Problems of Data Access Layersfrom John Wiseman at Lemonodor — Troubles with data access layers. Don’t let any one tell you there isn’t an impedance mismatch between objects and a RDBMS, here we have one between straight procedural code and as simple a DB as you can get. And after this is established, you get people commenting that all the ‘business logic’ should be in the DB anyway.
This is a gallery intended to show views of other side of Iran, different with what you may have seen in the media.
by Ali Majdfar at pbase.com — Spectacular!
…It just doesn’t seem like it should work—there are a bunch of questions that come up every time OpenID is discussed anywhere…
by Simon Willison — Nice screen cast of how OpenID works. Five or so minutes worth investing.
Well, this image is my selfportrait. I try to do something artistic, and realistic at the same time. what should i say more, hmm… I spend like one and half month on it, working by nights. i use maya to create this image, maya fur, mentalray, and Zbrush 2. photoshop for the textures and color correction.
Piotr Wysocki (via TechEBlog) — Boy, things have moved along since I was at Alias. (Maya is an Alias product).
I made her [Song Hye Kyo] smile just for fun, but it turned out to be a very difficult process. I’m just glad it worked out fine :)
Max Edwin Wahyudi (via TechEBlog)
For younger students… there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.
Homework? Maybe not! I’m seeing more and more articles like this one. This is aimed at school principals.
PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports
In the reports, every single text-slide uses bullet-outlines with 4 to 6 levels of hierarchy. Then another multi-level list, another bureaucracy of bullets, starts afresh for a new slide. How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one side?…
by Edward Tufte, September 6, 2005 — Apparently NASA likes PowerPoint and was using PP to make technical presentations, most notably during the risk assessment of the Columbia space shuttle. This article goes into great detail as to why this is a problem and just how serious that problem is.
An On-line TV Guidevia Rethink — Seems to work too.
Yes, software still has bugs in itThe Yourdon Report
On Being Blind to Nonredundant Information
Instead of seeing people as the source of information, clusters are the source and people are ports of access to the information that circulates around them.
by Anne Zelenka at Anne 2.1 Pro — Discusses the first pages of Ronald Burt’s Bokerage & Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital.
fletcherpenney.net: HomeThe new home of MultiMarkdown
Markdown (by John Gruber) is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. MultiMarkdown converts “from text into other formats, including complete XHTML documents, LaTeX, PDF, RTF, or even (shudder) Microsoft Word documents”.
REST: the quick pitchMegginson Technologies: Quoderat — This’ll be worth keeping handy.
I’m proud to have worked on it, and even prouder of the fact that royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International. My only regret is that Frank Willison isn’t here to enjoy it with us. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I hope he would have.
Greg Wilson at The Third Bit — The table of contents to a forthcoming book by Greg Wilson and Andy Oram. 35 or so articles about how programmers think. Looking forward to this one.
FBI Issued Illegal National Security Letters Under USA PATRIOT Act
A new Justice Department report concludes that the FBI broke the law in its use of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain phone, business, and financial data about people in the U.S.
from Schneier on Security
Family detained in U.S. granted permit to enter Canada
An Iranian couple and their nine-year-old Canadian son who have been held in a Texas detention centre have been given temporary residency permits to enter Canada.
Finally.
160,000-year-old jawbone redefines origins of the species | Science | Guardian Unlimited
Modern humans were living in northern Africa far earlier than previously thought, according to scientists. A new analysis of a 160,000-year-old fossilised jawbone from Morocco shows that the homo sapiens in the area had started having long childhoods, one of the hallmarks of humans living today.
Scotsman.com News - GaelicThe news in Gaelic
Study: Nearly One-Third Of Iraq, Afghanistan Vets Return With Mental IllnessThe Huffington Post — Oh dear!
VIDEO: Tacoma Police Gas Peaceful Anti-War Protestersfrom David Goldstein at The Huffington Post
Smithsonian study concludes Caribbean extinctions occurred 2M years after apparent cause
“We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what paleontologists normally do,” said Aaron O’Dea, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “In our case, we see that most coral and snail species died off a good 2 million years after the environmental change that caused their demise.”
eurekalert
English and Irish may be closer than they think
In Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago… Ireland received the fewest of the subsequent invaders; their DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool… 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about a third in eastern and southern England.
Stone Pages Archaeo News
Meet the one wheel balancing scooter
about £300 in parts
Engadget — Looks like fun
Sadistically-named “Twirl-A-Squirrel” prevents bushy-tailed critters from dining on bird seed. The video shows scene after scene of squirrels being twirled off feeders. The cruelty! After my third viewing of the video, I had to stop watching.
quote from Mark at BoingBoing — Need one of these too.
All-in-all, however, CL-Markdown is feeling pretty stable.
unClog
