3 Feb 2007
Hello Tarot Kitty, Someone's gotta sell you
I can read your mind, Dawn Stevens.

31 Jan 2007
Letting Hollywood writers say what I mean

"We are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth. But because we got brains, if we try real hard, we may occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil."
-- Hugh Laurie as Dr. House on House (talking to a female patient who was raped), 2007

"We are all monkeys."
-- Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines in 12 Monkeys, 1995

Dec 2006
I'm a Four Wheeler
The New Mexico Four Wheelers wrote a "new member" welcome article about me in their Trail Tales monthly newsletter.

20 Apr 2005
Programming Pendulum reaches Apex with AJAX
This AJAX web programming stuff looks really cool, as long as you focus on the end results. Pay no attention to the frazzled programmer twitching in the fetal position behind the curtain. But fear not - the time of celebration is nearly upon us.

The misguided and futile attempts to use a hypertext document browser as a general purpose programming platform have now reached a level of complete absurdity, which is a good thing: it means the end is near. Soon we will be back to programming in, well, programming environments. The amount of complexity required to develop something useful in this AJAX "platform" of hodge-podgery must be an order of magnitude above standard HTML + Javascript. How much can a developer take before he cries, "Enough! This was supposed to be EASY! Why are we DOING this?!?"

The laws of capitalism will ultimately bring a measure of reason to this madness. The cost to develop something useful in this AJAX mess must be obscene. At some point it will outweigh the freeness of having the browser pre-installed on every client. XML and DOM?? XHTML? Asynchronous JavaScript "binding everything together"? Lord help us! These bits and pieces will be glued together into new acronyms, but the bullshit will simply pile deeper. It all has to collapse, eventually. Please!

Meanwhile, I loves my Gmail. :-)

Paul

21 Apr 2005

Paul,
       I regret to inform you, the apex has not yet been reached.
Before that happens, we need to fully port all web applications so they
can run on local machines.  In other words, each application will need
to run its own web server or locate and bind to the local web server on
the machine.  In this way, web applications will be portable and
stand-alone, but still limited by the http interface.  Even then, I'm
not sure that's the true end of our sorrow, but I'm certain it's to
come.
       Jason