From an interview with the Oscar-winning director of Fog of War (IMDb) and the new Standard Operating Procedure (IMDb).

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Vista under the Christmas tree

If you’re planning to buy a computer this holiday season—and you don’t opt for the shiny goodness of an iMac or iBook—then you’ll probably be getting Windows Vista. Windows Vista is very shiny and pretty and probably sounds like a great alternative to its predecessor, Windows XP. However, the minor improvements to the file explorer and organization (and major ones to... [More]

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What is Metadata?

Metadata is, by definition, data about an application’s... [More]

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Once you’ve got an XWiki up and running (whether you imported a Mediawiki or not), you’ll find you want to tweak the standard rollout a bit.

Speeding up XWiki

After working a while with XWiki, you may notice it getting slower. Our XWiki was kind of slow from the get-go and we pretty quickly figured out why: the slowdown was caused almost entirely by the pretty, DHTML list of all pages in the panel on the... [More]

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The first publicly available version of the Encodo C# Handbook is ready for download! It covers many aspects of programming with C#, from naming, structural and formatting conventions to best practices for using existing and developing new code.

Here’s the backstory on how and why we decided to write a formal coding handbook.

Here at Encodo, we started working with C# less than a year ago. We... [More]

When non-Americans can corner an American abroad, they more often than not end up following this line of questioning: “I can understand, in some way, how you guys elected Bush the first time—avoiding, for now, a discussion about what we mean by ‘elected’—but how in the name of the sweet baby Jesus did you guys elect him a second time?”

The short answer is: Americans care about policy issues—just not when they’re actually voting. They’ll be happy to answer poll questions that show concern... [More]

Up and Then Down by Nick Paumgarten (New Yorker) is a well-written look into the world of elevators and the companies that create them. It mixes research with the story of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Some interesting tidbits from the article:

• The last time an elevator plummeted down a shaft was in 1945 in the US. It was called “the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety... [More]”

The Daily Show did an extremely silly tribute to fallen British soldiers recently, with Jon Oliver reading a list of heroes and Jon Stewart caught completely unawares[1]:

Britain's Fallen Soldiers by John Oliver & John Stewart (Daily Show)

The list of names is extremely silly and transcribed below[2]:

• Algernon Bottomside
• Percival P. Pocketnubbin
• Wing Commander Battle Morningwood
• Remington Snatch
• Cecil Hardboner
• Lt. Cl. Buntington Cornhole
• Jeffrey Incestershire
• Cpt. Oroffis Schwartz
• Lead Seaman Huffington Knobgobbler
• Alastair Vaginafoot (Allie to his many friends)... [More]

Op-Chart: Making Money Hand Over Fist (New York Times) is another in a long line of really slick, interactive, infographic presentations. Because of the extreme noise on the trading floor, traders use hand signals to indicate buy/sell interest, prices, amounts and status information.

“An oil trader demonstrates the hand signals used on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Text and graphics by Ben Schott, a contributing columnist.”

Sample of Trading Floor Hand Signals

These days, all USB drives are plug-and-play with Windows XP: you plug it in, Windows recognizes it and shows it in the Explorer, usually with a drive letter like F, G or H. Sometimes, however, the auto-detection of the drive letter goes awry and the drive doesn’t show up in the Explorer and you’re hard-pressed to access it.[1]

If this has happened to you, you should first verify a few things:

• Make sure that the drive is plugged in properly and that it is turned on (and/or drawing power... [More]

Top 5 Amazing Kinetic Sculpture Videos (Wired) reported on a Theo Jansen, an amazing Dutch sculptor. However, some of their video links aren’t working anymore, so here are some fresher ones below.

Theo Jansen − Animaris Rhinoceros (YouTube) This sculpture weighs two tons and is made of steel and cloth—but a strong wind can push it along, articulating its huge legs in elegant slow-motion.

