup for an account.

Wifi from my RV. Paradise. KOA is partnering with Hotspotzz. The KOA location in Niagara Falls is Wifi.

Hotspotzz has a free wireless access day on September 25th. Hotspotzz has very few location in the east with one in Ontario, one in New York state and another in New Jersey state. They do have dozens of locations on the west coast.

Toronto itself has very few commercial Wifi network, most Wifi hotspots in TO are the result of loose networks and generous citizens. Spotnik seems to have the best TO network.

I have been at my god daughter, Aleya's 2nd birthday party most of the afternoon. Just got home. Missed the early Sunday games.

• Earlier today the Colts, Chiefs and Vikings all move to 3-0. Bucs and Steelers pick up road wins to move to 2-1. All five teams are looking like playoff contenders.
• Giants are beating the 2-0 Redskins on the road 21-3 in the 3rd quarter. Very impressive.  Not that impressive, the Giants had to pull the game out in overtime after an 18 point second half come back.
• Chargers are losing at home again this week (second in a row?). An 0-3 start with two losses at home would mean an almost certain end to their playoff hope.
• Lions' Harrington threw three interceptions, but don't blame him, two interceptions were late trying to play catchup. They lost on only 58 yards rushing in 23 running plays and three 50+ yard offensive plays by the Vikes. The game was actually lost when Lions up 10-0 were called for three staight 4th down penalties, backing them up from their 25 yrd line to their 4 yrd line.
• Rams without Warner are beating the 2-0 Seahawks on the road 23-10 in the 3rd quarter. Impressive. The Seahawks would have look great at 3-0 and should've beat a Warner-less Rams at home. Two 4th quarter touchdowns and Seahawks are now 3-0, winning
• I watched 49ers fall to 1-2 with a horrible loss to the Browns. 49ers dominated the entire game, failed to score a touchdown and put away the Browns. Two fourth quarter Brown touchdowns. Coming from behind for a one point win is the script of the day.

You can install the new DudeBar here.

Notes: It requires .NET run-time version 1.1. If you don't have it, then the installer will ask you to install it. Then you have to return here and restart the installer.

If you are installing the DudeBar for the first time, then the installer will try to show the DudeBar, otherwise it may actually hide the DudeBar. If you don't see it, then simply select View | Toolbars | DudeBar.NET from the Internet Explorer menubar.

Check out the Associated Press description of Spezza's goal tonight.

"Jason Spezza scored at 2:46 in overtime, lifting the Ottawa Senators over the Buffalo Sabres 3-2 Friday night in the exhibition opener for both teams. Spezza took a feed from winger Marian Hossa and beat Sabres goalie Ryan Miller for the winner."

Spezza skated in from outside the blueline, made a fool of the Sabres defense and tucked the puck by Miller. Great goal! The A.P. writer must have been reading the boxscore when he wrote his crap.

This is an excellently written article on RSS and Web content syndication in general.

Quotes: Among a Webmaster's biggest challenges are keeping content fresh and advertising what's new. The RSS specification for syndicating content is a way to meet both needs. ... RSS syndication was originally designed for newsfeeds, but it also can be used to broadcast event listings, software or book revisions, project updates, corporate news, and more. More recently, RSS feeds have become a popular means for bloggers to announce updates to their Weblogs. ... What does RSS stand for? Depending on whom you ask, it could stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. (RDF stands for Resource Description Framework.) The reason for the varying names is that RSS is not one specification. It is several competing specifications along two main lines: an RDF-based version that's powerful but complex and a non-RDF version that's simpler to use. ... A third syndication specification, variously called Echo, Pie, or Atom, has recently garnered much attention.

Source Formerly Echo.

The Pie guys are thinking about Nota as a possible project name. Nota is extremely leading.

Check out the evolution of KBCafe.com since 1998.

1. 7.6% Netscape
2. 2.9% NetNewsWire
3. 2.1% SharpReader
4. 1.8% Archive.org
5. 1.0% Bloglines
6. 0.9% Feedreader
7. 0.9% PHP
8. 0.8% NewsGator
9. 0.7% Googlebot
10. 0.4% Mediapartners-Google (Adsense)

others

• 0.4% FeedDemon
• 0.2% AmphetaDesk

Sorry, I excluded the obvious Internet Explorer 73%. That's old news.

She's actually the 2nd goldfish I've had named Alina. I've had three dozen or so Goldfish over the last three years, but only she remains. Most of the others were eaten by other Goldfish and my Chinese Algae Eater (flushed him in frustration).

The video is quite large, so you'll have to be patient.

Quote: Skype is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users – not to share files this time, but to talk for free with your friends.

Skype was on CNBC today. I've also been getting a lot of Dude-mails 'bout it.

Last night, I brought my kids to CEC. It was my niece Eden's birthday party. Ya, her second party this week. Funny, I bumped into two former 724 comrads. Purely by accident. One comrads' son was also celebrating his birthday.

I've already received more than 1000 copies of the Swen virus in my inbox. This is by far the biggest tax on the email system, even bigger than SPAM. Although hard to prove, a quick scan of the blogosphere and news sources, it would seem that Swen was first report here at iBLOGthere4iM. Coolage!

Quote: For information on how to combat the worm, click here.

More...

• Swen at Symantec.
• Swen is not Gibe contrary to most reports.
• Swen at Microsoft.

Here's a challenge. Can you figure out where I got it? And don't view source. That's cheating.

Above:The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA's Terra satellite captured this image September 17, 2003.Click to image see animation Credit: NASA

Quote: So the AOL stock symbol is being retired, too, to make way for the stolid old symbol, TWX.

I really hate linking to Web pages that require login or popup ads. I had to fix up the URL to make it work without a login. I purposely don't link to the Motley Fool for just this reason. I'm kinda getting tired of the NY Times too. If you ever get a popup from one of my links, then please tell me.

Likely the biggest problem that exists in the programming community is that many programmers think they are gods. They believe they can go around pissing off (a.k.a. being a Joe) all their coworkers and that because they are so good at programming, that nobody would dare fire them. Compounding this problem are week development managers that put up with such destructive behaviors.

Examples of god-like behaviors.

• Senior developers (paid $$$) who go out of their way to publicly point out mistakes made by other developers, often more junior (paid $). A better behavior is to publicly point out the successes of junior developers and point out the mistakes privately.
• A developer who refuses to work on his assignments, but rather works on what he believes is important.
• A developer who closes bugs, ignores them, marks them fixed, because his code he believes doesn't have bugs.
• A developer that refuses advice, because they are beyond learning from others.

I remember telling a developer once that he could do this certain task in 15 minutes using a wizard and that we just didn't have time to spend 2 weeks coding something by hand. One month later, he was finished coding by hand, what I did with a wizard in 15 minutes. But of course, his code was so much better than the wizards. His code could slice dice mince rince drain shred chop knead and more. The requirements were to slice. The wizard produced code . . . . . only . . . . . sliced.

A must hire for any company in the midwest.

.

John Edward: "The real problem is that the Board of the New York Stock Exchange has operated like a clubhouse, with no accountability to anybody except itself. Instead of setting an example for corporate America, the board has become a symbol of what's wrong at too many corporations."

Grasso did nothing wrong. He was already owed the $180 million. This was deferred compensation and retirement benefits, not current compensation. The board agreed to pay him this money. Now they have asked him to resign for accepting this pay package. NYSE Board has to be held accountable for this bad situation, not Grasso. Another board that needs to be packaged away.

More

	09/17/2003	NYSE Statement Issued by H. Carl McCall
	09/17/2003	NYSE Statement

The quality of this email will convince a lot of users to run the payload, supposed patch. Attachment was PATCH94.exe (106KB). I got a second with an identical signature, but it was spreading as a bounced email.

System requirements	Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP
This update applies to	MS Internet Explorer, version 4.01 and later MS Outlook, version 8.00 and later MS Outlook Express, version 4.01 and later
Recommendation	Customers should install the patch at the earliest opportunity.
How to install	Run attached file. Choose Yes on displayed dialog box.
How to use	You don't need to do anything after installing this item.

I'm currently, or I should say my wife is currently looking at baptising our daughter at our Roman Catholic Church.

The problem is that most of our friends don't qualify as worthy godparents in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestant. No first communion. Not confirmed. Living in sin. Gay.

I would think that the qualities that would disqualify you from godparenthood would be...

• theft,
• adultery,
• murder,
• lying and
• envy.

Remember the ten commandments? Is the Roman Catholic Religion more about marketing and growing the top line? Or is it about being good and believing in god? Sunday Christians rejoice, for you truly have religion. My daughter doesn't, because her parents don't have friends worthy.

source Intertwingly.

Six Sigma is very interesting. It was created by a company that is performing miserably.

Motorola's revenues have dropped 30% over the last two years and losses are in the multi-billion dollar range. I guess people are so impressed with those results, that they want to emulate Motorola. Does master black belt mean that you know how to run a company into the ground?

Where's the server not found? Seems Verisign now redirects all server not found to their own search engine, SiteFinder. Cool! Good business. The Internet community is pissed.

• Wired News
• BoingBoing

11g

Quote: It's been a rough 5 days for the Bank of Montreal's (BMO) information security team. On the weekend, two old Bank of Montreal server systems were put on eBay for sale. That isn't that unusual...banks often have arrangements to sell old hardware to resellers, who then make the equipment available for public sale. The difference this time is the servers in question were not erased properly and still had information on them containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of several hundred bank clients, along with their bank account information, including account type and number, balances, credit card numbers and more. Story. And let's not forget the fraud someone perpetrated on the bank last week by sending emails to a selection of BMO customers with links to a fake BMO banking site they had setup to collect customer logins and passwords. While only a few actually "logged in" to the fake site, the bank reported that to date there has not been any fraudulent activity and that the fake site was shut down within 24 hours. Story.

