Archives for January 2003

The Education of Governor Ryan. Governor Ryan’s dramatic announcements that emptied his state’s death row were not the product of sudden desperation, but a gradual and painful re-education. [New York Times: Opinion]

Hearst Ranch deal. Hearst Ranch plan closer to approval.

This deal has the state paying between $100M & $150M for 82,000 acres (with 18 miles of coastline) with the Hearst Corp reserving rights to build 27 homes and an Inn. 

Not bad IMHO.

This is the land that surrounds the Hearst Castle.

The spirit of Orson Welles and Wm. Randolph Hearst haunt these lands.

[Google U.S. News] [Marc’s Voice]

Case resigns as AOL chairman. Steve Case will step down as chairman of AOL Time Warner in May, saying he wanted to avoid “distractions” at a critical time for the company. [CNET News.com]

Oh well, I guess it had to happen.  I wonder how long Miles will last?

There was a time when Steve Case was as famous as Bill Gates.  Then it all came crashing down.   He really pulled off a miracle and should go down as one of the most important people of the 1990’s.

I wonder who will take over as Chairman?

 

[Marc’s Voice]

Wanted: What’s His Name Again?. For U.S. intelligence agencies, the varied spellings of foreign names that sound similar make it difficult to maintain accurate terrorist watch lists. Name-matching technology is helping make sense of the alphabet soup. By Steve Mollman. [Wired News]

DBForm. Recently dbform has been appearing in my referer logs and I just had to have a look. Apparently it’s written by Tony Blair (yes really) – now you know what he does when he’s not solving Britain’s problems!

If you have been a Web Database Developer for even a short time you will realise that most of your work is creating web forms and most of those forms do basically one action: updating records in a single database table.

Having to completely rewrite code to do basically the same task for every form is not only annoying it’s a waste of time. You can copy and paste but in the long run it takes almost as much time to make sure that you removed all of the data from the previous form and adapted it to the new table. So what is the answer?

Well after several years as a Web Database Developer I knew what the answer was, create a Class to build the form based on a database table, I just never got around to doing it. Until now that is.

“tri” If you are looking for something more powerful, why not try phpLens (commercial product).

“zeldman.hc” [PHP Everywhere]

Maurice Gibb.

Sad news today, Bee Gee brother Maurice Gibb died early this morning. I’ve met all three brothers several times and am a fan. I put these guys right up there with the Kinks, Stones, Beatles. Of course you have to look a bit further than Night Fever to see the body of work.

Robin Gibb was in Europe promoting his solo CD and was planned to be on our radio show Feb. 21st. Although understandable if he doesn’t, I sure hope he still wants to come.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

Adam Medros: “I’m a grad student at Harvard Business School and I think the only blogger on campus.” [Scripting News]