Paul Haahr

Kevin Drum says something I wanted to say, but better:

We're almost exactly where we were four years ago.

Which, really, is an amazing thing. You'd think an event like 9/11 would act as a catalyst that blows apart existing political dynamics and realigns the electorate, but instead it seems to have cemented it into place. Not only are we at the same place we were four years ago, but the divisions are actually more entrenched than ever.

Kabuto Sushi is open again, now at its new location (across the street from the old one): smaller, but very nice. And, most importantly, the food is as good as ever.

Jim Gray: Distributed Computing Economics Good reasons why I don't consider wide-scale distributed computing interesting.

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters. I disagree with Paul about a few things (static typing among them), but he's 100% right about the sketching, unscientific nature of most programming.

On the other hand, what I love about working at Google is that my day job offers me stuff that's more interesting than most of my spare time hacking projects.

Timothy Garton Ash: The War After War With Iraq.

Upsetting news: Kabuto Sushi will be closing at the end of March, after twenty years in business. The usual story -- their lease was up. Sachio Kojima will be opening a new restaurant (A & S Sushi Cuisine) across the street. The new place will be open for lunch, which is an advantage, but it will also be smaller.

Kabuto is an important place for me and Susan. We've been regulars there for six or so years and, if there's a safe place we have outside our house, that's it. In the years before Matthew was born, we were there at least once a week if we were in town. In fact, in 1998, I spent more on sushi at Kabuto than I earned.

Matthew first ate at Kabuto when he was eleven days old. (Ok, ``ate'' may be the wrong word: he napped in his carseat at the bar.) But today was a milestone visit for him -- the three of us sat at the bar, and he ate edamame (two orders), kappa maki, and soba noodles. More importantly, for a not-quite-two-year-old, he wasn't disruptive, sat in a high chair, said ``thank you'' to Sachio many times. He made his parents very proud.

Barnaby J. Feder: A Glimpse of a Future in a New Kind of Light.

Paul Graham: Design and Research.

Floyd Norris, Bush Plan Taxes Certain Dividends. The president's dividend plan is far more interesting than originally described. Norris's article is a must-read description. Three points that I hadn't seen before:

• The provisions to make dividends tax-deductible only from companies which pay taxes is a very good thing. Unprofitable companies shouldn't be paying dividends, so the companies that this should hit are profitable ones which don't pay taxes, creating a disincentive for buying their stock. A very nice bit of tax code hackery.
• The deemed dividend idea -- that companies could give shareholders a discount on their capital gains taxes when selling instead of a dividend -- seems like a horrible idea, because it will preserve and reinforce the disinclination of Microsoft and Cisco to pay dividends. If you think the goal of this proposal is to make it easier for companies to pay dividends, that's a bad thing.
• The treatment of preferred stock dividends as closer to interest than dividends is probably a very good idea.

Unfortunately, all of these tax code hacks are additional complexity. It's probably true that the majority of taxpayers dealing with dividend income already outsource tax preparation to accountants, but this will force the matter for many more. I still think expensing of dividends would be a vastly better idea, though it doesn't address the issue of companies which avoid taxation as well.

Keven Werbach, A plan that won't pay dividends.

Essay: Why and How to Promote Dividends:

During the boom of the late 1990s, I was one of many people predicting that it would end in a bust. I also argued that we wouldn't see a stock market recovery again until after market-leading, successful companies started to pay dividends. (more...)

Martin Mayer, Save the Dividend Tax: ``The president is right to focus on the dividend tax but he should give the tax break to the corporations that pay the dividends, especially if he wants to encourage a change in corporate behavior.''

Daniel Gross, In the New Economy, Cash is King.

CIO magazine: A 12-step program for curing Microsoft addiction.

InternetNews.com: Is Microsoft Licensing Forcing Banks to Break The Law? `` `We're forced into a position where we're either out of compliance with Microsoft's licensing, which is not acceptable, or we're out of compliance with the law, which is not acceptable either. Under these circumstances, we'll probably change our operating system,' says Warby.''

New York Times: The Warning Overdose: ``The only thing warnings this vague are good for is providing political cover in case of disaster. They offer no specific information about the location, timing or method of attack, and are all but useless to the average citizen, or even to local law enforcement officers.''