BMO is the center of most of secure Web stories. While at 724, I was babysitting BMOs FSP implementation. Somebody would give me a visitors access pass to the computer room in the morning and I'd hold it all day. I could walk out of the building and hand the pass to whomever I wanted and they could visit the computer room and do whatever they wanted. In fact, while in the computer room, I was usually alone. Of course, I didn't have access to the ultra-secure room. But the door was usually left open anyway.

One day, the V.P. Development asked me for a username and password on the demo system. I logged into the FTP site, got a pair and gave them to him. He returned five minutes later to tell me the credentials didn't work. Oops! I had given him a production username and password, not demo.

Source GreyOrbit.

Quote: "You're watching a McDonald's commercial for a contest open to people who order fries with their meals and idly thinking, "Yeah, another selfless corporate campaign against anorexia," when you notice it. Somebody has slipped a seemingly unrelated Web address, dugg.ca, at least twice into the video."

The Website looks to be overloaded. It responds better outside of normal hours. It started well, but I didn't get far before it hung up.

Source GreyOrbit.

The worst day of my life was the day I had to layoff Paul, Sham, Manoj, Robin, Lucius and Cip. Horrible day. The next worst day of my life was a few weeks later when the CTO said (with a chuckle) he was glad we laid them off, because they were really really bad programmers. The CTO had also been saying the same thing about the programmers he laid off a year earlier. I quit at the end of that day. We had to lay them off because the business failed, not because they were bad programmers. They were great programmers! I'm happy to say that I've helped four of the six get jobs by providing solid references.

Quote: Java Language Conversion Assistant is a tool that automatically converts existing Java-language code into Visual C#®.

Ranks #12 on top developer downloads from Microsoft. The .NET v1.1 redistributable is #1.

You know you've truly succeeded at being an intimidator when your subordinates have a big party to celebrate you leaving the company.

I had one friend who so hated his boss that he shit on his car.

Developer Fusion asked if they could republish some of my works. They just republished my article on Using ADO in C++. They also setup another profile page for me.

All together now. Dude!

I'm amazed at how eager people are to partition their hard drives. What's wrong with a single 50 gigabyte drive anyway? The theory is that you lose a lot of space with smaller files that chew full blocks. By partitioning, you create smaller blocks and thus less space is wasted. Wait, it's a 50 gigabyte drive. How many small files does it take to fill up a 50 gigabyte drive? Too many. My head hurts.

In the extreme, a friend once partitionned all the servers with 4 megabytes of space on the system partition. This maximized the amount of available space on the data partition. The system files were slightly more than 3 megs. The next step in the server setup was to add the required system components. The installer complained there wasn't enough space on the system partition. Yes, I reformatted the hard drive into one big partition. Thanks.

Partitioning is cool! I hate cool. But it'll save you a few meg of disk space. I don't care.

After a twelve hours of marathon meetings and a good meal, we converged last night on a Swing-Jazz and Blues bar downtown Toronto. The Reservoir Lounge is great jazz bar. Good music and beer. We ate at Remys Restaurant. Very good food. We also stopped for a drink at The Pilot's Tavern. Bad beer and no fun.

Of course, I was overwhelmed by three right-brained sales dudes (and dudette). After a few beers, the conversation turned from how to work together? to why blogs are going to take over the world. Being extremely left-brained, I don't think I was able to convince my right-brained friends. What's a blog anyway?

Performance and scalability at 724 was always a funny concept. We even had a performance team that tested the preformance of individual servers. The original alerts, written by someone who I'll refrain from naming, performed dreadfully. 100 alerts over any period of time would simply lock up the system. The alerts processor was rewritten by Sandra Vrtikapa and we started getting numbers in the 10ks alerts per minute. In the end, there was less than 1k end-users, so we could actually pump 10 alerts to each user every minute. If the same effort had been spent on pull marketing, then we would still have an application called FSP. I wonder if the latest alerts platform will ever require 1000 alerts per minute, never mind 1000 per second.

1. How To Base64
2. C++ Tricks
3. How To Shell
4. How To Thread
5. How To Ping
6. C# Performance
7. OOP Concepts
8. COM Internet Services
9. My Big Brother Microsoft
10. How To Port Scan

Calculated by number of hits during the month. The top article had 1414 hits. The 10th had 532 hits. This does not include hits at mirrors like csharphelp.com.

I delete a BMP from my Visual Studio project. The harddrive starts thrashing for a few minutes. What a 10 meg BMP? No, how bout 3-4 k. What is going on? I repeat, same result. Repeat, faster (1 sec) the third time.

