Events

This afternoon, North Pond, Chicago: Canon 7D, ISO-100, 1/125 at f/5.6, 18mm, here.

The Commonwealth has approved gender-neutral primogeniture for the British throne. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's firstborn will become the heir apparent, whether it's a boy or girl: "Attitudes have changed fundamentally over the centuries and some of the outdated rules — like some of the rules of succession — just don't make sense to us any more," [British Prime Minister David] Cameron told reporters in Perth. "The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply...

Despite the teams involved, I must (begrudgingly) accept that yesterday's bottom-of-the 11th, two-out, two-strike World Series home run was pretty damn cool. (So was the bottom-of-the 9th, two-out, two-strike game-tying triple that the same guy hit a few minutes earlier.) And yes, I would say the same thing if the American League team had done it. For readers outside the U.S.: The Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals have a baseball rivalry going back over a century. Think Arsenal and Chelsea, only...

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...