Chris Buckley Loses Job

From the Christian Science Monitor...

"Buckley, the son of famed conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.,
this week lost his job as a columnist at the National Review, the
magazine his father started, over a blog he posted on the Daily Beast
endorsing Barack Obama.

(The blog's title: "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama.)

Buckley offered to resign when, as he put it, "It became clear that
National Review had a serious problem on its hands." The magazine
accepted his resignation.

Today, in a followup post on the Daily Beast, Buckley says his
original post has prompted a "tsunami" of response.

Response at the Daily Beast has been running 7-to-1 in favor of his
post, says Buckley. But at the National Review Online, according to
Buckley, "That's been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against.".

"In fact," he adds, "the only thing the Right can't quite decide is
whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and
shot. Lethal injection would be too painless."

Yet despite the charges of patricide being hurled at Buckley
(literally), he points out that, "My father in his day endorsed a
number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K.
Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was
John Kenneth Galbraith…. He liked to mix it up.""

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/10/16/christopher-buckley-and-the-oddities-of-truth/

Are politics in the US divided forever?

Agile Means Truthfullness

"true agility is really less about process and more about principle"

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/agile-truthfulness

A Bit of History - Smalltalk and Java Edition

Interesting story behind IBM's VisualAge for Smalltalk and Java, and
what became Eclipse from Rick DeNatale...

http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/articles/2008/10/15/will-it-go-round-in-circles

via Randall Schwartz...

http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/library/post/rick-denatale-fills-in-some-looping-smalltalk-history.html?_c=feed-atom

The Big Xfer

Gotta love McCain's rhetoric about Obama's tax plan as a
"redistribution of wealth".

Um, John - have you heard about this Wall Street bailout thing? Buy a paper!

Oh, and please, "Joe the Plumber" - apparently your plant is also a
racist. "tap dancing better than Sammy Davis Jr."???

What did Dylan write about getting out of the new world if you can't
lend a hand?

QOTD

"Planning to use this Friday's poker winnings to buy Iceland"

http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/statuses/961718837

From Powells

Two nice finds browsing the shelves at Powell's over the weekend.

• "Concurrent Euclid, The Unix System, and Tunis", (1983) - $5.50, used, very good condition.
• "Modeling Reality - How Computers Mirror Life", (2004) - $17.98, new.

More as I read through them.

The Development of Chez Scheme

Kent Dybvig...

"Chez Scheme Version 1 was completed in 1984 and released in 1985. I am amazed to find myself working on it still more than two decades later. If asked in 1985 to look forward twenty years, I would have said that Chez Scheme and Scheme itself would have long since found their way into the bit bucket of history. After all, the oldest languages then were no older than Scheme is today, and many languages had come and gone. Many languages have come and gone since, but Scheme, with its roots in the circa-1960 Lisp, lives on. The user community now is larger and more diverse than
ever, so with any luck, the language and implementation will last at least another two decades. It's a scary thought."

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

I started using various Lisps in school, but my first taste of Common Lisp was the one being developed by Data General in 1984 in DG's RTP facility. I was up in Masachusetts, but a few of us there started prototyping CAD applications with DG's Common Lisp. And we went to AAAI and the L&FP conference in Austin in 1984 right when AI was booming and the DG compiler folks were debuting their CL.

Around that time I learned from the RPT folks that their Common Lisp was derived from Dybvig's PhD work on Scheme n RTP at UNC. At which point I wondered how great it would have been to preserve Scheme in the system as well as CL.

The paper above from Dybvig explains more of what was happening, especially from his POV. Interesting reading from back in the early days of Scheme.

Days of yore.

Web Velocity

Web Velocity is looking nice.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Web_Velocity_Progress&entry=3401361244

Dynamic Languages on the the Desktop

Ted's looking for examples of popular (for some definition of popular)
desktop applications written in dynamic languages...

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/10/10/retry-dynamic-languages-for-desktop-apps/

Certainly emacs.

I've used several Smalltalk desktop applications over the years. The
one perhaps most in the mainstream would be James Robertson's Bottom
Feeder.

There are a number of Adobe AIR applications available now.

Would this also include AJAX applications like gmail? Certainly gmail
is popular.

Oregon State - We're Number 17

Oregon State is #17 in power rating...

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt08.htm

...and they beat power rated #2, USC.

Shaping up to another good year. But oh, what could have been, had
they won at Stanford and Utah.

WiMax Will Be Great - Can We Get It Now Please

Still waiting on WiMax in Portland - still by the end on the year, said hopefully. Meanwhile Jason Hiner of TechRepublic...

What Sprint has launched in Baltimore is the first U.S. deployment of Mobile WiMAX, based on the 802.16e protocol. This version of WiMAX can be used for stationary modems, but it can also provide roaming Internet access across large areas and at highway driving speeds. So if you have Xohm WiMAX as your Internet service in Baltimore, your connection is good not only in your office or your house but anywhere you go in the city and throughout most of the metro area. It’s like combining your Cable Internet account with a 3G broadband account.

The limitation, of course, is that it is only in Baltimore for now. However, Sprint is preparing to launch its next two Xohm networks in Washington, D.C. and Chicago before the end of the year. Then it plans to light up Philadelphia, Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island. Meanwhile, Clearwire is prepping Mobile WiMAX networks in Portland, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Sprint and Clearwire networks will interoperate...

Ultimately, both Sprint and Intel want to replace the current cellular model with a platform that is open to devices and applications and ties into all of the development that is already happening on the Internet.

Now, to start, Sprint’s first Xohm network in Baltimore does not expressly try go after telephony. That would be silly to do since the coverage is so limited at this point. However, I have seen prototype WiMAX phones from Motorola and others, and there are even reports that the Google G1 will eventually include a WiMAX chip or be released in a WiMAX version.