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Christopher Allbritton has written a remembrance of aid worker Marla Ruzicka, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq on April 16.

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There’s a big gaping hole in my experience when it comes to software engineering, and that’s coping with scalability issues. I suspect that this is true for many software engineers. I’ve written lots of applications and seen them deployed, but only rarely have I run into problems with scalability, and most of those were trivial [...]

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Don Park notes that integrating the Adobe product line with the Macromedia product line is liable to be a bear for engineering reasons. Update: I’m willing to give the last word on this to Joe Gregorio.

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Slate’s Robert Wright explains why liberals should read Thomas Friedman’s new book on globalization:

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blockquote> If the left is to develop a rival narrative, it will have to honestly address the realities of both globalization and terrorism. Friedman’s book portrays both acutely

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Let’s say that as part of my job, I sent a report to my boss every week charting my progress. What would my boss say if, after a couple of weeks of bad reports, I decided to just stop sending the report? Well, the State Department has decided to stop publishing its annual report [...]

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This weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Wake County Democratic Party as a delegate. The main purpose of the meeting was to elect new county officers and select representatives for the Congressional district meetings and various planning boards, and to go over a bunch of resolutions that make up a quasi-platform. Democrats in Wake [...]

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Max Sawicky does a great job of demolishing some commonly held misconceptions about the estate tax. Update: Aside from the effect on the federal budget, eliminating the estate tax is expected to result in 12% less charitable giving in this country.

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Pete Prodoehl has seen some even fancier ASCII banners in his spam.

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Whenever Jon Steward announces a segment from comedian Lewis Black on The Daily Show, he says, “When a news story falls through the cracks, our own Lewis Black catches it.” That would be my introduction to Eric Umansky’s weblog. Umansky has written Today’s Papers for Slate intermittently over the years, and does a fine job [...]

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Back in the pre-Web days, heck, in the pre-WYSIWYG word processing days, a common way to make big type was the Unix banner program (here’s a link to the man page). In these days of HTML, HTML email, and Microsoft Word, the banner program has fallen into disuse, a relic of the moldy ASCII past. [...]

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