Fortune: Too Much Ventured Nothing Gained. Summary: Thanks to the bubble (increased investment) and bust (decreased returns), VC firms have too much money for the available opportunities. If this is the problem, I fail to see how the industry's current approach -- venture investment has slowed to a snail's pace, especially in high (non-bio) tech -- is doing anything but exacerbating the problem.

From the department of prior art: A 700-year-old fresco bearing an uncanny resemblance to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse has been discovered in Austria.

I've been listening to John Henry Days as an audiobook during my commute. It's a remarkable book, but I find myself rooting for the steam drill.

My positions on the November 2002 San Francisco Ballot.

Nicholas Kristof, Iraq's Little Secret: ``The White House is right that Iraq is by far the most repressive country in the entire Middle East - but that's true only if you're a man.''

The Communication Arts Eighth Interactive Design Annual. I usually associate ``award winning design'' with low information density, hard-to-use web sites. But I think there are a lot of good examples in here that are usable and attractive.

Had dinner last night at Chenery Park. The food was excellent, but the main attraction is that Tuesday's are kids night. Upstairs, almost every table had a child under the age of three. Probably horrific if you don't have children, but, for those of us who do, a perfect place to eat. (Matthew's screaming? Wants to run up and down the stairs? Let him.) Kudos to the overwhelmingly friendly and understanding staff.

Highlight of the day: the Golden Gate Railroad Museum.

I wouldn't have bought one, but I'm sorry that the Ford/Think Mobility didn't make it.

Darko Stefanovic, Kathryn S. McKinley, and J. Eliot B. Moss, Oldest-first garbage collectors: ``... we also find that the widely held belief that the vast majority of pointers point from young to old objects does not hold.''

James Surowiecki, Bush's Buddy Economy:

Lobbying, fixing, finagling: it's just business, of a kind. The point is that such ways of doing business have very little to do with free-market capitalism. They have more in common with crony capitalism, in which whom you know is more important than what you do and how you do it. That's the world Bush's key policymakers come out of: they've made their careers by circumventing the free market. Why expect them suddenly to embrace it?

Slate's Today's Papers, talking about the Washington Post article ``Forecast: Deficits To Last Into '05'' says:

According to the papers, the reason for the bigger estimated deficits is that this past year saw the most dramatic percentage drop in tax revenue since 1946. The Post notes that the ``$131 billion plunge in tax revenue was considerably sharper than the economy's own fall.'' It doesn't explain why that is.

The Post goes overboard with its puzzlement:

...because of a plunge in tax receipts, the likes of which has not been seen since the repeal of World War II surtaxes 56 years ago, said CBO Director Dan L. Crippen. Economists appeared to be at a loss to explain it. Crippen merely called it ``astounding.''

Isn't it obvious? Even through 2000, capital gains were substantial. Last year, they weren't. When I looked into this a while ago, reported capital gains ranged from $119M in 1994 to $446M in 1998; they probably continued to increase in 1999, decreased a bit in 2000, and fell off a cliff in 2001. Even figuring that all capital gains taxes during the boom were at the long term 20% rate, if capital gains in 2001 dropped to the 1994 level, which is optimistic, we see a drop in taxes paid of around $100M.

Adam Clymer, Tracking Bay Area Traffic Creates Concern for Privacy. This is one area where I'm happy to trade my privacy for more information. And it's easy to opt-out: just take out your FasTrak or stick into a Mylar bag. (Two of the reasons that this doesn't bother me are (1) I love the FasTrak and (2) I've always assumed that I could being tracked based upon having it in my car.)

On the other hand, I'm very annoyed that the data isn't just available at TravInfo.org for public grepping and munging. Instead, you need to register and become a TravInfo partner. Further, it appears the data is only available through a clunky text-based UI, and not just as data, at least for now. Back to writing screen scrapers.

James Surowiecki: Everyone's wrong about the new Wilco movie. AOL Time Warner Music is Good, Bad, and Incoherent.

The stupidest spam-fighting technique yet.

Pentium IV owners suing Intel over performance claims. It's true that, Megahertz for Megahertz, the P4 is slower than its predecessors by enough that I would never want to buy one, but even I don't think this suit has merit. Nonetheless, Intel should be embarrassed.

