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The term DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself—has become more and more popular lately as a design principle. This is nothing new and is the main principle underlying object-oriented programming. As OO programmers, we’ve gotten used to using inheritance and polymorphism to encapsulate concepts. Until recently, languages like C# and Java have had only very limited support for re-using functionality across larger... [More]

Street Installations has a list of pictures of street art involving mannequins posed in realistic & strange positions.

The one below—with a walker kryptonite-locked to a parking sign—is probably the best of the bunch.

Locked-up Walker

It is not difficult to find patterns in small data-sets. In fact, one can see patterns in any amount of data—the trick is to find patterns that are useful in predicting the future. For example, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, conquered it, installed a government, then proceeded to lose any semblance of control over the next four years. 16 months later, the United States invaded Iraq and repeated the pattern. The State department has not yet given up on Iraq in the same way that... [More]

Soldiers involved in America’s imperial maneuvers throughout the world have the heretofore unknown privilege of making their voices heard in real-time on the Internet. Their blogs are in a variety of styles, covering a variety of topics, revealing both remarkable sensitivity and ignorance for that which is not American. There is naturally a lot of filtering going on—this is, after all, the US empire’s military—but some really good stuff does get through. On Being Home by SGT Derek McGee (The Sandbox) is the most recent... [More]

According to MacBook Battery Is Toast After Being Fully Drained by Dan Benjamin (HiveLogic), Apple brings a whole new meaning to the term “dead battery”. According to the article, OS X can sometimes drain a battery so irrevocably that it can never be charged again. It’s a hardware problem that affects a small percentage of users. What’s interesting is the reaction to the problem by Benjamin, one of the Apple faithful. Instead of tearing Apple a new one for not addressing this clear software/BIOS/whatever issue, he lamely... [More]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the ripe old age of 85. Despite explicitly asking for the following epitaph, “the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”, bloggers around the Internet are tossing around his catchphrase, “and so it goes…”, ad nauseum instead. He made the request in his most recent book, a slim volume of thoughts he published after returning from retirement in a fit of pure frustration at the way the Bush administration was sullying America and doing such a crass,... [More]

If you’ve ever thought that PHP was too fast or used too little memory or that Java’s class encapsulation was too restricitive, boy has Quercus: PHP in Java got the solution for you. At last, PHP developers can enjoy the benefits of enterprise computing complete with abominable startup times, appalling refresh speeds and PermGen errors every 15 minutes. And Java developers can finally leave their half-assed web frameworks behind and get behind the ultra-organized global namespace with a little... [More]

As reported in I think therefore I am, I think by Stephen Cave (Financial Times), there are reports of repeatable experiments, which have the potential to obviate vast swaths of philosophical hypothesis and religious theory: science has its hands wrapped around free will’s throat and is starting to squeeze.

I Made You Read This

First, there’s the experiment by “American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet”, in which he tested brain activity of participants as they were performing various activities. Participants swore up and down... [More]

The universe is, apparently, quite big. This is made all the more amazing in light of how small its constituent components are, since it clearly takes quite a lot of them to make up something so mind-bogglingly huge as the universe. Brian Cox at LIFT Conference (LIFT07) gave a brilliant talked aimed at the layperson—if the lay-person happened to be versed in the basics of particle physics. Dr. Brian Cox explains nuclear physics is another, wider-shot video of the same event, on which you can... [More]

The problem with the free software/open source (hereafter referred to as FS/OS) is, as with most other movements, its fanatics. And, as with other movements, it’s not the belligerent—who are relatively easy to disregard—but the self-righteous—who constantly demand attention with arguments that are almost convincing—that really put you off. Case in point: the recent announcement that Apple will be carrying EMI’s entire music catalog with digital rights management (DRM) at double the... [More]

While America continues failing spectacularly in Iraq—despite pumping ungodly amounts of money into the venture—its eye wanders to Iraq’s neighbor, Iran. The lads in charge of the States have been grinding their war machine forward for months, nearly years, pumping themselves up, convincing themselves—which isn’t very hard—that this war will be much easier, that this war will go as planned, that this war will have a plan and that this war will be the beginning of the end of the Arabic... [More]

In the last several days, several polls have shown a remarkable turnaround in collective American opinion. Where previous polls have shown strong statistical divergence on important issues—both foreign and domestic—recent data suggests a much stronger alignment with the rest of world opinion on the following matters:

1. The number of Americans believing in the Rapture—that Jesus himself will return to Earth and lift believers to heaven while condemning unbelievers to a thousand years of... [More]

So that’s that; the big brouhaha over Steve Jobs’s stock options has finally, officially blown over. It seems the 6th generation iPod and 1st generation iPhone are both safe for now. Disney Board Clears Current Pixar Execs (Yahoo News) has more information, but it basically boils down to:

“Although the manipulation itself isn’t necessarily illegal, securities laws require that companies properly disclose the practice in their accounting and settle any resulting charges.”

