Events

Four stories from past week (two of them today) sadden all of us who love American democracy. First, and most importantly, the President revealed today that he authorized secret surveillance of Americans because of—wait for it—9/11: "This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I...

For a couple of years, Inner Drive has had a webcam pointing out the window. We've moved twice since the webcam first went online. From time to time, we've adjusted the webcam slightly. And, every so often, the webcam adjusts itself. For example, the first cam image is from when we left the office last night, and the second from when I woke up this morning: (The images are displayed at half-size, but you can view them at full-size by saving them from your browser. You'll notice that they have...

The San Francisco Chronicle today ran a long-overdue correction: A story Nov. 15 about mathematical references on "The Simpsons" TV show mistakenly said that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. Actually, 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,258,614,589,176,288,669,958,142,428,526,657, while 1,922 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,259,314,801,410,819,278,649,643,651,567,616. (Linked from today's Romanesko. In the "Anne"...

I've finally added an explanation of Evolutionary Delivery to my corporate site. I wrote this as part of a proposal to a client in September, and for reasons that passeth understanding, I neglected to publish it online. By the way, I write software for a living, so if you're reading this and realize you need a small, agile development team for a .NET project, send us a message.

A code smell happens when a piece of software code looks like there might be something wrong with it, but you can't quite tell what. You use the smell to figure out where the bad code is hiding. Martin Fowler has devotes an entire chapter of Refactoring to code smells. Here is an example, from a class that returns configuration information: public string Read() { ... } public double ReadD() { ... } public int ReadN() { ... } public string ReadString() { ... } What's wrong with this code? Several things...

Addendum to my previous reading list. I'm now reading Microsoft's Framework Design Guidelines, written by the guys who wrote the .NET Framework. Add this to my list of recommended books.

The Poynter Institute today sent around a link to the best newspaper corrections of 2005. Since they also linked to the 2005 plagiarism roundup, I thought it best to give Poynter proper attribution.

I've just finished Edward Tufte's essay, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." It is now on the Inner Drive Technology required reading list: Explanations of these choices to follow shortly.

In the Northern hemisphere, yesterday's was the earliest sunset of the year. Kieron Taylor, writing for the Sheffield Astronomical Society in the U.K., has a pretty good explanation of why this is so. Suffice to say, it's because the earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical. Here, then, is a quick chart of the shortest days of the year, for Evanston, Illinois: Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 4 Dec Earliest sunsets start 07:02 16:19 9:16 13 Dec Sunsets get later 07:10 16:20 9:09 21 Dec...

Figure 1: Figure 2: