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Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, October 30, 2001. Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Jim Roepcke: "I rolled a car when I was 19." 

Derek Powazek: "Tonight I ordered dinner for me and my sweetie at burritodelivery.com, where business is booming. And the burritos were top-notch, too." 

Robert Occhialini says that other portable MP3 playback devices have flaws that Apple has addressed with the iPod. 

Netscape 6.2 is released. 

AP: "President Bush will throw out the first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night, aiming to project an air of normalcy even as the government warned of possible new terror attacks." 

Doc Searls notes that MORE, a fourteen-year-old program (roughly) runs quite a bit faster on today's hardware. That of course is a demo of Moore's Law, our friend, as is the other big law that drives all computer and software development (it also begins with a M.) 

MORE has one of the more flexible product names. It's not an acronym, although you would be forgiven for guessing that it is. It was chosen because we didn't know which of a myriad of features we threw into the product in 1986 would gain traction. It turned out to be Bullet Charts. It was quite popular in France where its name is a homonym of the word for death, mort. And it of course is also a homonym for the law that makes it run so fast in 2001. 

Good morning to the special envoy to Afghanistan and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and their Vietnam-era helicopters. 

BTW, in case you forgot, we first heard about the Taliban in March when they blew up 2000 years of Buddhist history. Now, the Buddhists, being who they are, did not retaliate by bombing Afghanistan. That would not be Buddhist-like.  

Stupid question. Do timezones have names? In the US they do (Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern). I know that some parts of Europe do. What about the rest of the world? If all timezones have names, where can I find a canonical list of them? 

Here's the question framed in the context of a new verb I'm putting together. 

Another context. I want to avoid hard-coding the string circled in red in this picture. I want to "get it right" without having to ask the user to enter a string. 

Boy this issue is hard to grasp for some people. Look at the screen shot if you're confused or think you know it all. 

PostgreSQL has dealt with this problem. More good names on this page. Another good list

Thanks to Steven Vore for a pointer to the World Time Server, which is kind of a messy site, but may help in this little hole-dig. 

Hey I actually know someone who partied with Prince. 

Faisal Jawdat asks a deeply philosophical question. Is Scripting News a Journal or a Weblog? The Weblogger User Group mail list debates what Scoble wanted to accomplish when he started the group. Luckily Scoble is still alive so we can ask him. If he had died yesterday in the car crash I would have said this (after a suitable mourning period). "He sure didn't start the group so it could debate whether it was a user group for webloggers or journalers." But since he's alive (as far as I know) I can't say that. 

Last year on this day I ran a survey for consenting webloggers. Maybe in this question is a philosophy that can guide the users group? 

Hey while that debate is broiling, welcome to the rain. We're having the first bona fide storm of the California rainy season. Nice! 

Happiness is discovering an old demo app that still works. 

     

Last update: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 at 7:45 PM Eastern.

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