About a year …

About a year ago I forked over the $195 it took to become an ACM member. Included with this membership comes a subscription to Communications of the ACM, arguably the best trade journal around for keeping on top of trends in software development, Internet technologies and related academic concerns. Also included is access to the ACM Digital Library, which is an amazing wealth of 40 years of high-quality articles on a very wide array of subjects. This month’s issue of Communications of the ACM is all about collaborative technologies. It is my current bathroom reading (really!).

NY Times: Interface Design Is Trickier Than It Seems

This is what I want for Christmas, but I don’t think they sell them retail. [via Tara Calishain]

The Onion: Who Says Java Programmers Don’t Have a Sense of Humor?

The Best of CHI-WEB. Awesome! BTW, I think that the list archiving of CHI-WEB is some of the best I’ve ever seen. The only thing I would do differently is lose the graphical navigation and replace it with textual navigation. Oh, and spambot-proof the email headers to prevent the scraping of the email addresses.

Jon Udell: The Event-Driven Internet

The World According to Hong, part of Hong’s Cave.

Michal Wallace (a.k.a Sabren) has started a low-cost hosting company. I can vouch for him, having worked with him on a side project a few years back. He knows his stuff and is a very good system administrator. This looks like the perfect place to have an account for development purposes, since it’s cheaper than someplace like Pair, and has a personable system administrator who can help you out with special requests like installing any custom server-side software you might need that other hosting companies might not provide because they are hosting thousands of Web sites on hundreds of servers and don’t have the manpower to handle special requests.

When it requires a background check just to purchase an airline ticket, then the terrorists have already won. I’m not even going to talk about the hidden agendas of these data warehousing companies and the Federal government.

Down in the financial district near Wall Street, there is a guy who thinks he is a crow. I’ve seen him a couple of times, running across the street screaming “Caw, Caw!” and flapping his arms. Man, I love New York.

The 105-character username, a conversation at work:

camworld2:  do we have a character limit on usernames and passwords 
            for [the product we're developing]
davezone74: upper limit for usernames is 105, I think.  That is the 
            size of the field in Oracle, I don't know if the CGI limits 
            it beyond that.  passwd is 20 characters.
camworld2:  great, thanks
camworld2:  can you imagine a 105-character uername?
camworld2:  "damn! I made a typo, let me try again"
camworld2:  (five minutes later) "damn! another typo..."
davezone74: hahaha

Posted by Cameron Barrett at December 7, 2001 12:02 PM

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *