Too cool! Today’s Bizarro cartoon credits my stepbrother Seth Chabay for the gag.

Seeing a light blue Ford Anglia in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was a special treat for me, because we had one when I was about seven.

Too bad about the script, though.

In the trailer for The Two Towers, Arwen says “There is still hope”; cut to Aragorn. Is the pun intentional?

Lost Doctor Who show revived: the BBC is remaking Shada, an episode (by Douglas Adams) that was aborted by a strike in 1979.

Tony Woodlief quotes Murray Rothbard:

“Most classical liberal or laissez-faire activists have adopted, perhaps without much thoughtful consideration, a simple strategy that we may call ‘educationism.’ Roughly: We have arrived at the truth, but most people are still deluded believers in error; therefore, we must educate these people – via lectures, discussions, books, pamphlets, newspapers, or whatever – until they become converted to the correct point of view.”

They both apparently think this is pointless, and what libertarians ought to be doing is whatever it takes to get elected. But Woodlief, seemingly unaware of the irony, goes on ( . . more . . )

Rumor concerning Yahoogroups:

Attention: Owners & Moderators please read Important!!!
If you are on other groups, or are a moderator or owner of other groups, please crosspost this notice . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Someonehas been joining communities with the nickname YAHOO COMMUNITYMONITOR, and then posting the following:

Yahoo Group Managers have been receiving a few complaints about your group. I am required to join your site and monitor it for about one month. will not do anything to damage or ruin your site,I am only required to monitor it. The only thing required of you is to accept my application and make me a Manager of your group for the time I am there. If you cannot meet these requirements,Yahoo will have to shut your group down.

DO NOT!! make this person a manager! SHE/HE is a fake, and has been deleting groups once made a manager. BAN the member immediately. Please let other groups know about this problem.

Now, I’ve no idea if this is really going on, but it’s obvious that such a message would not come from someone genuinely sent by Yahoo.

Tangentially: I wish there were a convenient commercial alternative to Yahoogroups – something that would allow me to create a list with all the old Majordomo-style conveniences, for a small yearly fee, rather than being driven by advertising.

Joel [Spolsky] on Software – The Law of Leaky Abstractions

means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.

And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.

In Praise of Evolvable Systems: Why something as poorly designed as the Web became The Next Big Thing, and what that means for the future. (Thanks to Joel Levin for the link)