Paul Graham on Spam. I think he's right -- spam is awful now, but it's a temporary and solvable problem. I don't think any one solution will cover everything, but a learning content-based filter should be one of the better ones.

Based on this essay, I've added Jason Rennie's excellent Naïve Bayes-based mail filtering tool, ifile, to my spam filters.

How stupid can you get? Loudcloud changes their name to Opsware, but didn't get around to acquiring the domain name, so they are using the domain opswareinc.com. Some domain name squatter got opsware.com just days ago, according to whois records. Embarrassing.

Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names: Monochrome Canon, Transcendent Honors, Barb Therapy, and more.

PolyFuel: fuel cells as mobile device battery substitutes. If these really work it they could be revolutionary. (Annoying Flash web site, though.)

Heard a lunchtime talk by Jean Couch from The Balance Center. Fascinating. Almost everyone in the room seemed to have exactly the same feeling about posture, all negative and painful. Everything you know is wrong.

Saw George Rhoads on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood this week. I've always loved his sculptures -- especially, the first one I saw, at New York's Port Authority bus terminal -- but I never knew who he was.

On reason that it might really be different this time, at least as regards widely quoted ``market-wide'' P/E ratios: bad choices in actively managing the S&P 500.

I've now had my fourth credit card theft, of one form or another, in the past five years. I need to write them all up.

I've said it before, but librarians are on the side of the angels.

Adding functionality to the Mozilla address bar. Very, very useful.

BSDVault: Microsoft's Digital Rights Management--A Little Deeper. The updated End User License Agreement (EULA) for Windows Media Player apparently contains the following language:

Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

I parse that as ``we're going to impose new controls on the data on your machine, we'll update our software behind your back to do so, and we might tell you about it.'' This is not security by any definition of the word I understand. (Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.)

Robert X. Cringely: I Told You So. I'm afraid he's right about the latest disaster Microsoft is trying to foist upon the world. And he's right about calling it in an earlier column. Here's what I wrote to some friends after reading that essay:

I have to say that this article really depressed me. The major takeaway from this article, for me, was to always refer to virii which affect Microsoft software as ``Windows Worms'' or ``Outlook Viruses'' and not as ``internet'' or ``email'' problem. But that's not sufficient.

Alas, it appears some at Microsoft read that column last summer and turned it into a business strategy, adding in some pernicious extra features for digital right management.

I love the Spamdemic Map from Clueless Mailers

The Business Plan Archive. Great idea. I may have a plan or two to contribute. I wish more was up there now, but the ten lessons are already worth reading. And I'll note that the dotcom I worked for folded in May, 2001, the month with the single largest number of shutdowns. (Thanks to Ted Weinstein for forwarding the link to David R. Baker's article in the SF Chronicle.)

Unlike many people, I agree with the Ninth Circuit's ruling that ``under god'' in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the establishment clause of the first amendment, and I've thought so since I was in elementary school. I'm an atheist, which makes me sensitive to this issue (and to the complaintant in this case), but I think it's fairly obvious that the language ``under god'' involves promotion (``respecting an establishment'') of religion. (And, as my mother says, it ruined the rhythm of the pledge.)

George Johnson, At Los Alamos, Two Visions of Supercomputing. The model of cheap clusters of inexpensive, low power parts is appealing.

Ravenbrook released the Memory Pool System as open source! This is a terrifically exciting resource for anyone building systems that could benefit from advanced memory management, with garbage collected languages being the obvious candidates. MPS is a very flexible toolkit and the cleanest memory management I've ever heard of.

I was at Harlequin for part of the early development of the MPS, and we were using it to manage memory for DylanWorks. I can remember hearing about only two bugs in MPS that were discovered after the memory management team delivered code to us.

Kudos to Richard, Nick, Tucker, David, David, Tony, Pekka, and the rest of the people who worked on this great technology.

Saw Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report. Excellent, though I would have preferred it ending earlier, as much more of a dystopia. Spielberg is a genius at replicating the feel of other movies, but doing so as a cohesive whole and making something original and polished in the process. This felt like a melange of Blade Runner, The Fugitive, and LA Confidential Now, if only Guy Pearce or Russell Crowe had been cast in the lead.

