Month: February 2002

GAO vs. White House over Enron: Bets, folks?

My wife: “This should be very interesting. Someone’s career is probably over.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, was named Walker v. Cheney. Walker is David M. Walker, the U.S. Comptroller General and head of the General Accounting Office of Congress. Cheney is Richard B. Cheney, the vice president and head of the administration’s energy task force, the focus of the litigation.

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Johnny Cash and NIN

New York Times, Johnny Cash: an American Original Returns. According to the article, Cash is recording his fourth album:

“The songs are coming from every direction,” Mr. Cash said of his forthcoming album. “I’ve written two or three new ones, and I recorded a Sting song called `I Hung My Head.’ I’ve recorded a Marty Robbins song called `Big Iron.’ I’m recording `The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ that Roberta Flack song. And I’m recording `Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails.”

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Mac racks? Research customers says please

Wired: Mac Cluster’s Last Stand?

“If Apple were to offer a scalable, high-density hardware solution, I would push hard for a platform switch,” said Patrick Gavin of the University of California at Santa Cruz Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering . “The PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to anything else out there in terms of power consumption versus processing power.”

It make sense that this point would come. Apple under the second coming of Steve Jobs has had a laserlike focus on the consumer and pro graphics markets. But they have other customer segments too. If nothing else, the reception that the guy demoing Mathematica at MacWorld got might convince them to pay attention to these genomics researchers. Then there’s the big BLAST story….

“On the Grid” gets a new meaning

CNET: “Grid computing luring mainstream backers.” There’s something appealing about this: if a guy with solar panels in California can put energy back on the grid and get credit for it, why can’t we develop some generic, organized way to share spare CPU cycles? A draft paper by IBM and Globus describes how this may mesh with web services.

Of course, Lisa told me about grid computing in September, but I’m just now picking up on it. <Insert wry joke about husbands not listening to wives here.>
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What I’ve been up to

It’s been quiet on the programming front. I’m getting smarter in Cocoa and AppleScript. Here’s a feature that’ll be coming in 1.0.3 – a News Item Department drop down list that syncs with your Manila blog.

Here’s where I am:

  • The RPC call works
  • I can basically parse the XML that gets passed back (though all the department names are lowercased and I’m not sure what’s up with the vertical bars around one department)
  • I can populate the dropdown
  • The above three steps are triggered temporarily from a button. I need to add UI to get the departments in the first place, cache them in the prefs file so I don’t have to hit the website every time, and add more UI to refresh the categories if they get out of sync.

So it’ll take a while longer for me to finish up. But I thought this would be the hard part and it’s done already. Now I have to figure out how to use some of these Cocoa functions to write a list into a plist file as an array. Dig we must…

Reading the entrails

Eric Norlin takes a stab at the current economic situation and doesn’t like what he sees:

I’ve been doing some thinking about the contraction in the commercial paper market and the possible ripple effects on any economic recovery…diagnosis: all of the predictions for the Q3 turn around are wrong. It’ll be at least Q4 and maybe Q1 of 03 before this ship really turns. This, of course, means the stock market will tread water until at the very least April — and more likely June.

Eric’s thesis, briefly, is that massive debt overhang problems is about to hit a generation of managers raised to believe that debt (commercial paper) is cheap, which will create totally unexpected liquidity crises (cash shortfalls) and cause another rash of bankruptcies. This is consistent with my Finance II class: the main place (other than taxes) that the Modigliani-Miller theorem breaks down is in the frictions created by large amounts of debt in the capital structure.

BTW, Eric, your site navigation leads something to be desired. I had to work really hard to find a permalink to that article.
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A note about department names

I’m still working on the issue, but it looks like if you name your News Item departments with spaces in them that you can get errors from AppleScript when parsing the resulting XML output from sitePrefs.get (“newsitem.departments”). I don’t know whether AppleScript isn’t parsing the XML correctly, or whether Manila is outputing malformed XML, but consider this a word to the wise.
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Tough economic times — except for us, of course

Interesting move on Sam Palmisano’s part: IBM President Palmisano Warns Of Tough Economic Times in 2002 (link to WSJ article, subscription probably required). The headline sounds like he’s warning about IBM’s business, but the article goes on to say “Mr. Palmisano urged resellers of competitors’ products to reconsider their business with those companies in light of upcoming changes that will affect the industry.” Sounds like Palmisano isn’ t above a little FUD.
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Small progress

Looking again at the Manila RPC spec, I see I’ve missed something that might enable populating a drop down list of news item categories. Comforting after I’ve hit so many walls with other feature implementations over the last few weeks. I’m now looking at “manila.sitePref.get” which allows retrieving named portions of site preferences. I can grab the department list using “newsitems.departments” as the preference name, but now I have to see how to parse the reply using AppleScript. Dig we must…