March 1, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Posts like Robert Scoble's recent Open Letter to Bill Gates remind me that there is a difference between people who know how to run a successful business and technology people who like to be armchair business men but lack financial forsight.

 


 

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I've been killing three birds with one stone in the past 12 hours. I've been pretty irritated by the general lack of functions in XSLT. No support for dates & times, no regex support and even simple aggregation functions like min()/max() are missing. So after work yesterday, I decided to implement the EXSLT functions for the .NET Framework. So far I've done all the date functions plus some extra from XQuery.

So now I get three things; XSLT functions I've been craving for months, fodder for a future Extreme XML column, and better tools for creating the expected results for my day job testing the XQuery F & O

More below on Penn & Teller's new show, political humor, blogs as journalism and thoughts on Joe Gregorio's recentposts on Regex-able XML.

 


 

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February 23, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Just reread localroger's Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect after seeing a review on Slashdot. It was quite thought provoking and well written although it did seem that some of the sex and violence was a tad gratuitious [even though it did affect the plot]. The story definitely got me interested in reading more about Singularity and Artificial Intelligence. By the way, did anyone notice that K5 stood up to the Slashdotting like a champ? Nice.

Clicked on my Slashdot user info page for the first time in a while and noticed I have 104 fans and 27 freaks (haters). That's surprising given that I don't post to Slashdot with much regularity any more. It almost makes me want to start posting regularly to Slashdot again. Almost.

More below on Spring Break, Nigerian scam letter blogs, and software patents.

 


 

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French laws are weird. On the one hand they pretend to be liberal and progressive by not making prostitution illegal on the other hand they propose banning "passive soliciting" such as dressing or acting provocatively. So prostitution is legal but being sexy isn't? Ha. Then there's the fact that producers of pr0n are taxed a hefty 66% of profits which they plan to jack up to 93%. Weird shit.

Thoughts on people getting confused by the Creative Commons licence below.

 


 

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Is it just me or does the trailer for Dark Blue make it look like Training Day 2? Ahhh, looks like I'm not the only one that thinks so. More below on how languages limit ones expressiveness and my current writing queue with a call for suggestions.

 


 

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February 14, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Last night some coworkers and I went to see Shangai Knights and Daredevil. Thoughts on both movies follow. WARNING: POTENTIAL DAREDEVIL SPOILERS.

By the way is http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22inverse+these+two+coefficients%22 the best Google Bomb ever or what?

Poll: What Movie Are You Most Looking Foward To This Year?

 


 

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Flash Mind Reader. Speculation below.

 


 

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Yesterday was my first anniversary working in the Belly of the Beast. As is traditional I brought in a pound of weed M & Ms for my coworkers. Digging around the K5 archives I found my first day of work diary from last year which brings back memories.

More below on the results of my last poll, scalable APIs, tester jokes, cool fellow B0rg retiring, and processing semantic HTML.

Poll: Favorite Open Source Licence?

 


 

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In yesterday's K5 diary I mentioned a site that aggregates 'Microsoft blogs' and described it as unnerving. Today the site author asks if I want to be taken off the list. Well, since I'm not on the list I can't ask to be taken off can I?

More importantly my Corrolla is almost paid off and I'll soon be turning twenty five. Time to buy the phat whip. Any suggestions folks?

Poll: What car should I get?

 


 

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A little while ago Joshua Allen started keeping a list of bloggers who work at MSFT. I always thought it was a grand joke and highlighted the kind of GroupThinktm you see at B0rg Central since you don't see lists of IBM bloggers, AOL bloggers or AT&T bloggers on various other personal weblogs do you?

This grand joke is now a joke on me. There are now [alleged] news sites that eagerly track the weekly brain farts posted to the InterWeb by myself and other B0rg. This is not to disparage my fellow B0rg employees but really 90% of the stuff in blogs [mine included] is brain fart material that is only of interest to yourself, some friends and the overly voyeuristic. I'm not sure which unnerves me more; reporters who are reading B0rg blogs hoping that some poor slob leaks some confidential shit or people who create websites to aggregate all the B0rg blogs.

More rant below.

 


 

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