A week in Myrtle Beach and the only photo I took was of this misused apostrophe at a miniature golf course. Not quite as interesting as misused quotation marks, but it’s still surprising how many errors like this make in onto signs.
At least someone else got a shot of me riding a wave in. The weather was perfect all week, and early June fell nicely between biker week and high school graduation season.
I can definitely recommend the Red Stick Ramblers from New Orleans after seeing them play Saturday night at the Carrboro Arts Center. They put on a very lively show with many original songs plus a few standards. The crowd was small (100+) but enthusiastic with a dozen or so filling the dance floor for most songs. I’m told there was a good mix of waltzes and two-steps, but I wouldn’t know the difference.
Every band member excelled with their playing skills and vocals, but I thought fiddler Kevin Wimmer really stood out with some very smooth sounds coming from his fiddle. Guitarist Chas Justus was interesting to watch because of his perpetual friendly grimace. It was a treat to see a fiddlesticks [video] performance, which was new to me.
Last fall, the powers that be at Duke Forest (presumably the Forestry department at Duke) re-positioned the rocks on the downstream side of the concrete bridge as shown in the first image. While New Hope Creek is usually gentle, I couldn’t imagine the piles holding up long during the heavy flow periods. The images below show the same view over the winter.
December:
January:
February:
Though the piles are lost, it’s interesting that the few big rocks held their approximate locations.
Here is a current image. It looks like a new arrangement is being tried.
One of my hobbies since buying an 8-core Mac Pro is to actually make use of all of the processing power. So far I haven’t had much success. And, of course, the web and disk are not any faster, so the extra cores don’t do much good in general.
The only app I use that’s really built for that kind of thing is Xcode, which will spawn off separate compiler threads in parallel. However, I wasn’t seeing more the two cores busy when compiling a large project, though Xcode claimed to be working on 8 files at a time. I was thinking that disk or memory constraints were the problem, but it turned out to be a configuration issue.
At some point in the past, I has innocently turned on the Distributed Builds option, which is meant for distributing tasks to other machines on a local network. However, a side effect is that the compiling is throttled, presumably with thread priorities, so the build is more of a background activity. Turning off Distributed Builds gets all 8 local cores working in parallel.
Now I just need to get my own programs to use those cores…
I’m surprised no one has complained about this cover misquote from last week’s Parade Sunday insert. Maybe I’m the only one that actually read the story.
I was interested to find out why this pilot feels she’s got to fight. Turns out she never says she’s got to fight. The full quote in the story is, “If I’ve got to fight, I’ll fight.” Quite a different sentiment. I know headline writing is a different job than journalist, but it seems like somebody in the review process would have taken Journalism 101.
Was it just a gaffe or intentionally misleading?
Scott Adams discusses the value of experience in presidential candidates, and while I agree no job really provides relevant experience at being a head of state, I do have a solution. Just pick a leader the way sports teams do it: hire a head of state away from a smaller, successful country.
Is there any system of rating heads of state? I see Denmark is atop one happiness index, and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in his third term, so he must be doing something right. I bet he’d like to move to a bigger stage.
There is the minor issue of the constitutional requirement of natural citizenship. First of all, the constitution can be amended, and I know Arnold Schwarzenegger would be for it and probably Panama Canal Zone native John McCain. Second, the wording in the constitution is not completely clear. Section 1 of Article II states:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; …
It’s hard to parse that in a way that makes all the commas meaningful. The common interpretation is what you get if you omit the second comma, but what makes that comma ignorable? And even without that comma, the first “citizen” is not qualified like the second one, so technically one just has to be a natural born citizen of some country.
The XML Schema 1.1 was already running behind when I left the Working Group in 2004, and it’s still a work in progress. Though I no longer write XML tools, I try to keep up with the group’s activities and provide hopefully useful comments to public working drafts. However, knowing the WG is so far behind schedule, I’m hesitant to make too many official comments since each comment must be addressed by the group, adding to the delay.
Many of my comments have been resolved recently in a relative flurry of activity. (The comment archive shows more activity last month than any previous three month period.) When a comment is resolved, the original poster can (silently) accept the resolution or appeal to the W3C director. I disagreed with the resolution of my comment on type tables and substitution groups, but just registered my dissent and closed it anyway rather than appeal — I trust the working group’s expertise over my casual interest.
Substitution groups have always been questionable in my mind. I’d prefer typed wildcards or, at least, an opt-in mechanism rather than opt-out for substitution groups to limit their unintended use.
Type tables is a big feature added late in the game and doesn’t seem to interact well with substitution groups. Type tables allow alternative types to apply to an element based on its context, such as an attribute value. I thought such context-based constraints should be in a separate layer, as is done with Schematron, but it seems like half the schema-dev questions are about how to impose such constraints within XML Schema, so I can understand why the Working Group would want to add it.
The problem, as I see it, is that type alternatives live as element declaration properties rather than within the type hierarchy. Substitution group members must have types in proper derivation relationships, but that only applies to the declared types, not the alternatives types. So combining type tables with substitution groups can break the spirit of the derivation hierarchy, if not the letter of it.