the corner office

It's spelled Hear! Hear!

Not Here! Here!

More. It's understandable that it's more commonly heard than read, and therefore commonly misspelled, but this wrongness must stop. If I help one person to spell this correctly, this post will not have been in vain.

A number of blogs I follow have mentioned the WinFS is dead story (no links; if you haven't read about it yet, I think it's quite likely that as soon as the IT news sites get into the new week, you're going to).

I feel sorry for the people behind WinFS, because I have no doubt that the WinFS project was finally scuppered by marketing and business pressures pulling everything in all the wrong directions, and if the smart techies behind it had been free to do their thing, some pretty awesome stuff would eventually have surfaced.

Some Googling prompted by last post, unearthed some odd stuff.

First, Franklin W Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys books, was just a pen name for a crowd of authors known as the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Details here. I didn't know that. I feel strangely cheated.

Second, searching Amazon for Little Nicholas books, I came across a German translation: Der Kleine Nick Und Seine Band. There's a certain Teutonic charm to that title but I can't quite articulate why. It reminded me of an old South African TV series, and shock of all bloomin' horrors, you can now actually buy Trompie en die Boksombende on DVD. In fact, if you click around from here, SABC has a few old chestnuts available: Haas Das se Nuuskas, Heidi, Liewe Heksie... even Shaka Zulu. I suspect that none of these will have aged too well.

The nostalgia trip just doesn't stop. In primary school, I loved the Little Nicholas books, especially the illustrations. Unlike the Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys and Willard Prices and other popular children's books, nobody else seemed to know about Little Nicholas (despite being written by one of the dudes behind Asterix), and they always felt like something of a secret treasure to me. Every few years I remember the series and post a mental reminder that one day I need to get hold of the books, and re-read them. Then I forget about it for a few more years.

Tonight I stumbled across a mention at Crooked Timber, cue oh-wooow-maaaan moment. After a search, it turns out that in addition to the original collection, Goscinny's daughter recently found another 80 stories which had never been published. These were rolled into a new 600-page book, doesn't look like there's an English translation (yet?)

Either way... new mental note duly filed. Next revisit around 2011.

Continuing with the theme of movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, today I watched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The movie has been etched in my brain as 'cool' since the days of Betamax, but I couldn't really remember anything about it. The only scenes I could remember were Eli Wallach insulting Clint Eastwood in the desert and the dead soldiers in the trenches. So I wasn't quite sure whether my enthusiasm would survive re-watching the movie.

No chance. Awesome movie. Enthusiasm restored, with a new-found appreciation I couldn't quite have mustered in primary school. I won't try to get all high school English on it, but the movie is just a stylistic, gritty, panoramic, and hugely entertaining masterpiece.

I'd actually been building up to buying this on DVD for a while now. It seems that Sergio Leone's 3 'Dollars' spaghetti westerns have all been restored, spruced up and re-released - TGTBATU now includes additional footage which had been cut from the original US version, and the running time is almost 3 hours. The local Look & Listen has had the one-disk featureless version of this re-release for a few months, and every time I see the DVD I gave it a gawk. I've never gotten it though, because I'm always partial to the the 'special edition' versions with all the goodies on 'em. Today I was in another DVD shop, and they had the 2-disc special edition, which has commentaries, and heaps of documentaries, interviews and the like. So I bought it in a snap. Given how chuffed I am after getting this, methinks the other Man With No Name movies will be following soon.

In an article on SGI (via Linux Today):

Server, storage, and visualization vendor Silicon Graphics Inc's chairman and CEO, Dennis McKenna, said in an interview with Computer Business Review that its filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early May should be seen as a "positive event".

"Before the Chapter 11 there was a high level of uncertainty around SGI," said McKenna.

No, the next line was not "... but now everybody knows we're stuffed.".

Instead, he continues with "Customers were saying that we could have the best strategy but how were we going to deal with all of this debt?" Personally, I'd be more worried about the state of the business models that led them to that debt. The man has a point kinda sorta, but the spin rather detracts from it.

Another line which may be portentous:

McKenna said the company is looking to raise additional money either from enforcing some of its numerous patents, or from divestitures.

That patent thing sounds rather casual, but you have to wonder. Deciding that cashing in on some IP was the best way to 'restore profitability' didn't turn out too well for these dudes.

