February 2004

The trouble with ice cream

We went and saw Something's Gotta Give this Friday evening. It's a great movie. There is a scene early in the movie where the principle players are in a small grocery and one is eating an ice cream cone. If you watch the scene closely you'll see the cone is eaten down and then in the next shot is back to being well above the cone. Ice cream is something that would make shooting tough.

Communications 101

A lot has happened up the road at the University of Colorado this week. The allegations are terrible. If but a small portion of them are true it leads one to believe that major changes are needed. Is CU the only school with such transgressions? I doubt it. It doesn't make it acceptable but it should be a clear message to other programs to get their houses cleaned up. It has been very disturbing to listen to the Buff's coach this week. Even after being suspended his comments suggest he doesn't get it. He said "I sincerely regret that yesterday a portion of my remarks were either misinterpreted or taken ... aired out of context. I apologize for answering that question in a manner where I must have come across as insensitive."

Privileged Communication?

An email list I'm on ends every message (well really only some of them as the list server is not set up properly):

All e-mail sent through XXXXXXXXX's e-mail lists is considered privileged and confidential, and is intended only for the individuals or entities named above.

I wonder how many people believe there is some sort of actual weight to this boiler plate disclaimer. 'lectlaw defines privileged quite well. The definition includes the important fact that "to qualify for privileged status, communications must generally be made in a private setting." Therefore any e-mail sent to a mailing list is not privileged.

It's been a busy week

I've been out of the loop a bit this week. It's been a busy week for the folks over at The PHP group. Following on last week's release of 5.0 Beta 4 this week they released PHP 4.3.5RC3.

Sunday in the park

I spent a portion of Sunday afternoon, between working on some php projects that need to be finished, watching the ducks and Canadian Geese on the pond at the lake. For some time I pondered Dave Winer's comments on Saturday about Atom and wondered why not produce a feed normalizer that converts Atom to RSS. Obviously I wasn't the only one. The thing is, Dave is right. We have a good standard already (Thanks Netscape and Userland). If it's too ambiguous in areas for some then lets extend the current spec in a way that does not break it.

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