Kurt Eichenwald, Andersen Trial Yields Evidence in Enron's Fall:

Enron proposed, according to the e-mail message, imposing a cross-collateralization that allowed Mr. Fastow to remove the new structure any time he wanted. That would be somewhat akin to a person agreeing to guarantee a mortgage, so long as the obligation could be rescinded as soon as a payment came due.

``I did not see any way that this worked,'' Mr. Bass wrote. ``In effect, it was heads I win, tails you lose.''

In memorium: Scott Shuger. Shuger's Today's Papers column became my number one news source very shortly after I started reading it. He did a great job.

With Scott Shuger dead and Dave Winer in the hospital, Internet journalism feels like a small world.

Paul Robinson, The Philosophy of Punctuation. A wonderful essay. He rightly critizes too many flaws I find in my own writing: too many semicolons, dashes, and parentheses. And what about all those colons?

How Much Data Is That?

The maps in MapBlast's driving directions are significantly better than any other maps I've seen for route directions.

MapBlast has been testing (since March 2001, apparently) a new type of map for driving directions, under the name LineDrive. The maps don't include useless features not on your route; instead you get just the roads you're supposed to take, distances, and major cross streets, simplified and with proportional distances adjusted so that turns are easier to follow. In contrast, most driving directions just highlight a route on an traditional road map. It makes for a vast improvement in the readability of the direction maps. It's like getting a AAA Triptik versus a stack of maps.

The technology is described in a paper by Maneesh Agrawala and Chris Stolte, Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization. My take-away is that they modeled the maps on how people draw maps by hand when giving directions.

The maps are very reminiscent of Charles Minard's classic map of Napoleon's march to and retreat from Moscow. (Fans of Edward Tufte probably know the map well.)

MapBlast, like Yahoo, use Navigation Technologies for the actual directions. I think MapQuest's directions are actually better, but it's worth sacrificing 10% on the directions for the additionaly clarity of the better maps. I've used Yahoo's directions for years out of habit, but have now switched (including my automated tools) to using MapBlast full-time.

And, unfortunately, MapBlast's user interface does also suffer in comparison to Yahoo's: you can't edit addresses on a map page or enter addresses as cross streets.

(Credit to the Oakland Zoo for getting me to try MapBlast for directions.)

Now that I work for Google, I'm very conscious of how I write search queries. Do I put hyphens in? Quoted phrases? Explicitly try to exclude terms? Do I go for a long set of words? Double a search term? Insert an area code so get the phone number in a snippet? At times, this is optimizing so that I can get the best results in the quickest way possible; at other times, I want to see how Google will do on unrefined searches.

I don't use the I'm feeling lucky button, but sometime I try very hard to ensure that the first result is what I'm looking for.

No longer is search for me only about what I'm searching for, but it's also about how Google is doing. Could it do better? Could I make it do better? How can we automatically do some of the tricks that I'm trying to do by hand? Are we being spammed?

Is this a hazard for all software developers? Are we slaves to our implementations?

Nicholas Kristof: Gun Show Fantasies:

Here in Michigan, for example, a member of Hezbollah, Ali Boumelhem, was convicted last year of buying weapons at gun shows to ship to Lebanon.

Years ago I was held at machine-gunpoint one night in Beirut, and it seemed the gun capital of the world. So it's unnerving to learn that frustrated Lebanese terrorists come to America for weaponry by taking advantage of our lax gun rules.

Image Analogies: Fascinating image manipulation by example system. The texture-by-numbers examples, in particular, show an amazing technique for easily creating large synthetic images. (Link courtesey Paul Baclace and Sweetcode.)

Peter Scheer, Slate: The Socialist Economics of College Tuition: ``One surprising result of this social policy is that the real cost of private colleges hasn't increased in the last two decades?contrary to the conventional wisdom that tuition inflation has priced the most selective schools beyond the reach of middle-class families.'' Fascinating and believable.

I'll be hearing Lawrence Lessig speak at the Mechanics Institute this evening.

John Markoff, Intel to Offer Some Pieces in a Puzzle: ``Intel goes to great lengths to compare the new Itanium chip with both its previous Itanium, known as McKinley, and to a competing chip from Sun Microsystems. Missing in the document, though, is any reference to Intel's own industry-leading Pentium family of microprocessors.''

