October 2003 Archives
I found a great Mac RSS reader: NetNewsWire. I was using SlashDock, but NNW is a lot nicer. I like how you can add groups and how it keeps track of items you've read. For now, I'm using the Lite version, but I may upgrade to the full version. It can even be used to add blog entries!
The president of Ambrosia software has written an article on the economics of Open Source Software. I am leaning towards his line of thinking and I agree with many of his points. This goes along well with a previous entry of mine regarding what a successful open source project is. Open source isn't the correct path for many applications, and proprietary software isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
As a life long Chicagoan, I still do not understand White Sox Fans, and probably never will. They take it personal when the Cubs win. One even said he "could not have come up with a better story", in regards to the 8th inning collapse, fan and all. And you should hear the tone of their voice and the gleem in their eye when they talk about it. It's eerie. I don't think this is a small minority, either. The vast majority of Sox fans were wishing and hoping for a Cubs loss. And that's what I don't understand. If the White Sox were playing for the AL championship, the majority of Cubs fans would root for the Sox. I know I would. I was even rooting for them at the end of this year, before their big choke. But after listening to these people, I may just give up. They're so filled with jelousy, it's just sad.
I've lost a lot of respect for Joel Splosky after his rant about exceptions. Sorry, he's just wrong. After using Java's exceptions, I can't imagine going back to checking return codes. That gives me bad memories of writing Unix socket code in C. Having to check return codes everywhere is really a PITA and makes code very unreadable. I usually agree with a lot of what Joel says, or at least respsect his opinion, so it's rather disappointing to see him take such a bad position.
[Update] Ned Batchelder has an awesome writeup discussing the issue in more depth.
I'm sure that poor fan who "stole" Moises Alou's foul ball catch is going to get a lot of flak. But let's face it, the Cubs themselves are to blame. Sure, it was 3-0 at the time, and would have given 'em two outs. But the Alex Gonzalez error and horrible pitching were far more damaging. The fan didn't let up 8 runs, the Cubs did. Gonzalez could have ended the inning, or at the very least, got the second out still leaving the Cubs ahead. And then intentially walking the bases loaded twice turned out to be a bad call in hind sight. Call it a curse, or a major league choke, the Cubs should have never been down by 5 runs going into the eighth. Hopefully Kerry Wood brings his best stuff to Game 7, because it's gonna be hard to come back from such a devastating loss.
[Update] Sure enough, the Sun Times, Tribune, and every other Chicago newspaper had the fan on the front page. C'mon! What about Gonzalez? And in the articles, there were quotes of people wanting to beat the fan to death. That's just disgusting. Every fan in his position would have done the same. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. I'm almost embarrassed to be a Cubs fan.
Ok, so most TV news viewers are misinformed, according to a recent study, but Fox viewers seem worse than the rest. It also seems that The Daily Show is conspicously missing from the poll as a primary news source.
