Googling “Microsoft Word COM API” is apparently the wrong search string, because the first link is Joel on Software. I like Joel’s writing, especially his older stuff, in which he said a lot of interesting things about the interaction of business and programmers, and was endearing naive about programming languages. This led me to an article from 2000 that analyses Amazon’s success and then predicts that Amazon will be eventually be faced with competition enabled by two technologies: wallets and reputation management.

Except that Amazon now *provides* online wallets and reputation management. I trust the Amazon name more than e-bay/half.com, so I do most of my used shopping there, in addition to the new items. Amazon is* not stupid; they will likely outlast the obsolescence of physical media as well.

Oh, and wordsworth.com is dead now. So Joel was right.

*Or would you prefer “Amazon are not stupid” ? British collectives are always plural but American collectives are plural only if the form of the word is plural. The Miami Heat plays the Chicago Bulls, but the Chicago Bulls play the Miami Heat.

Well, I am now recovering from that cold, and I have a few announcements. First, since my blog software is only mailing me when *I* make a comment, and since I haven’t gotten any spam comments after turning off trackbacks, I’m not moderating comments any more.

Second, this sociolinguistics assignment is looking rougher by the minute. I have the choice of a 3-5 page paper on “English as Germanic Language? #t or #f?” or “Linguists’ Most Dangerous Myth", in which I comment on a paper that says creoles aren’t special. Of course creoles *are* special in that they are known examples of young languages, and they also happen to have a small collection of Indo-European languages as one parent. But this paper is serious mush. It’s like the author doesn’t want to come right out and call other linguists racist pigs so he wraps the insult in a series of big words*. For example:

In conclusion, postcolonial linguistics – with its scientific results and its
reflexive meditations about, and criticisms of, certain (mis)practices in Creole
studies – draws attention to the sociohistorical determinants and sociological
consequences of metalinguistic attitudes in, and outside, linguistic research.
Such results will, one must hope, help improve the quality of life of Creole
speakers in at least two ways, one “theoretical,” the other “applied”.

In other words, this paper raises a bunch of “promblems” with other peoples’ statements but doesn’t provide any evidence that they are wrong**. Instead it analyses their “attitudes” and (mis)practises. I don’t feel safe commenting on this paper for 3-5 pages so it looks like I’ll be opining on English history instead. Like I’m qualified to do that.

2.5th, I’m reading the pseudo-code in Mark Ellison’s thesis “Machine Learning of Phonological Structure” and it’s basically just Python without colons. Is that allowed? It sure is easy to read. I guess it probably isn’t Python since it was written in 1992 and I don’t think Python was that popular back then.

Third, arc doesn’t look that impressive–it’s basically Scheme with a bunch of the standard undefined, plus a lot of utilities predefined. Of course it’s an early alpha, but it’s been that way for *seven years*. Its main contribution so far is to get a lot of people interested in Lisp. If it becomes popular in a worse-is-better way then it has the potential to improve. Its philosophy is similar to Perl (at least relative to the other Lisps out there), so things could get interesting over time.

But seriously, arc right now is no bigger than Swindle, the port of the Common Lisp Object System. I’ve used that for a couple of years already. I think it is probably less buggy.

*Seriously, he quotes Chomsky at the end and CHOMSKY sounds easy-to-understand after this guy.
**Most of the statements *look* wrong but without evidence who knows? I’m not a creolist so I don’t know the evidence.

I don’t like web design. Yet here I am at it again. I hope this doesn’t last long. So I’m going to write about my frustrations.

People still use tables for layout, probably because IE 7 still doesn’t interpret divs the way I expect them to, causing a single line break instead or two or three. Apparently they are afraid to change because that would “break the web". I look forward to the day that IE is irrelevant.

Also, the only browser with pretty small-caps is Safari. The others don’t have enough size difference between real caps and small caps.

I read this week a book called “The Case for Christ". It’s sort of like Josh McDowell’s “Evidence that Demands a Verdict", without turning into a reference volume like that work–the author is a journalist and knows how to write chapters that flow. The book is presented as a series of interviews with experts, giving it a Socratic flavour, which is always how I imagine my internal debates going anyway. This also means that the author gets the really hard questions out fast and is willing to show when the experts don’t agree with popular thought on either side of the religious divide.

The book was useful to me; sometimes I don’t feel very much like being a Christian. I could make a pretty good nihilist sometimes. But given the choice between no god and one God, the evidence points clearly to one God named Jesus. So I stick with the evidence.

Do you ever get the urge to flip off school busses? I know I do. They are the most visible symbol of our school system in much the same way that gas prices are the most visible symbol of our economy. I guess most people don’t like our school system much, but I am particularly hostile because of my home school background and libertarian leanings. It’s a combination of instinctual and principled dislike.

By the way, I didn’t really know that I leaned libertarian until I started arguing with my parents this Christmas break. The news talks about nothing but the primaries so we talked about politics a bit. Not that any of us believe in politics much, but our views do differ in places. The funniest person was my sister, who is a bona fide liberal, but claims to be a libertarian.