The Bumpus Principle

Novell’s Winston Bumpus promotes a simple sniff test for determining the relevance of an emerging standard: It saves you money, it makes you money, or it’s mandated by the government. Short and sweet, perfectly distilled, that phrase should be the standard. If the Bumpus Principle or a comparably simple equivalent were applied to every technology in place at every company, IT infrastructures would become much stronger. [via InfoWorld's Tom Yager]

HK fashion or pretension?

What would Hong Kong be without the obligatory Hello Kitty and Ultraman masks? [link via BWG]

An amusing list of responses to software bugs by programmers

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?"
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"
1. "It works on my machine."

Taming Lists

Excellent article on A List apart on use of CSS to Tame HTML Lists. Useful examples about building top, left side, and bread crumb navigation bars. Stuff I’ve done before but it’s always painful to get the little details right.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Will Be Based on Mozilla/Gecko!

It's a day late, but cute

Hong Kong, SAR

Hong Hong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

what's going on here?

SARS House Arrest in HK

Hong Kong looks to be on the edge of panic, trying to cope with this bug.

Hope that people obey the quarantines, and we can properly id this thing in the next couple of weeks. If we can contain it, stop the number of cases from ballooning over the next couple of weeks then the Medical Community can do their thing. Otherwise, Mask and gloves are going to be the fashion accessory of 2003!

Meanwhile Allergy season is starting up. The only good thing out of this is Elicia finds it easier to get a seat after sneezing!

One of the best uses of Flash I've seen in a long time.

Be sure to watch to the end. Alexis Trépanier's web site

Toronto Stuff

AccordionGuy mentions the family haunt in Chinatown, Rol San, otherwise known as fish lips. I'll have to keep my eye peeled for accordions.

Street traffic was quiet, only 40% busy, on Sunday.

Walking around Queen West (Queen & Eclid) we saw Glynis's new Response storefront, She thought we were brave to going to eat. Me, I wanted my Char Siu Bo.

Microwave tunnels?

The March 15th Economist (as I work my way though the backlog created by the weeks in Calgary) had a piece on the using of microwaves in the mineral extraction process, and the work of Sam Kingman of Nottingham University, rather that using grinding to breakup chucks of rock before separation of minerals/metal. A quick google search turned up more references, such as this : Microwaves in Mining, Engineering & Mining Journal.

Brain Fart: Could this technique be used to make mining and tunneling cheaper/faster? I envision beaming the microwaves ahead of the gouging machine, adjusting for the take of material being dug in. That made be think of tunneling for Horta’s ala classic Star Trek's “Devil in the Dark”

Nerdcore

Cory Doctorow has put up a hit from his latest usr/bin/god.
Looks tastily so far.

Heard from my Brother yesterday that he surived another round of purges at Nortel yesterday. althought they lost five (2 new jobs elsewhere in the company, and
three layoffs) people out of 18. For another quarter at least.