Random thoughts of a Saturday night
So it's a Saturday night, and I know I should have posted lots of stuff to the blog that I never got around to doing. Time for a brain dump.
As some of you may know, I'm the sessions chair of MacHack. Sessions planning is going very well. If you're a Mac programmer, you really need to register. We're going to get the paper and sessions list up in the next few days. We've got a great lineup.
I saw Life Is Beautiful tonight. The movie is fantastic. I remember reading about how some people thought that it was inappropriate to use the Holocaust as the basis for a comedy. The response here is that this movie isn't about the Holocaust, but uses it as a plot anchor to bring the story and theme into focus. As long as the movie isn't disrespectful of the history (which Life Is Beautiful most certainly is not) I don't see the problem.
In my mailbox: ACM Queue Magazine. Another computing magazine. In fact, they acknowledge this in their editorial column: "Does the world really need another computing magazine?" It's what I'm calling "theory-on-practice". For example, the theme of the first issue is "web services". There are interviews with prominent people, some overviews of practice, and a few snippets of code, but no deep, involved look at how it turns out to be in reality. An interesting read, nonetheless. This might replace my subscription to Dr. Dobbs (which I've found to be unfortunately not worth maintaining).
Alan Keyes: "The Role of Religion and Faith in the Public Arena" was his talk at Wayne State last Tuesday. His main point was that the basic concept at the foundation of the United States, that all men are created equal, was explicitly declared to have been derived from religious principles. He's a fascinating speaker.