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Toyota is taking a pounding in the press for some highly visible quality issues that have surfaced over the last few months, requiring one of the largest vehicle recalls in the company’s history. Every company hits rough spots, and I have no doubt Toyota will do the right thing by its customers, and by itself. [...]

I hate Windows Vista, and in this post I’m going to tell you why. But before I do I want to say that I am a long-time admirer of Microsoft, most particularly in the way that they have managed to continually update their operating system while retaining backward compatibility with almost everything ever written for it. [...]

My kids sometimes wonder what it is about history that fascinates me so much, and I have almost no ability to provide an answer that satisfies. So instead I turn to demonstration. Every now and then I learn something that, once it sinks in, nearly takes my breath away, and my next thought is usually [...]

You may have been in a situation like this, or you may have known of a situation like this. A child is performing poorly in school. He or she misses assignments, pays little attention in class, and doesn’t do well on quizzes and tests. Naturally the quarterly grades reflect this. In between report cards the [...]

I struck out three times at the library this week. One was a Ben Bova novel about two brothers on opposite sides of the stem cell/cloning/immortality issue. It started pretty well, but then kept switching between first person protagonists in the first three chapters. I like the first person perspective, but I guess I don’t [...]

I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about the notion of completeness in programming. I think it’s a valuable concept because those of us who write software have a hard time defining what the word “done” means with respect to our product. The old saw about model railroads is that they are never finished, and [...]

The New York Times has an interesting article today on various efforts to search the “deep web”, including a project at Google (of course). The deep web is defined as all the information in web-connected databases, in contrast with all the information that is encoded in HTML on static pages. I’m using the Times’ descriptions, [...]

I’m sure you felt, as I did, that today was a surprisingly fine day to be out in the Pine Barrens. The weather was sunny and warm, a rarity for February even in this mild state. The roads were very wet. That’s probably because there is still a layer of frozen soil a foot or [...]

Everyone likes the AJAX client-server interaction model for websites. Using Asynchronous Javascript and XML the client browser can display a page and then issue requests for additional or updated data in the background. It’s very cool, and frameworks like Google Web Toolkit or AJAX extensions for ASP.NET have made it easier than ever to accomplish. [...]

Well, today is the day I removed Internet Explorer’s icon from my desktop. I have to admit that my capitalist principles were trembling a bit as I relegated the little ‘e’ in its orbit to the trash bin. Surely a well-run corporation can make a browser that is more complete, better tested, and more reliable [...]