Bruce Eckel, on Web Services:

Programming is all about abstraction, and the abstraction here is the remote procedure call. I want to be able to write some kind of simple function call, and get some information and maybe produce some kind of side effect on the remote computer. If the underlying mechanism happens to ship data back and forth using XML, or uses an XML-RPC, SOAP, or JSON setup to make the call, that's fine -- but I'm solving a real problem here and I don't want to have to spend my time figuring that stuff out, or even needing to think about it.

SOAP is supposed to make data exchange easy, but in reality, it just makes things even more complicated.

I have a simple theory based on how two colleagues naively (by which I mean "oblivious to SOAP") and independently approached various data interchange problems. To exchange data, you need two things: format and comms. For web services, format is XML, comms is HTTP. Do you need big monstrous libraries to serialise-deserialise and wrap method types and do fancy communication and cater for different formats and the like, though? No. Why? Your average Java developer knows how to use XML APIs. Converting a Java object to an XML representation and back is not hard. Second, Java makes comms easy. There is ample support for HTTP communication. Mastering an HTTP client library is certainly no harder than figuring out how the hell SOAP works.

I'm sure it's the same with other languages. This is why the concept of web services is popular. With two simple APIs, your average developer can fling data across a network quite easily. Yes, what they're doing isn't as abstracted as some would like, but the problem with technologies like SOAP is that something simple gets totally convoluted, until you've got an overgrown mud pie that's theoretically pleasing but has lost sight of the underlying merits that made it seem like a good idea in the first place.

This is a post, where if it gets any Google traffic over time, you know it's going to be from some weird-ass people. (I'm posting it, so I guess I fall into that group).

I was listening to my Deadbolt Hobo Babylon CD yesterday, and every time I listen to it I get frustrated because the CD has the f-words beeped out. There are a lot of f-words on that album, and the beeps get quite distracting. That got me sensitive to 'explicit lyrics', and then later in the day I was listening to something else, and realised that the song I was listening to was pretty old, but had the f-word. When did people first start cussing in modern music, I wondered?

Wikipedia awards the honours for the first use of the word 'fuck' in a (rock) song to The Doors ('The End' from 1967). Other uses of the word are credited to The Beatles (a line in 'Revolution 9', from 1968, although I'm not sure if anything from Revolution 9 really counts as 'lyrics'), and John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero' from 1970.

The song I was listening to was 'Tired', by German group Dies Irae, from their one and only album, First, from 1971. It wasn't the first song to use the word 'fuck', but it must be one the first songs to use the word 'motherfucker'. (Update: meh, posted too soon. Went back and re-listened on earphones and it might be 'mindfuckers'. Which would be even more obscure. Crazy German accents.)

So anyway. As I stumble across more really old songs with cuss-words, I'll add them to this post. If you know of any to add, please feel free.

I watched WarGames on DVD this weekend. Talk about a blast from the past. 23 years down the line, it's become a little dated of course. It's still an entertaining flick though, and it was worth re-watching for historical interest alone.

The geekery is more proto-geekery than anything else, I guess, because WarGames, was, I think it's safe to say, the mitochondrial Eve of all hacker/cracker movies. Green screens and 3-digit-baud modems and 5" floppies and 16 colour wall graphic displays and arcade games and lousy hairstyles. Tells the kids of today that there was a time when this computer stuff was still mythical and damned near unattainable for your average South African kid, and they won't believe you.

The other major aw-looky-there historical point, of course, is Global Thermonuclear War. Our problems have changed since the Cold War ended and the world discovered that the Soviet arsenal was basically rust and a bit of duct tape. We still worry about terrorist attacks and dirty bombs and directed nuclear attacks from Renegade States With Nutty Leaders, but if you think about it, it's all fairly small-scale compared to when we were still worried about the commies coming to git us, and civilisation distintegrating quite literally, because the whole planet was going to get nuked to hell, all at once. Again, tell the kids of today...

An interesting bit of trivia, that most techie people probably already know - the terms wardialing, and more recently, wardriving and their ilk, got their names from a technique made famous in this movie.

I go to gym, I'm a little less sedentary than I was a year ago, but I'm hardly a picture of uberfitness.

My aunt on the other hand, finished her 10th Comrades Marathon yesterday. In addition to being proud of my aunt's accomplishment, her running is also quite inspirational to me, as a lesson in life in general. I remember, back when I was still reasonably fit as a varsity student in '92, going jogging with my aunt as she was getting into the whole running thing (even then I battled to keep up though). She had recently joined Run/Walk For Life as a way to get fit, moved rather quickly from walking to running, then ran her first marathon, and not long after that was finishing ultramarathons. It takes dedication, and discipline, and a lot of sweat, but even incredible personal achievements can start with just a few steps.