Reuters: Halliburton Shares Off, SEC Launches Probe: ``The accounting policies under investigation were adopted in 1998 while Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton. He held that post from 1995 to 2000.''

We were watching Mulholland Drive on DVD last night. So far, I like the movie. But, David Lynch's decision to eliminate chapter stops makes it really hard for tired parents who don't have enough energy to watch the whole movie in one night to enjoy this DVD.

Matt Loney, News.com: Media firms lobby piracy controls to EU:

To back up their demands, the media groups claim that counterfeiting and piracy of copyrighted works ``feeds a growing black economy in which criminal networks use piracy to fund other activities such as drug dealing, arms trading, money laundering and terrorism.''

Yes, that's it, I'm going rip CDs and sell copies of them in order to subsidize my money-losing drug dealing and arms trading activities.

Yet another excellest essay by Paul Graham: Revenge of the Nerds.

Grigory Yavlinsky: The Door to Europe is in Washington. (Thanks to William Safire for the link.)

This week's spam.

Another reason to dislike Trent Lott. As if we need more.

Broken music: List of copy-protected CDs and how to hide the copy protection with a magic marker.

Saw Attack of the Clones. The happy prejudice of low expectations: I enjoyed it a lot. After the previous movie and the Dawson's-Creek-in-space trailer, I was expecting the worst, and this was actually pretty good. The teenage angst of Anakin Skywalker, including Hayden Christensen's imitation of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, and the portentous falling in love scenes were awful. But there was also a good space western in there, with a few great action sequences and fantastic visuals over all.

Also saw Kissing Jessica Stein. Fun and light, even if the ending was a bit of a cop out.

• Synthetic spider silk.
• American Antigravity: field-effect propulsion. Is this real?

This week's spam.

Following Jakob Nielsen's advice about homepage usability, I added a tagline.

Saturday, May 11, 2002

Paul Waugh and Robert Booth, Goodbye stars, hello stripes: The new symbol of the EU. Is this for real? It's a cool flag, very 21st century (or, at least, late '90s), but it just doesn't seem like a flag.

Hal Varian, Knowing About Diluted Earnings Is a Powerful Tool:

Earnings aren't reduced when the option is exercised, they are often just diluted -- the same earnings must be spread among more shares. The appropriate arithmetic in the case of dilution is not subtraction, but division....

Executives shot themselves in their footnotes and are now living to regret it.

This is the most sensible piece I've yet read about accounting for options.

Hugo Martín, LA Times: In Artist's Freeway Prank, Form Followed Function:

For two years, the rail-thin artist planned and prepared for his most ambitious project, a piece that would be seen by more than 150,000 motorists per day on the freeway, near 3rd Street.

With friends documenting his every move on camera, Ankrom clandestinely installed the finished product on a gray August morning. For nine months, no one noticed. It even failed to catch the eye of California Department of Transportation officials

The 46-year-old Los Angeles artist designed, built and installed an addition to an overhead freeway sign--to exact state specifications--to help guide motorists on the sometimes confusing transition to the northbound Golden State Freeway a couple miles farther north.

But is it art?

Just re-read David Clark's RFC 817: Modularity and efficiency in protocol implementation (1982). Fantastic essay about I/O and performance, which is a topic near and dear to me these days.

Swarm Music.

I can't tell what's worse: the awful JavaScript scrolling box UI on the Coca Cola list of brand trademarks or that they claim ``Jesus'' as a trademark.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jeff Gerth: Enron Forced Up California Energy Prices, Documents Show. I'm shocked, shocked to find that market manipulation was going on here.

Top Ten New Copyright Crimes.

Just saw a very interesting Flash application, which, I think, is a Microsoft Word viewer. For an example, see this article (Putting a Happy Face on Angola) by Ken Silverstein at Slate and click on the image that looks like Microsoft Word running in a Window at the bottom of the screen.

Quick summary: It pops up a 3-frame window. The top and bottom frames are GIF images that lool like Word toolbars and status lines, etc. The middle frame is an embedded Flash object (called word_doc.swf) which scrolls through the document. When your mouse hovers over highlighted text, it pops up some annotation.

Very odd to see something that looks that much like Microsoft Word running inside a GNOME+Mozilla window.

Is this something Microsoft wrote? Macromedia? Can other people use this to make Word documents accessible on the web?