Kinetic Horse Sculpture (YouTube) This is a kinetic origami, powered by a central motor with a single offset axle moving its four legs. The carefully folded joints coupled with the single... [More]

The whole post is one of his best—on par with this classic about Hill & Bill aka “the Clintstones”: The big secret meeting, complete waste of time by FSJ (The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs).

Though the article, What Every American Should Know About the Middle East (Daniel Miessler), has already done a decent job of summarizing Arabs, Islam and the Middle East[1], there’s still probably too much text[2], so here’s a summary of the summary[3].

1. Arabs are an ethnic group.[4]
2. Iraqis are mostly Arab.
3. Iranians are mostly Persian (another ethnic group).
4. Afghans are Pashtun, Hazira, Uzbek or Tajik (also ethnic groups).[5]
5. Afghani is the unit of currency in Afghanistan.
6. They speak Arabic[6] in Iraq.
7. They speak Farsi[7] in Iran.[8]... [More]

The author of the article—John Pilger—met Griffiths in Vietnam and continued to work with him through Iraq until Griffiths’ death in March of 2008.

Sportswriters Swoon Over DC Ballpark by Dave Zirin (Common Dreams) brings news of the opening of the new baseball park in Washington DC in a deal that moved the Montreal Expos south to the USA. Apparently, the mainstream media coverage was nothing short of effusive—gushing, even—about the new stadium, which was almost wholly financed by taxpayer money. From the article:

“$611 million of tax payer money in a city that has become a ground zero of economic segregation and gentrification. $611 million over majority... [More]”

The next Olympics will be in China—everyone who’s anyone knows that by now. Some objected to the selection of China a long time ago, citing human rights violations; some objected to the selection of Russia for the next winter Olympics for similar reasons. None of the objecters seem to understand that the marketing—which emphasizes a wholesome gathering of nations striving for peace through competition—is wholly separate from the business of the Olympics, which emphasizes making money for... [More]

The timing is poor for linking to this article, Club Gitmo: What it’s really like behind the wire. by Jacob Laksin (Weekly Standard) because it’s reads so much like an April Fool’s joke or an article from the Onion. The tour the writer claims to have received from the base staff sounds nothing like those given to members of the Red Cross or Amnesty International or the UN. He makes Gitmo sound like a pleasant place to spend some time to unwind. Consider this description of the chair on which detainees (read: prisoners) are... [More]

…you don’t talk about policy. Instead, you write long articles defending Obama against “absurd allegations that he has no specific policy initiatives” without mentioning a single one of them yourself. The article The Obama Generation − He’s No Pied Piper by Bethany Woolman (Common Dreams) is a typical, information-free example—packed with adulation, but containing no substance.

“Obama’s presidential campaign is inspiring a new generation of leaders. […] the true genius in the Obama campaign […] is [in] inspiring our... [More]”

Nail. On. The. Head.

The word “bailout” sounds so crass; it is to be avoided at all costs. Far better to dress up an announcement of corporate socialism in language the layman will interpret as sound financial planning, to make a statement to imbues on with a feeling that there is nothing to see here—just very knowledgeable people managing the very complex economy to the very best of their abilities to ensure as well as possible for you, the little guy. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like that, but, despite all... [More]

Learning by example in Bush’s America leads to the list in Everything I Know I Learned Since Jan. 20, 2001 by Neal Starkman (Common Dreams). Some examples are cited below.

“Rich people hire everyone else to work for them, making our economy robust.

“Scientists’ opinions are neither better nor worse than anyone else’s.

“The fall of communism is the best evidence that providing everyone in this country with free health care is doomed.”

There are a lot of versions of this, but this one is pretty neutral and to-the-point.

Here’s a neat (rhyming) poem for those learning English (or think they already know everything they need to know), found on I thought I had it ruff, er rough! by David Bogner (Treppenwitz)[1]

This is a cool presentation of English accents. I can verify most of the American ones (I guessed the state before she said it), and the British/Irish/Oceanian ones sounded about right too. It’s about two and half minutes long.

21 Accents by Amy Walker (YouTube)