Cox Crow

David Fletcher remarks

Back in 2003, I mentioned that Portugal’s legislature had authorized the creation of weblogs for all legislators to promote better interaction with their constituents. Now, I’m more than excited to see that Utah Representative Steve Urquhart of St. George who is the majority whip has a weblog where he shares his thoughts on the legislative process.

In the same post Mr. Fletcher points to the Legacy Parkway Hotsheet, a blog to promote the development of new highway. While I, and many other constituents, wish our elected representatives were more informative, blogs, like any other on-line medium, can easily rise to the level of discourse exhibited at /.. Then again, I suppose that one must expect proponents or opponents of a thing to indulge in vicious name-calling and illogical invective as a matter of course. If you use generic slurs or pronouns, you should provide an antecedent every now and again so your reader knows who you are insulting. Links please.

Dost thou recall the IBM PCjr? Take a Mac Mini, connect it to your television, add a wireless keyboard and mini-mouse. Voila.

Zimran thinks that the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle are triumphs of marketing.

First, consider the iPod Shuffle. Flash drive mp3 player with no screen — you just put in your 120 songs and it plays them back randomly. This was driven by the marketing insight that many iPod users just set their machine on random play…

Secondly, consider the Mac Mini. $500 to get OS X and storage. Again, this is driven by the marketing insight that the PC market is saturated, many PC owners aren’t going to switch but may augment, and that they already own a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but may be short of space on their desk. There is no new technology in this tiny marvel, just very intelligent feature editing and pricing.

Is this “marketing”? Or is it simply observing how a thing is used, and revising your product to meet that use? To my mind, marketing as a profession is not concerned with creating things which satisfy my desires, but in persuading me that I desire something which they wish to sell. It does not attempt to discern an unsatisfied market, but to create a market where one does not exist.

Sweet! The New York Times, via c|net, reports that Google cares about grammar. Right on, man!

Apple introduced a few new toys this morning. Apparently they are Good Stuff, because Apple’s site is intermittently available at this writing.

WCI Communities finally updated their Four Corners description to include home plans. These samples, from the village collection are out-of-place. The images do not show the village context. That can, however, be inferred from the location of the garage: it’s in back.

But, still, none of these are shown in the sketch advertising the development. That sketch looks more like this. Maybe they just needed to use the same artist.

On Friday, SBC announced that

the SBC Foundation, the charitable giving arm of SBC Communications, will provide up to $2 million in funds to assist disaster relief in areas affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami in South Asia as well as to bolster future disaster relief needs in the domestic United States.

The grant has two components: SBC Foundation will match employee contributions, and make a 5-year grant to the American Red Cross for disaster relief work. But the billing systems, both at SBC and Cingular, are volunteering their time as well.

SBC customers can easily donate online though their SBC Yahoo! and eBill accounts.

[M]any Cingular customers will receive a free text message
inviting them to make a donation of $1.99 or $.99 to one of three
organizations: The International Fund of the American Red Cross, UNICEF, and
the Save the Children Fund. Customers simply need to reply to the text
message — which is also free — with the organization they choose and the
amount they wish to give. One hundred percent of their donation will
automatically go to the agency selected, and that charge will appear on their
next bill, the company said.

Sometimes it’s good to be an enabler.

An impact caused our Olympus D-580‘s lens to offset from the center line, and thus not work. We did not purchase the extended warranty. The Olympus list price for a new D-580 is $229.99. The Amazon price for a new unit is $199.95. The repair cost is $144.06.

The camera is almost disposable. And I’m almost inclined to decline service and fix it myself, drawing on my vast knowledge of camera repair painstakingly acquired by loitering at the Zimmermans when I was a child.

BBC America is sponsoring a writing contest to promote their Canterbury Tales series. I could win an iBook!

Phil Windley points to an article by Sam Tregar in Dr. Dobb’s Journal on using virtual machines, specifically VMware, as build-to-order test environments.

Since one of my goals for 2004 2005 is a set of disposable test environments, I’m more than a little interested.

Two shows that we’ve been watching regularly are Desperate Housewives and Murder in Suburbia. I watch them for the places as much as the plots. The latter show involves a pair of lady detectives on a suburban police force. They investigate murders, as one might suspect from the title.

The kittens are chasing the cursor.

Netcraft has released the year-end web server survey results for 2004. These show Apache gaining 1% over Microsoft Internet Information Server. They do not comment on possible causes for this, but do remark that it is relatively substantial in comparison with the recent static trend. However, as they noted late in December, Microsoft no longer supports Windows NT 4.0.

When you force someone to choose, some percentage will not choose you.

Life

• Habitat for Humanity
• Putnam Humane Society
• Doctors without Borders
• Red Cross
• Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
• St. Jude Children’s Hospital
• Food Bank of the Hudson Valley
• Second Harvest
• The Nature Conservancy
• Scenic Hudson
• Wildlife Conservation Society

Liberty

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Free Software Foundation
• The Cato Institute

The Pursuit of Happiness

• Fordham University
• LinuxFund
• The National Geographic Society
• The Christian Science Monitor

Last year, Amazon enabled buyers to contribute to presidential campaigns. Today, Amazon and the Red Cross enabled buyers to help with disaster relief. As of 21:57 EST, they have raised

The Associated Press reports that few animals were killed in the tsunami.

ALA NATIONAL PARK, Sri Lanka – Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka expressed surprise Wednesday that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunamis — indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park in an air force helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, and not a single animal corpse.

Dumb? Perhaps. Ignorant? Not when it comes to survival.

Dear Spammers:

I’m getting more than a little annoyed by the comment spam. None of your spams will be permitted, and none will contribute to an increase in PageRank.

If you would re-enter civil society, I welcome you. Otherwise, I will continue to ask my Congresscritters to institute the death penalty for this behavior.

Naff off.

Maybe if setup.exe were a shell script, then the author would have fixed his mistake. Anyway, when one upgrades from a down-level version of Internet Explorer to any version greater than or equal to 4.0, said installer program, or one of its descendent processes, may complain that

Error Initializing the cache. Shutdown all programs and run scandisk or chkdsk. Delete the cache, cookies and history directories in your windows directory and then restart IE. If the problem persists reinstall IE.

If one then attempts to delete those files, and can’t, because Access is Denied. You Don’t Have Permissions or the File is in Use, then one may want to find and kill the process which has the file handle open.

Thanks to Mark Russinovich of SysInternals, this is easy. His Handle program displays a list of open files, much like lsof(8) does on *U?X systems. It is essential.

But, Microsoft, you wrote when this problem first surfaced, on Windows 95, that

The presence of one or more of these files prevents Runonce from creating the Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, or History folder that Microsoft Internet Explorer needs to store cached data.

I don’t suppose it occured to y’all to test for the existence of those files before attempting to create them? Or, at the very least, correcting it so that the problem might only apply to that particular release?

No? I didn’t think so.