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I made a startling discovery today. After hours of rationalizing, reasoning and thinking I came up with the following conclusion: Our dog doesn’t understand us because she only understands French. Our 12 year old puppy was born somewhere in Acadia, that’s that part of Nova Scotia where they still speak French.

This also explains why she doesn’t listen to me or my wife. Our dog prefers to drop her message at spots where she’s out of view. And most importantly, she eats with knife and fork. Yes. You heard that quite alright. Talking about table manners, she has a distinctive way of letting know she is in charge. Naturally, that is, after our cat has signed off for the day as the ‘Pet-Commander-in-Chief’.

So: from now on, it’s “je m’appelle Arthur, comment t’appelle-tu, mon petit cherie”? That is French for ‘Do you want a dogbone, Katy?’.

update: Make that Katie, instead of Katy

Compare this:

   “I can imagine them sitting at a coffee shop in San Francisco, an old seedy one on Van Ness, both needing a shave and a bath, quoting Trotsky and Marx to each other”

with this:

   “It is indescribable. They are no longer human beings, they are animals. This is no longer a humanitarian question, but a task for the surgeon. Here one has got to cut, and as radically as possible. ”

And then this:

   “People who interpret the world using only their own narrow cultural or local community as a frame reference, who make moral judgements based on the traditional values of their own community only, and who uncritically conform to the norms of their community, have a narrow perspective on social reality”

While reading the release notes for the latest version of Firebird (conveniently compiled by Alfons) I noticed the following:

   “You must also delete your old Mozilla Firebird directory rather than just overwriting the files there. Not doing so WILL result in problems and you should not file any bugs on Mozilla Firebird unless you’ve first done a clean install and tested on a new profile.”

From day one I always assumed that copying the files (and overwriting) was sufficient for a new install. I wonder if it really makes a difference: something I can’t imagine.

Secondly, I haven’t heard a yell from my wife since she has been using Firebird herself. I think it’s safe to say she’s a happy user. And while browsing, she feels a bit safer nowadays too

I used to compare programmers to mechanics but I wonder if that comparison is still valid. At work it is expected from me to solve problems. They are categorized too and I can tell the difference if they’re critical or not so critical. Sometimes I prioritize them and can even tell a time how long it will take to get it ironed out. I log my hours. I log my changes. I log everything so that at the end I can tell where I made my changes. And users are allowed to see in those comments too: they’re actually funny.

Nowadays, if you bring your car to a mechanic they cannot even tell you what might be wrong. They charge you too much dollars for an hour service and at the end of the day it’s your guess if they have really fixed things or that you have been ripped off. Not to mention the scarce looking bill and the ‘Thank you for doing business with us’. If it’s expected from me to give exact numbers when fixing things, why can’t they?

I have been thinking about a couple of ideas which I’d like to round up: more or less in a hobby-like matter. For some kind of reason, those ideas remind me of the two starmaps I made when I was 15. With the help of a book, lots of cardboard, plastic, knife, pencil, pens and scissors I managed to make a 60 by 60 cm moving starmap (or was that a meter?). Each single star with a respectable magnitude was carefully drawn. Each (northern hemisphere) constellation was carefully lined out. Not to mention the different M-systems. Since I was bored and apparently my brother liked the idea of possessing a giant starmap, I made another one specifically for him. I think it took me a week to finish each of them and they still should be hanging in one of the rooms of my parents’ house (if you read this Alfons: a picture of them would be appreciated). A remarkable achievement: the instructions for the moving part I found in a book, but the specific stars I looked up in encyclopedias (Winkler Prins) and other astronomical books.

By any chance: if you’re living in Nova Scotia, you may just as well take a look out the window and watch the snow. First of the season. Prepare thy shovels and salt.

Clay Shirky’s essay on the Semantic Web has drawn a lot of criticism from weblog luminaries. You know, the A-List type.

More interesting are the matters that had to be solved somewhere else. Over at work, I finally found out how to deal with business rules, let alone, how to carefully categorize them and seperate them from the actual code. Back in the days, I did not have a clue. Additionally: When computers do the math, and someone ends up choosing the wrong type of double or significant variables, you find out fast which one should have not been used if you discover rounding problems at your end. I praise my masters (that is, my Chemistry teachers) for showing me the way of handling rounding: that is at the end when you have to present the actual numbers. Decimals. Math. We eat them for lunch. By the penny.

And that very thing is far more interesting to discuss than the ‘Semantic Web’ stuff.

I watched Saving Private Lynch, which had its premiere tonight. It was bad. Bad. With a capital B. Embarrassing.

There are so many different versions of the story. To make things worse, private Lynch herself says that she can’t recall the complete story. Nor has she confirmed anything that is being shown in this made for TV movie.