Month: March 2004

everyone loves cake

John & Belle Have A Blog: E-Z Duz It

Here is a recipe for the easiest cake ever.

Belle is quite right, this is the easiest cake ever, the kind of thing you can make after dinner and still have for a dessert.

I first saw this in Moosewood Cooks at Home as the 6 minute chocokate cake, and they have reprinted it in the their latest book, Moosewood Restaurant: New Classics. I posted a variation on it here.

It really is amazingly good, and it works for muffins/cupcakes as well (good for school parties where allergies may be a factor: no eggs or groundnuts to worry about).

portrait of the artist as a middle-aged cyclist

0007T
so here I am at the start of the Chilly Hilly Classic. At this point I could only testify to it being chilly (about 40ºF) but the rest of the ride’s name would become apparent all too soon.

This image is the proof taken by Marathon Foto. If I ever do one of these for charity, I could see buying the images they make for promotional or testimonial use. They obviously stake out their locations well: that’s the Seattle skyline across Puget Sound you see behind me.

Yet Another Text -> HTML formatter

Daring Fireball Projects: Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

aaargh, another of these (I use [very little of] Brad Choate’s textile 2 now, and I mean to take a look at TextPattern as well). Now this . . .

waiting for the curve to bend

Lingering Job Insecurity of Silicon Valley:

Building software, he observed, is “becoming the equivalent of blue-collar work.”

Unemployment has risen sharply in computing, making it more like blue-collar work in that sense. The unemployment rate last year among computer scientists, for example, was 5.2 percent, the highest level since the government began tracking this work as an occupation two decades ago. In most of those years, the unemployment rate for computer scientists was under 2 percent [From my dim recollections of undergraduate economics, 4% is generally considered to be as good as it gets: a graph accompanying this article shows it dipping close to 1% — ed]. Similarly, unemployment among electrical engineers last year, at 6.2 percent, was the highest in 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[ . . . ]

The persistence of record high unemployment among skilled computer engineers suggests that something beyond the usual up-and-down cycle of business is at work.

Do tell.
Continue reading “waiting for the curve to bend”

Tipping point for RSS

Chad Dickerson: March 09, 2004 Archives:

Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld’s Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we’re certain that it’s permanent. I think it’s a big deal.
[. . .]
Feels like a tipping point to me.

Of course, for those of us lower on the foodchain, the tipping point to celebrate is when user requests outnumber robot requests . . . . .

this is news?

Ensight – Jeremy C. Wright

It appears that productivity is quickly becoming more important than security to business leaders.

It was bound to happen, really. It’s part of the cycle that things go through. Just like you are most likely to get money for security after a major virus or hacking attack than you are 2 months afterwards [or two months prior -ed]

I’m act[ua]lly surprised the focus on security has lasted this long.

The original article is about corporate instant messaging, not IT management in general. Risk management is a large component of IT management, so this is nothing new. I wasn’t aware that security had ever superceded productivity . . . . the job growth numbers (or lack thereof) suggest otherwise.

Given the vitality of the virus/worms we’re seeing, this does make me wonder why anyone would want to adopt a new closed-source version of an existing open protocol and even mention security.

every picture tells a story

Op-Ed Columnist: Promises, Promises:

What you see in this chart is the signature of a corrupted policy process, in which political propaganda takes the place of professional analysis.

09KRUG.583

When the facts change, I change my mind,” [John Maynard] Keynes is said to have quipped: when conditions change, it makes sense to change your strategy. I don’t see any evidence of that in the graph though there has been some tempering of expectations.

rebel music?

Crooked Timber: Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs

Juan leads with his chin, describing Rush as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.”

This made me smile: I liked them fine (hey, they were loud, played lots of notes, and were unlistenable by adults). But somewhere along the way, I found it curious that their stuff was so relentlessly libertarian, while they lived in a socialist monarchy, just across the border from the US. I don’t expect artists to live their art, but absent almost any other subject matter (there was a two album space opera in there, as I recall), it just seemed strange to me.

The Clash came along and kicked them to the curb . . .