News.com: Interview with John Wood of Room to Read.

Amazing Hubble photos.

Joyce Slaton, SF Chronicle: Plagiarizers Beware: Turnitin.com is here to stop your cheating ways. I like this. The web has been described as the ultimate tool for students who want to plagiarize; it's nice to see it being used to combat exactly that problem. Turnitin.com's specific techniques are not necessarily that important -- 40 character sequences? Why not words? But comparing a student's paper to everything on the web (and, perhaps, to all other submitted papers, across schools) seems like a great approach. Interesting that it's feasible for a small company to do.

Tim McLaughlin, Reuters: Struggling EMC Unveils Low-Cost Data Storage Product:

After an application server captures or creates a piece of data, Centera gives it an address based on a mathematical formula calculated from the data's content. Once the data is stored it cannot be changed and duplicate information is eliminated, Rothnie explained.

This sounds a lot like Venti, which is, I think, a very neat idea. I have lots of friends at Network Appliance, which makes me a little hesitant to applaud EMC, but this seems to be a good move. Too bad there's no information about Centera on their web site yet.

EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives at Byte and Switch has more details on Centera. Says that they use a ``27-character'' digital signature for ``10⁸⁵ unique addresses.'' (Someone's got their math a little wrong: 27 bytes is 216 bits, which allows for roughly 10⁶⁵ unique values. I suspect the reporter made a transcription error.)

Floyd Norris: Pension Folly: How Losses Become Profits:

A study by Milliman USA, a benefits consulting firm, found that in 2001 the reported results of 50 large companies included $54.4 billion of profits from pension fund investments. In fact, the pension funds lost $35.8 billion from investments last year.

Peter Kaplan, Reuters: Microsoft Exec Warns Court of Computer Frustration:

Using a personal computer would turn into a confusing and frustrating experience under antitrust sanctions sought against Microsoft Corp. by nine states, a Microsoft executive testified on Thursday.

``Would turn into?'' Hello?

Heard a very good talk at Stanford by Todd Proebsting, ``Disruptive Programming Language Technologies,'' applying Clayton Christensen's ideas to programming languages. I'm a big fan of Christensen's work and spend a lot of time thinking about programming languages, so this sounded like it was going to be a great talk. And it didn't disappoint.

Proebsting argues that most programming language research -- e.g., all that work on type theory, functional programming, and, especially, optimization techniques -- is irrelevant to the languages which have had real momentum in the past decade: Perl, Python, Visual Basic, and Java, for example. This is inarguably true.

His opinion is that this is a good thing. Compiler optimization for its own sake is pointless in light of Proebsting's Law (compiler advances double computing power every 18 years), at least relative to what hardware engineers are doing with Moore's Law. Type theory, functional programming, etc, may be good, but they don't do much on their own. In particular, they don't appear to be doing much for programmer productivity.

In contrast, the recent disruptive languages have been very pragmatic, focusing on getting thing things done, at first in one specific domain. They have the disdvantages that they're slow (relative to C or C++) and they're not as general or good for big programs. But people write lots of code in them, and they take over mindshare from the big languages by making it easy to get things done.

Proebsting set up a few criteria for success of a programming language, based on these observations: the technology must have disadvantages relative to existing languages for those languages' areas of focus; it should be ignored by POPL and PLDI; and the examples it does well on should address real problems, not toy examples such as append, the dining philosophers, or factorial. (I'd add, for any language about data structures, please don't show how to implement a stack.)

So what should a programming language designer do? Proebsting's advice was that if you have, say, a really neat type theory, build a language based around your type system, tack on something useful, and promote the useful part. Then, people get your type system for free.

He then listed several of his personal candidates for useful language features, which I'll summarize without details:

• ``flight data recorder''-style tracing of code
• checkpointing and undo; that is, transactions over a program's state
• relational database integration as language constructs and types (and not just another way to embed SQL in conventional languages)
• parsing without restriction to LR- or LL-based techniques
• XML manipulation by declarative pattern matching
• declarative constraint solvers
• distributed programming

Almost all of these look to me like candidates for extensions to existing languages, or APIs that can be built in other languages, but, as Proebsting pointed out, regular expressions or UI forms are also good candidates to be treated as ``just an API,'' but Perl and Visual Basic are full-fledged languages that developed their followings based on depth of support for those features. On the other hand, Perl and Python, in particular, seem well suited to incorporating any good ideas that come up in some of these areas. (I still like (self-)extensible languages. Perl and Python are quite extensible, but their extensibility is an ``outside the language'' concept.)

Todd's final prediction were that the next big language would be slower than what it replaces. (He also predicted that it will use braces ({}) for enclosing blocks of code, in that culturally compatible syntax is often a property of disruptive languages.)

An interesting disruptive language I'd add to the mix is Dave Winer's UserTalk. Ruby doesn't seem particularly disruptive in and of itself -- it addresses a very similar audience to Python, for example -- but it does seem to be part of an interesting disruptive wave.

James Surowiecki, Tax Cheat, Inc.:

The billions of dollars in tax revenue lost to corporate tax shelters is bad enough. But the real problem with the proliferation of shelters is that they sour the average American on one of the obligations of citizenship.

After about a dozen years as a customer of Bank of America, they just lost my business. I deposited a check made out to me and my wife for our 2001 federal income tax refund. They sent it back to me, because I didn't deposit it to a joint account. We don't have a joint bank account. They've never required a joint bank account before for depositing checks made out to both of us before, including our state income tax refund which I had deposited a week earlier.

I went in to argue about this, but they would not deposit the check without my wife there. I'm sorry, I'm a good customer and they should be able to help me. But, no, they've decided this check was somehow different from other similar ones which they've accepted and they wouldn't accept it, even with my wife on the phone saying it was ok. (She had signed the check and her signature is on file with her account.) If they had created the expectation over time that joint checks can't be deposited to one of our accounts, I would have accepted it, but they pick one check out of dozens over the years and declare it a third-party check? And then stand on the principle of it, with an unsatisfied customer in their presence? That really rubs me the wrong way.

Mark Davis: Unicode Myths.

Gadget of the day: a keyboard made of light.

Dinner at The Meetinghouse. Excellent. I was expecting a little bit less, because of the ``comfort food'' label that they've earned. It wasn't overly fancy, but the food wasn't too simple. Elegant, actually, as fits their decor. Salad, johnnycakes, duck, salmon. And a fabulous dessert of an ice cream sandwich, which we hear is also available at the Hotel Utah.

Fourteen years and thirteen months: Susan and I have been together fourteen years, and Matthew's been with us for thirteen months, as of today. Both facts are surprising, because both feel like they've been going on forever and still both feel new and exciting.

I'm generally opposed to patents, but Dean Kamen seems to justify exceptions to that rule.

Sunday, April 14, 2002

Great day in Berkeley: Brunch at Café de la Paz, followed by riding the steam train at Tilden Park with Matthew.

Two items that speak for themselves in today's New York Times business section, pointing at the degree of corruption that can occur when business is booming and everything looks as though times are great.

Daniel Altman, The Taming of the Finance Officers:

Only three years ago, Andrew S. Fastow, the disgraced chief financial officer of Enron , received an Excellence Award from CFO magazine for his skill in managing the company's capital. Two years ago, Mark H. Swartz, the embattled finance czar of Tyco International, took home an Excellence Award for his work sealing the company's many acquisitions.

This year, CFO probably will not hand out Excellence Awards at all, because their longtime sponsor, the Andersen accounting firm, has backed out.

Amy Cortese, Venture Capitalists See Investors Grow Mutinous:

The most uncomfortable standoff may have been at the meeting of Idealab, the technology incubator, held in March in Pasadena, Calif. The firm has been sued by investors including Dell Computer and Moore Global Investments, who have accused Bill Gross, its founder, of mismanagement....

Presentations by Marcia Goodstein, who is the president and chief operating officer and Mr. Gross's fiancée, and by a director, Robert Kavner, a former executive vice president at AT&T, were among those prompting pointed questions, according to two people who attended. Idealab said it invested about $1 million a month but spent twice that much a month to operate its fledgling companies. The largest operating expense, it disclosed, goes to salary and benefits: Mr. Gross's compensation, including salary and bonus, exceeded $750,000 in 2002, up from $250,000 in 2000. During that same period, the plaintiffs charge, Idealab lost half their $1 billion investment.