Although I know that the first priority still has to be aid, I'm having a hard time keeping the bile down at the government response. Any disaster will involve chaos and bungled plans, but concentrating on preparations for civil emergencies, including the possibility of evacuating a major city, is supposed …

Given the sudden spontaneous emergence of "Gee, this doesn't have anything to do with anything, but have you thought about how helpful query statements are?" posts going around, I think Friday, September 16 1:00 PM- 2:30 PM Room: 152/153 (Hall F) is going to be the most …

After an initial sweep to clear the spam and no-further-reading-required blog posts, I've got 92 emails in my Inbox and 193 posts in my RSS folder after ten days on the road. Getting to zero email bounce (ZEB) looks to be a lot easier since the next action on individual …

Just in (to Hawaii) from the East Coast. In the past few years, my left knee has become excruciating on long flights from fluid accumulating due to a combination of long periods of sitting erect and (perhaps) lower air pressure. Yesterday, I wrapped my knee in an ace bandage (not …

My friend the Art Historian tells me that Kodak has announced that they will cease manufacture of slide carrousels, much to the chagrin of thousands of museums and colleges. He also says that there is a multimillion-dollar market for a presentation program that can show, side-by-side, two randomly-accessed images (i …

My latest article for DevX shows how to add ink annotations to photos, both on the image itself and within the EXIF metadata headers.

The WMI Code Creator freeware tool is an absolute godsend for anyone trying to plumb the depths of WMI. It allows for interactive exploration of all the namespaces on your computer and even generates C#, VB, or VBScript code to retrieve the value or attach to the events you find …

Inspired by Edi Weitz' solution to Einstein's Riddle in Common Lisp (via O'Reilly Radar), I used Andy Chun's NSolver constraint programming library to solve the program using .NET.

Here's a sense of what C# / NSolver looks like:

//The green house's owner drinks coffee
>Post(greenHouse.Eq(coffee));
//The person who …

Two-step (geotags in the HTML)

::: {style="display:none" geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wsg84_pos#"} 19.423791 -155.91163 :::

Dan Gillmor wonders if there's an effective way to battle scam e-mails. Here's a thought: banks, eBay, CC companies, etc. provide a Web site or Web Service that provides an array of fake userids and passwords that are identified in their back end as “fraudulent.”

• A savvy person receiving a …