Wikipedia and Trust. When should you take Wikipedia's word on something? My own rule of thumb is that either the matter should be objectively checkable or the person or event in question should be long past and noncontroversial. Anything politically sensitive, either currently or as a plot point backstopping a current political narrative, should be regarded with deep suspicion. In spite of process changes at Wikipedia, you still get things like this, where a biased critic of an organization ends up editing its Wikipedia page. Community sourcing has its place, but this points out one of its hard limits: It cannot cope with politically charged matters. It either turns into yet another debating venue, or an echo chamber dominated by whichever side has the most time to kill. Update: another case in point.
LISP-head! So it turns out that Brad Feld is an old time parenthesis junky. I never got into the life-as-a-linked-list style. Back in the day a lot of my work was instrumentation, control and low level graphics, all necessarily real-time, so assembler and C were the weapons of choice. I still have this residual tic whenever I read about something that I know will be real-time implemented in an interpreted language: "What'll happen when the GC runs!!?" Oh yeah, incremental collection, twenty years of Moore's Law - guess it'll be OK. (Via Ole Eichhorn.)
A Successful Airportectomy. Or maybe I should say transplant. Over the weekend, I replaced my slowly dying Apple 'Snow' Airport with an Airport Extreme base station, and the wireless network situation has improved tremendously. Installation was mostly straightforward, but with a few security related glitches that invoked the cussing reflex. Just in case Google brings others performing the same operation here: As of 3/25/08, the interface and help documentation of the Airport Utility don't correspond in at least a couple of places. If you want to do MAC filtering, the doco say there's a separate menu entry. But it doesn't exist - instead use the Timed Access mode and set the times to Unlimited. When setting up a wireless distribution system (WDS), the doco says to use the 'add' button to authorize more wireless nodes, but that's actually on a separate tab in the interface. Also, if you reasonably decide to give the new network the same name as the old, and also decide to conscientiously change the network password at the same time, it will work great on your admin machine. But it will cause all the other client machines to be kicked off the network without any diagnostic, necessitating a bunch of spelunking in the obscure keychain interface. So don't do that. Once through these hazards, everything worked great, and I rounded off the install by hooking up my surround system and an old USB printer to the network via an Airport Express. Worked first time, and I've now got a stable 'four bars' throughout the house.
Go State! My wife and I are both alums of Michigan State University, and have been rooting for their men's basketball team in the NCAA tournament. They are through two rounds and into the Sweet Sixteen. If both State and Stanford win their next game, they will end up head-to-head, making for a real case of divided loyalty. Gotta go with the old school tie there.
More On Bad Debt. I'm not the only one taking notice of the unfunded pension liabilities at the state and municipal level. The Weekly Standard features California public employee pensions follies, starting with the recent near-bankruptcy of Bay Area suburb Vallejo. A lot of this material is from the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, which is backing a public pensions reform ballot initiative for the state. The politician's handouts to the public employees' unions are starting to come due, just as the boomers head into retirement. It's not going to be pretty.