That’s it? Just a little... [More]

The executive branch of our government has long since crossed over from brazenly illegal to just batsh*t[1] crazy. In this atmosphere, you’ve got to shout to be heard above the din of casual corruption and corrosion of all that once defined the US as a democratic power. And Mr. Gonzales is no shrinking violet. The consolidation of power under the ever more powerfully defined executive proceeds—nay, accelerates—apace under the highest-ranking cop in the land, the Attorney General. Ever since... [More]

The term in the title stems from two movies released in the 80s, The Decline of Western Civilization (IMDb) and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (IMDb), which documented the world of punk rock and heavy metal, respectively. With metal and punk safely behind us, there are now much more insidious cancers eating away at the fabric of our society. One of the more prevalent, Local TV News, is discussed in Things That Still Exist But Shouldn’t by Amelie Gillete (AVClub). The article covers a few things, but leads... [More]

This guy breaks down Mankiew’s principles of economics into terms we can all understand (though the original list isn’t what you would call earth-shattering either).

“Let’s begin by separating them into the first seven principles, which are microeconomics, and the last three, which are macroeconomics. The difference, of course, being that microeconomists are economists that are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists, who are wrong about things in general.”

Principles of economics, translated by Yoram Bauman in 02/16/07 (YouTube)

The Onion has staked a claim in the world of news reporting: to report that which never happened, and likely never could have, but in a manner that suggests that it did. For the most part, the intended humor is relatively transparent, making it easy to laugh along as the author gets increasingly outrageous. It’s funny because it’s sometimes hard to discern articles from the Onion from the human interest pieces in what are considered mainstream news sources.

The “Politics” section necessarily... [More]

For the last six months or so, Doonesbury has been publishing blog entries from US soldiers on duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no way to tell just how edited or censored they are; there is no way even to tell if they actually come from soldiers. As with almost everything you see and here, it’s difficult to know what to believe. It’s also difficult not to use that fact to pick and choose what to believe, selecting only that which does not offend your delicate sensibilities—that which... [More]

People’s interactions with each other online and how the web affects what kind of content they create is the subject of this short film by an anthropology professor. It’s got a nice soundtrack and the animation and transitions are really well-done. It takes the viewer visually through HTML content creation and the transition to XML and newsfeed creation through creation of videos and social bookmarking sites for organization to mashups of any kind of data.

“Digital text is different … more... [More]”

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

In part one of this article, we discussed improvements to the user interface and basic applications like Windows Explorer. In this second part, we take a quick look at some usability issues associated with installation, networking and security.

Networking

Accessing known networks is snappy and pretty easy, taking advantage of an explorer that actually seems to use threads (shocking!) One down side is... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Past experience has shown that, while the initial reaction to the initial release of a Microsoft product can be very good, that curve degrades with time. With early versions, replace the verb “degrades” with “plummets”. Early on, the superficial glitz has the most power to distract from the deficiencies. Vista is far from an early version, coming as it does at the end of a long line of predecessors of... [More]

That, in a nutshell, sums up the last 6 years in America under the Bush Agenda. Faith-based and fancy-free. The title of this article cites Bush’s response to Nancy Pelosi when she asked him why he thought that “this time it’s going to work” (meaning an infusion of troops), as documented in The Pentagon’s not-so-little secret by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon).

Accusations that Bush’s approach[1] to the world is simplistic and detached from reality are mean-spirited. It is anything but simplistic; the sheer artfulness and complexity... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Most Tapestry programming involves writing event handlers and operations on page objects. In order to execute these operations, you need access to properties of the form and properties of the session and application in which the page resides. For convenience, developers can add references to all sorts of objects in the system using various forms of the @Inject* annotation (like @InjectPage, @InjectObject... [More]

The last US election in November was widely regarded as the dirtiest in US history. The Republicans, in particular, slung nearly ceaselessly from a never-ending supply of mud. With just over 21 months to go until Americans start making up excuses for not voting for President, the first salvo has already been fired at Barack Hussein Obama, United States Senator and proud leader of an exploratory committee to determine whether his winning smile will be able to dredge up enough cash for a run at... [More]