James A. Robertson tries to explain “the problem with Wikis”:http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3228889836
bq. People like rich client software. People tend to not like basic editing tools – which is what Wikis use. Combine a Wiki with decent posting tools, and I bet you would see more collaboration.
I just had to do this entry with “MT-Textile”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php markup, obviously. :-)
Tim Bray: On the Goodness of Unicode
Also, a cool Unicode Converter, which appears to be written in Javascript. I think Javascript in current browsers is going to be a good solution for handling international character data (my personal problem is mixing Hebrew and European characters).
Thanks to a discussion on Barbelith I found on LinkMachineGo, I discovered that two comics characters, Mr. Six in The Invisibles and Jason Wyngrade of the Hellfire Club (Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s revised take on Mastermind, from the X-Men storyline that lead into the Dark Pheonix story), are actually based on actor Peter Wyngrade, who played a supervillain running a Hellfire Club in an episode of The Avengers TV series (“A Touch of Brimstone“); In that episode he turned Emma Peel into a “Queen of Sin”, with a fetish outfit (spikey collar, corset, boots) very similar to Jean Grey’s “Black Queen” identity.
However, Jason Wyngrade’s look, with the mustache and sideburns, as well as his first name, came from the character Jason King which Wyngrade played in a TV series called Department S and a later series of spin-offs. Grant Morrison’s Mister Six in The Invisibles is more simply derived directly from Jason King. Austin Powers probably owes a greater debt to Jason King than to most other sources.
Paul Graham, The Hundred-Year Language
Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they’re reusable because they’re language, whether they’re written in an object-oriented style or not.
I think that comment jibes with my experience; objects are useful for particular problem-domains, but divide-and-conquer, building up a set of tools (functions) that each handles a little bit of the problem and putting them together in a much simpler framework – this is useful anywhere.
Microsoft’s Glossary of Computer Terms in Hebrew. Pity the link of the first letter of the Hebrew breaks the word.