In the dot-com days, my work led to three, count 'em, three patent applications. In all cases, I'd signed over the IP rights to the company. Both companies went bankrupt before the patents went through, leaving me to understand that the IP is now the property of creditors, who were …

Microsoft is running a contest called "Made in Express" that will pay out \$10,000 to the best application written in Microsoft's entry-level version of Visual Studio. The proposals chosen as finalists are, to put it kindly, ambitious: an AI psychotherapist (assuming that the person doesn't just cut-and-paste Eliza); an …

"Vista has a beautiful face but poor bone structure. She's lovely now, but I'm worried about how she'll age."

That's too vivid to slip into a column that uses another metaphor throughout. Darn it.

Does anyone know Patrick Logan's email (patricklogan.blogspot.com)? If so, can you forward a note to him that I want to reference this post in a column and need his title.

::: {.Section1} The first issue of SIGEVOlution, the newsletter of SIGEVO, the ACM Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, is now available for you to download. Via http://feeds.feedburner.com/illigal?m=493

Obviously, if you’re interested in the subject matter, it’s a good read. It …

Living in Hawaii makes you aware of the shortcomings of the USPS. I received a Christmas present on April 17 (and yes, it was sent in December). A few weeks ago, we Express Mailed some x-rays to Oahu, a distance of about 80 miles as the sooty shearwater flies. It …

::: {.Section1} Via a comment by Gregg Irwin, here's a REBOL-based control language \< ?xml:namespace prefix = o />for Excel by Robert Muench. (Wow, REBOL: There's a blast from the past!). Sample code:

goto cell "B6"  
change to "Testing"  
select "B7"  
set to "=B4 \* B5"  
select "A5:A9"  
change to "=\$B\$5 …

What with all the talk about language directions, I was thinking about a hobbyhorse of mine that spreadsheets are proven to be something that a lot of people "get" and that it behooves language designers to pay attention to them. Usually, I speculate about a spreadsheet-like development environment, but in …

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We received a letter on the SD Times reflector with lines such as "you guys mindlessly regurgitating the marketing hype of the self-congratulatory X committees....X is essentially nothing but a tacit admission...that the previous 4 versions of the spec were nothing but an incredibly expensive series of mistakes …