My niece (we are are not actually related, Talos' mom was my wife's maid of hono(u)r) is going to be a big sister. Congrats to Talos and her parents.

Sorry, no digital pictures of Talos or the birthday girl (Eden).

Sorry not to post earlier, but my niece (Eden) was celebrating her 2nd today.

• Panthers look impressive leading Bucs in 4th. Bucs could have won the game on a last second convert, which was blocked (third blocked kicked of the game). John Kasay kicked a big 47 yarder (4th of the game) to give the Panthers a 12-9 win. A miss would have given the Bucs great field position.
• A second road win by Broncos, but two weaker teams.Still Denver are now in line for a big 10+ win season.
• Two straight home losses by Eagles. Watched both games. McNabb has been awful.
• Bills big time win on the road over Jax. Watched both games. Bills look like Super Bowl contenders.
• A road win by Redskins puts them into a playoff role.
• Jamal Lewis runs for 295 yards, a new single game rushing record.
• More on Wannstupid, the Dolphin coach. Up 21-3, he put Fiedler in pass mode again, which resulted in a fumble, followed by a TD for the Jets. Finally, he gave the ball to Ricky Williams and ran out the clock. But will he learn before he cost the Dolphins another playoff season? Jets will have difficult making the playoffs after two early loses.
• The Raiders, at home, struggled to beat the Bengals.

If you Google programmer rewrite, then you get 120 thousand hits. Do you think programmers think about rewriting too much?

Story (not first hand): Opencola was on the verge of a big deal with some of the largest technology companies when the VP R&D said that he didn't think the solution would scale and would return back to the office and get his team to rewrite the application in the next six-weeks. He returned home, fired all the developers, hired some trusty friends and buckled down for the rewrite. The rewrite took over a year and the business opportunity disappeared.

The rewrite mentality exists because most programmers actually think they know better than everybody else. They discount that other programmers know anything of value. Back to our story.

The Opencola browser six months after the rewrite, still had connectivity issues thru NATs and firewalls, an extremely large memory footprint (100 Mb) and memory leaks that made it unusable for more than 10 minutes at a time. These were the same issues that resulted in the application being rewritten to begin with. It effectively took them 6 months to rewrite the same buggy unscalable application and more months to remove those bugs. Had they just taken the existing application and removed the bugs, they may still be in business today.

A rarely appreciated programming skill is the ability to extend and debug code written by others.

Here we are less than a month from the Ontario provincial elections and I haven't blogged on the issue. What? Here's my choices.

• Dalton McGuinty, Ontario Liberals
• Ernie Eves, Ontario PC
• Gail Broad, Ontario NDP
• Frank De Jong, Green Party
• Giuseppe Gori, Family Party

McGuinty promises to raise the high school drop-out age to 18, while many are graduating as young as 17. He seems a little out of touch with reality. Doesn't someone actually review his statements before he makes an ass of himself.

Eves. Let's see. His government was warned about their handling of hydro in Ontario. Deregulation in 2002. Blackouts in 2003. Remember the Hydro One fiascos. His government was also warned about removing photo radar. Eves paid dearly for that mistake. Do the rest of us have to pay?

Let me just laugh. I don't even know the other three candidates.

source Alec.

Even with all the Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, RIAA, P2P, Sharman, file sharing, piracy, MP3, DMCA all over the news, Internet users still have a bare understanding of copyright. For instance, I have written a couple of dozen articles for various sources on the Internet. Every month, I find one of the articles on a site that didn't ask my permission. I have given such permission to many sites, like csharphelp.com, hardcorevisualstudio, developerfusion.com and many more.

If I don't give you permission, then you don't have permission, that's copyright law. Some have even taken to reproducing the articles with surrounding ads. Some have removed my copyright notice. When I address the situation, the site author is usually unaware that he has broken any laws. I even had this response from IDG's ComputerWorld.com and DevArticles.

By the way, if you want to reproduce my articles, then please just ask. I rarely object. Just don't modify the article, don't remove the copyright, don't change the format or formatting.

from my friend, Lucius Nedelcu.

TLD is more often used incorrectly than correctly. kbcafe.com is not a TLD, it's an SLD name. com is a TLD.

Quote: This advertisement, from Dude Research, is hillarious. I wish they'd make it a bit more readable, though. Glad to see someone has a sense of humor. Hey, Chris Pirillo, this is up your alley! Oh, and Dave Winer, even has a plug for RSS in there. Heh.

I've decided that my current blogging tool is not adequate and I'm going to write a new one. The project name RSB stands for Really Simple Blogging™. Hopefully, it won't take too long. The goal is zero code on the server. Something that I've been thinking alot about since joining Opence.net.

kbcafe.blog sucks :)

Because the author doesn't take the time to move his idea forward. I've seen this a lot lately on the Internet, where the author presents his idea but fails to move it forward.

• Don Box's RSS Profile
• Timothy Appnel's RSS Profile
• Jevon's Comment Feeds

Eventually everybody gives up on the author and moves onto another initiative.

Leafs Lineup

Forwards: Roberts-Sundin-Mogilny-Antropov-Nieuwendyk-Nolan-Tucker-Green-Domi-Renberg-Fitzgerald-Reichel.
Dmen: Kaberle-McCabe-Berg-Marchment-Belak-Jackman-Pilar-Colaiacovo.
Net: Belfour-Kidd-Tellqvist.

Looking good. Preseason schedule follows.

The Web has spurred creativity.

bin Laden is back and this time he's got a walking stick.

source Al-Jazeera.

Quote: THE PRESIDENT: Today our nation remembers -- we remember a sad and terrible day, September the 11th, 2001. We remember lives lost. We remember the heroic deeds. We remember the compassion and the decency of our fellow citizens on that terrible day. Also today is a day of prayer. We pray for the husbands and wives and moms and dads and sons and daughters and loved ones of those who still grieve and hurt. We pray for strength and wisdom. We thank God for the many blessings of this nation, and we ask His blessings on those who especially hurt today. Thank you.

Ω I disagree in spades. A binary XML standard would help Web services complete its domination of the RPC stack and obviate DCOM, IIOP and RMI.

source Don Box.

Quote: Less than a day after the recording industry announced its lawsuits, the 12-year-old Manhattan schoolgirl and her mother settled their case for $2,000.

It's impressive the way the RIAA has stood up to this 12-year-old school girl. Next the RIAA is going to settle with a 1-year-old for candy.

If I give Forrester Research millions of dollars, do you think they'll report that development projects run by Randy Charles Morin cost $25 less than development projects run by his closest peer? Forrester has no integrity. Hmmm! I wonder, if you use MySQL instead of Oracle. What about a cheaper J2EE application server?

SCO slams Open Source community. The Open Source communities actions of late are clearly illegal and they deserve whatever is coming. Unfortunately, the actions of a few idiots in the Open Source community are going to mean the end of open source.

No matter how you sugar coat it, the following is an admission of guilt on part of the Open Source community.

Quote: The other SCO code snippet Perens walks through had to do with memory allocation functions in Unix System V and Linux. He says there was, in fact, "an error in the Linux developer's process," specifically a programmer at SGI, and he says while the Linux community had the legal right to this code, it didn't belong in Linux and was therefore removed.

These guys do some awesome work. My kids particularly enjoy the Spiderman and Friends Funhouse on Clifton Hill.

Playing the Home Game, Part 4
By James J. Cramer
March 13th-14th, 2000
How about some wild cards, some companies that have the capability of being trillion-dollar companies if they execute well, because they can scale, because they can grow effortlessly without a lot of people, because they have a lot of sales momentum. Remember, sales momentum, not earnings, put you in Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - boards) and Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq - news - boards). If you wait for the earnings to explode, you miss the biggest moves. They always occur ahead of that earnings explosion.


Let me give you five that we are putting in our basket, five that we think are candidates to be huge. Before I did this, I bounced these five off my staff. The comments of my friend and partner Jeff Berkowitz control. He did not know whether any one of these companies would be big five years from now, but if one is, that stock will make up for the rest. In spades.

So, without further ado, here goes:


724 Solutions
InfoSpace
Inktomi
Yahoo!
VeriSign
Now, before I go into each one, I'm going to offer some real caveats and I demand that you listen to them. One, we own these. If they go up 50 points or something huge next week, we will not own as much because we will have to create room if they drop 50 points. These stocks trade in wild increments.

Two, we would never own just one of these. Maybe that will be the one that doesn't execute well. Maybe that will be the one that blows it. Three, I could have mentioned a whole bunch of others -- Redback (RBAK:Nasdaq - news - boards), Brocade (BRCD:Nasdaq - news - boards), Veritas (VRTS:Nasdaq - news - boards) spring to mind. But I want to talk about these because they represent the most likely lottery tickets out there. I did not choose the words lottery tickets out of imprudence. That's what these already multibillion companies are.

So what are these lottery tickets?

724 Solutions devises a way to make wireless banking possible from handheld computers. Isn't that what we really want from our future cell phones? 724 makes it happen.

You want wireless in this market. InfoSpace has potentially one of the best wireless strategies I've seen. These guys have deals with most of the major carriers who pay them for their software solutions. InfoSpace is set to capitalize on the off-line world that can't specifically sell goods over the Internet, but rather offers promotions or their services (dry cleaning and restaurants).

Two more interesting stories. I wonder what's happening with these guys. Haven't heard anything in a few weeks.

More Balfour

• Canadian man on trial in Lebanon

More Arar

• Canadian suspect in Syria faces civilian trial
• Arar denies torture

In one of my past lives, I worked for 1X, the author of the Managed Risk Sports software. 1X has also rejigged their website.

TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer.

Not many tournaments on the PGA create tremendous without the help of Tiger Woods, but Mike Weir is not only a Canandian hero, but has elevated the interest in the Canadian national championship, the Bell Canadian Open. Not appearing; Tiger Woods. Weir finished an impressive 10th, considering the pressure of playing with a nation on your shoulders.

Looks like a playoff will decide the tournament. Bob Tway is the champ, on three holes of really bad playoff golf. Nobody wanted to win this one.

This is looking to be one of the most exciting US Opens in a long-time. Mostly because the rain forced a lot of games, some at night (prime time), in the last few days. Ferrero's exciting play and Roddick's raw power, this should be a great final.

Roddick is dominating the early play. Breaks Ferrero early and he's really hitting the ball with power. This match just doesn't look close. Roddick is doing whatever he pleases. Overpowering! Roddick blew a 141 mph ace followed immediately by a second ace to accentuate a great first set win.

Ferrero elevated his game in the second set, holding his first four serves, but still being dominated on Roddick's server. Holding serve is the game, looks like a tie-break. Roddick wins the second set tie-break. We could have a new American tennis hero. Just as Sampras retires (Agassi on his way).

The 3rd set, like the 2nd, Ferrero struggles to hold serve, but doesn't falter and Roddick dominates on his own serve. But I think Ferrero is playing better as Roddick slides slightly. Ferrero double faults on a break-point. Roddick to serve out the championship. Roddick aces out the match.

I love the IBM real-time scoreboard.

Year-after-year, Dave's play calling particularly late in the game costs his team. Today, with Rick Williams in the backfield and a great defense, he had only to give Ricky the ball and he could have run out the clock. Rather, he called two passes in-a-row late, leading to an interception and another loss.

Last season, Dave blew a 24-13 lead with less than 5 minutes left during the last game of the year to eliminate the Fins. Again, he refused to let Ricky run out the clock giving him zero touches and throwing away his team's playoff chances.

NFL football really makes MLB baseball look boring. What an exciting first week of football. I'm watching the Bills absolutely dominate the Patriots. I watch over the entire league using Sportsline's Game Center.

• Colts could really use an early road win against Cleveland, tied 6-6 late. Colts win on a last second Vanderjagt 45 yarder.
• Broncos look dominating, but then they are playing the Bengals.
• Vikes behind Randy Moss look great. Moss dropped an unordinary amount of passes last season. Dropped passes are not tracked, but I'm pretty certain Moss set the all time record last season.
• Panthers have come back from 17-0 to lead late. Peete was replaced by Delhomme, who has been great. Jaguards scored 56 seconds later to regain the lead on a 65-yard pass from Brunnel to Lewis. Panthers now have the ball on the Jax 10 with less than a minute on the clock. Delhomme throws his 3rd TD in relief with seconds on the clock.
• Dolphins were losing to the Texans, but have recaptured the lead. Ricky was having a bad day until he caught a 35 yarder to put the Fins up early in the 4th. Fins are in trouble late, but hold Texans to a field goal after the Texas had a first and goal at the six (5 minutes on the clock). Fins lose it on a last second field goal. BIG TIME UPSET.
• Harrington (4) and Blake (3) have combined for seven touchdowns in this weeks game-not-to-watch. Most have predicted the Lions and Cards will compete for top draft picks this year.
• Titan kicker Nedney kicked a 50 yard field goal. Not impressive? In the same game, Titan punter Hentrich kicked a 49 yarder. That's gotta be a record. Two kickers with 49+ yard field goals, same game, same team. Hentrich really nailed it too! It would've cleared 55+ yards, maybe 60. Hentrich also hit a 34 yarder later in the game. And a third field goal by Hentrich.

Connectivity to the Game Center has been really bad today.

A great day in the sports world, first Sunday of the NFL season. I lived in Windsor for 6 years, so my favorite team is Detroit Lions (Bills a close second). Ya, I cheer for real losers. I'm a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey fan too! But I lived in Windsor during the Barry Sanders years.

Predictions. AFC division winners will be Steelers, Broncos, Bills, Titans wild card will be Dolphins, Chiefs. NFC division winners will be Eagles, Bucs, Bears, 49ers, wild card will be Giants, Rams. Super bowl is Broncos over Eagles.

AFC Notes: I picked the Steelers because the Ravens don't have a quarterback, otherwise Ravens would've been my pick. Portis will be the leagure MVP. Bills looked awesome in the first half this week. Ricky is great in Miami. Chiefs have a great chief. Colts will compete for a playoff spot.

NFC Notes: Eagles, Giants and Bucs look good. Rams could surprise and win it all, but they may not even qualify for the playoffs with this oft-injured bunch. If only the Panthers had a quarterback, but they don't. If the Falcons can stay near .500 till Vic returns.

