Events

Two tangentially-related stories this afternoon. First, from HuffPo, President Obama did not sic the FBI on medical-marijuana dispensaries in California; the U.S. attorneys did it on their own: Obama as a candidate promised to maintain a hands-off approach toward pot clinics that adhered to state law, with Attorney General Eric Holder publicly asserting that federal prosecutors would not initiate enforcement actions against any patients or providers in compliance with state law, deeming it an...

I'm at a client site today and tomorrow, jamming on database optimization. Expect regular posts to resume Friday.

Via Atlantic Cities, the recession may help move developers away from the 19 standard building types identified in a report from UC Berkeley in 2005: [T]he Grocery Anchored Neighborhood Center...is generally about 5 or 6 hectares in size on a plot of land that’s 80 percent covered in asphalt. It’s located on the going-home side of a major four-to-eight lane arterial road, where it catches people when they’re most likely to be thinking about what to buy for dinner. It has a major, 4,600 to 6,500...

Reader AT actually met Tom Shanks, the chief programmer behind the ACS Atlases, and corrects my understanding of how the ACS team put it together: Contrary to what you assume in your post, Tom Shanks did not hack his atlas into an Apple II. ACS was rather professional in their IT. The worldwide city database with longitude and latitude they had licensed from on of the big atlas (map atlas) publishers, if I remember correctly Rand McNally. The timezone history data they had collected from numerous...

I've now set up the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ at Digital River, a software-distribution company. You can now buy developer, commercial per-server, and non-commercial per-site licenses for reasonable prices. Check out the overview and SDK (reg.req.) pages for tons o' info. You can also check out the no-nonsense license agreement before you buy.

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ has had support for the tzinfo database for several years now. Weather Now uses it; so do a few of my clients. Like the lazy software developer I am, however, I never put up a decent demonstration of the code, which might, you know, make someone want to buy it. Well, the documentation, she is here. Licensing, you will be shocked to learn, is available for a modest fee.

The U.S. government is an insurance company with an army: The vast bulk of its spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt. But what about recent deficits? They’re caused mainly by a fall in revenue and a mostly automatic increase in spending on safety-net programs. Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers. And if you want smaller government, either you’re...

To better understand the facts behind Astrolabe’s stupid trolling quixotic lawsuit against the guys who coordinated the worldwide time-zone database (tzinfo), I bought copies of the Shanks Amercian and International atlases that Astrolabe claims to own. (I went through the secondary market, so I didn’t actually give Astrolabe any money.) First, an update. According to Thomas Eubanks of the IETF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken over Arthur Olson’s legal defense. Mazel tov. I expect to see a...

Despite tons of research that support the anthropomorphic climate change theory, some people persist in the belief that the data does not support it. And yet, this week, there's more data: [A] new study of current data and analysis by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature...estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what its head, Richard...

A British plastic surgeon recently announced his findings after a months-long investigation of a particularly British institution: It sounds almost like parody – a top consultant plastic surgeon spends three months studying models appearing on Page 3 of a bestselling British red-top newspaper. Later this month he reveals his findings: the mathematical proportions of the perfect breast. This year [Patrick Mallucci, Consultant Plastic Surgeon at University College London and the Royal Free Hospitals,]...