Great pitching performance by Halladay. Bobby Kielty hits a two-out first-pitch pinch-hit RBI in the bottom of the 10th inning to win 1-0 over the Tigers.

This was the first 10-inning shutout performance since Jack Morris did the same in game 7 of the 1991 World Series. The 1991 World Series was likely the best World Series ever.

• Five of the seven games were won in the last at bat.
• All seven games were won at home; 2 Min; 3 Atl; 2 Min.
• Gene Larkin hit the ball that won the series in the bottom of the 10th inning, game 7.

Let me continue. Other great game ending hits?

• Shot Heard Round the World by Bobby Thompson.
• Maz' game 7 walkoff homerun.
• Kirk Gilson in Game 1. Gibson ended his career with 3 homers, 9 RBI and 3 steals in one at bat more than 5 World Series game.
• Joe Carter in Game 6 to win the series. Ended two world series in a row, one with the glove (an easy catch for a putout at first) and one with the bat.

Whatever turned baseball into the boring event it is today?

Quote: Our sincere apologies that THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG is not available for download at the moment. We are told that the huge web-based media interest worldwide has meant that millions of people have been reading about us globally and are attempting to log on.

I like scalability problems. It means that you have made it. Such messages are actually anticipated by good business. Heh! It's so good that we don't have the server capacity to meet demand. And more articles follow. It's so popular that they couldn't meet demand. Truth is that they didn't have a scalable solution. It doesn't matter.

Next time I have a scalability problem, call me on my cell at Disneyland ;)

In the last few years, I've encountered a unordinary amount of people who are succeeding thru intimidation. This is likely a result of the downturn. These individuals succeed by trying to break other people's confidence, allowing themselves to graduate to the top of the organization unchallenged. The problem with this type of success is that it is very lonely. The intimidator may graduate to the top of his organization, but he'll have reduced the size and stature of his organization in the process. To be more clear, it's not that he is moving upwards, it's that he's moving his teammates downwards and many teammates are simply leaving the organization. Overall, your organization is weaker and you've accompligh nothing of real value.

So, how do you recognize the intimidator? And are you one of them?

• The intimidator is quick to point out publicly when other individuals fail.
• The intimidator often speaks negatively of individuals particularly when they are not present.

Examples of intimidation.

• If the intimidator found a bug in the application we were building, then he'd walk up to the person, shaking his head in disappointment, tell the person that he's found this "really really horrible bug" and that he wants the person to fix it NOW!
• The intimidator highlights every group meeting by a public bashing of at least one coworker.
• It's important for the intimidator to stress urgency and panic. He's most successful when everybody is running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The panic leads to more mistakes and more ammunition for the intimidator.
• Intimidators often look down on their coworkers and patronize them.
• Intimidators are quick to fire subordinates.

A worthy compromise from the RIAA. How many users will take this out? Do you share files illegally? If so, would you take this compromise?

Marketecture is funny. I remember integrating MTS and MQSeries into a product so that marketing could meet a customer requirement. The customer thought incorrectly that this would enable transactions and garanteed delivery, but truth was that it simply slowed thruput with no benefit.

Still today with every turn, I run into the same issue. Expected to write code that follows the marketecture, regardless of whether any real features are realized. Arg! The pull and push of satisfying marketing and writing practical applications is ongoing.

These online directories are getting annoying. They trick Google into presenting the pages high in the ranks when the usefulness of these pages is low. This is done by linking a lot pages to the directory listing. Type Randy Charles Morin at Google and hits 3, 4 and 5 today are the following directories.

• Radio UserLand : Randy Charles Morin
• Pinnacle Publishing: Randy Charles Morin
• Technology at Harvard Law: Randy Charles Morin

Installed JDK 1.4.2, Tomcat 4.1.27, Cocoon 2.0.4. Run Cocoon. Fatal error.

Fatal: File jar:file:/C:/Program%20Files/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/cocoon/WEB-INF/lib/cocoon-2.0.4.jar!/org/apache/cocoon/components/language/markup/sitemap/java/sitemap.xsl; Line 154; Column 32; org.apache.xml.utils.WrappedRuntimeException: The output format must have a '{http://xml.apache.org/xalan}content-handler' property!

Turns out that Cocoon doesn't work with the xml stuff in the JDK 1.4. I hate freeware. Arggg!

Solution: Downloaded src version of Cocoon. Copied xalan-2.3.1.jar to tomcat/common/endorsed. Restarted tomcat.

Here's an interesting story featured on NBC's Dateline this night.

Bruce Murakami is a great man! He turned a black cloud into a rainbow. Justin Cabezas killed his wife and daughter. In turn, Bruce turned Justin's life from a 30 year jail term into a goal in life. They now work together to stop speeding in the Tampa area. Wow!

Bruce qualifies for my great men list!

1. Brayden Morin
2. Mahatma Gandhi
3. Terry Fox
4. Mikhail Gorbachev
5. Nelson Mandela
6. Bruce Murakami
7. Rick Hansen

By the way, who am I missing to get to 10?

I often overuse the word cool. Just not right now. Cool!

How much would you spend on a small motor boat anyhow? Add that to the cost of your car and well this is just not worth it :)

Just when you think somebody has broken Google, the Google team patches up the break and brings the universe (or the Web) back from certain death. It's all about persistence. I wonder if that persistence is programmatic or manual.

I often encounter a situation where a particular search returns a large amount of irrelevant links (more like ads) from one source. These are people who are trying to use the PageRank algorithm against Google. Then, a few weeks later, the irrelevant links disappear. Did Google manual find the problem and correct by kicking the offender off the Google pages or was this an automated process?

Regardless. Great job!

Amazon no longer allows affiliates to create static HTML links that they publish on their site to sell stuff. Rather they force you to use IFRAMEs and SCRIPTs that allow Amazon to put dynamically generated HTML on your webpage. So, they can now popup windows and perform all sorts of tricks on your webpage. I really wonder if anybody is really stupid enough to put IFRAMEs and SCRIPTs on professional pages.

Personally, I don't generate any revenue from Amazon, maybe about $100 USD per year at most. I might try a few links and you can see the behaviors.

Here's two for Lord of the Rings and Wrath of Khan...

This is a quick link...

Buy from Amazon.com

I can't even get the title into the link. Not very useful.

Here's the IFRAME view...

This is simply too much. All that I want is a URL I can link too! That's it.

The XML Server Pages of Apache Cocoon look great!

Often the defendant against DMCA attacks, Sharman is now the plaintiff. No longer the champion of the copyleft movement, just a corporation looking out for its shareholder value.

A note in time. Name: Brayden. Age: 3

Paul D has updated his collection of software.

StampManage 2003  New!!!
		StampManage 2003 is our new program for managing your stamp collection.  StampManage includes a huge datebase of US and Canadian stamps, complete with images.  StampManage uses the SCOTT™ numbering system.  Check out our demo to see the powerful features and ease of use you will not find in any other stamp collecting software. [More Info]   [Purchasing Options]   [Download Demo]
CoinManage 2003
		CoinManage 2003 is a complete program for the coin collector.  Virtually every feature important to coin collectors has been incorporated into this program.  CoinManage automates the tedious data entry chores associated with cataloging your collection, allowing you to concentrate on your hobby.  Our latest version contains coin values in many different grades, the ability to add unlimited file or URL attachments to your records, as well as built-in links to hundreds of non-commercial coin collecting sites.     [More Info]   [Purchasing Options]   [Download Demo]
AssetManage 2003
		AssetManage 2003 is the best way to inventory your home and small business-related assets.  You'll know what you have, where it is and what your possessions are worth. It's perfect for insurance purposes!  Create inventories for multiple locations, attach multiple images to each record.  AssetManage even allows you to keep track of Warranty expirations as well as all expenses related to an item.    [More Info]   [Purchasing Options]  [Download Demo]

was taken down last week :)

The RV Dude and Randy @ Work links in the Blog Roll are f'ed. They both used DCTO blog hosting.

Quote: The Real Geek, now blogging as iBLOGthere4iM, using a blogging tool he wrote himself (how many people can say that?), points to a Bill Gates memo regarding trustworthy computing, has and links to neato Mars pics, and most importantly is hiring in Toronto (at least, I assume that's what the abbreviation means). As you might guess from the name and the location on my roll, he write a lot on programming and technical matters. The other large part of the blogging is reports, sometimes with pictures, on family camping in the new "I want one of those too!" RV.

Thanks for the good words.

Can anybody tell me what the X in XML stands for? Send answers to Meg.

source Scripting.

I saw Longhorn last month when I was in Redmond. Looked pretty good. Of course, I wasn't looking under the covers. Longhorn is still schedule to be a major topic at this years' PDC.

This is funny! But also a sign of what's to come. GPS in car? GPS in computers? GPS in cell phones? Since most thieves are lacking... many will get caught stealing GPS enabled devices in the next 10 years.

The Niagara KOA is very nice. We stayed there Saturday and Sunday nights. The question is whether it is worth the price. It's more expensive than any other campground we've frequented. Of course, the price is primarily due to the location on Lundy's Lane, Niagara Falls.

Saturday evening and night we went on wagon rides, played in their park, swam in their indoor swimming pool and burnt a little wood. They have great firewood.

Sunday we spent the afternoon at Marineland, then down to Clifton Hill where we ate at the Rainforest Cafe and played past midnight at Marvel's Adventure City. The kids loved the DareDevil Obstacle Challenge and the Spider-man and Friends Funhouse at Marvel's Adventure City.