Tag Archives: news

Black Monday for tech workers (??)

Posted on January 5, 2009 by David Megginson

I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies. Just a single layoff affects dozens of people: the person who’s let go the person’s family the managers who have to do the firing … Continue reading →

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Good choice (I think)

Posted on December 12, 2008 by David Megginson

The U.S. Senate made the right choice rejecting the auto industry bailout. This isn’t about class warfare: it doesn’t bother me that the CEOs took their bizjets from Detroit to Washington (CEOs take private jets so that they have more … Continue reading →

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Banking: blame and beliefs

Posted on October 14, 2008 by David Megginson

The world banking meltdown is a lot like the Christian Bible: no matter what your personal beliefs, you can find something there, somewhere, to back them up. Too little regulation? Lenders were able to use credit derivatives (such as collateralized … Continue reading →

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A political posting

Posted on March 29, 2008 by David Megginson

Late in 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, U.S. President John F. Kennedy asked Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for his opinion on how the U.S. should cope with escalating unrest in Vietnam. Peason: “Get out.” JFK: “That’s a … Continue reading →

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Delayed echo in the echo chamber

Posted on February 2, 2008 by David Megginson

Some people compare blogs (and mainstream media) to an echo chamber, constantly repeating and amplifying the same messages, but the echoes usually die out quickly. Not so, today, when I found this story on the planenews.com aviation news feed: 21 … Continue reading →

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Amazon SimpleDB (not very Codd-y)

Posted on December 14, 2007 by David Megginson

This might be of interest: Amazon SimpleDB Amazon’s announcement Dear AWS Developers, This is a short note to let a subset of our most active developers know about an upcoming limited beta of our newest web service: Amazon SimpleDB, which … Continue reading →

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Above par

Posted on September 21, 2007 by David Megginson

Today, around 12:30 pm EDT, the Canadian loonie was worth more than the US greenback for the first time in 31 years (CBC story). By contrast, the Canadian dollar hit a low of somewhere around US $0.63 in the late … Continue reading →

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Godwin's law goes mainstream

Posted on May 2, 2007 by David Megginson

Godwin’s Law has finally left the geekier corners of the net and gone mainstream: political opponents and the press are lambasting Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May for an immature and totally gratuitous Nazi reference. According to Godwin’s law, that … Continue reading →

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ReiserFS

Posted on January 9, 2007 by David Megginson

A number of years ago I was working on the scenery system for the open source FlightGear flight simulator. Due to the nature of geodata and the scenery building system, I ended up with tens of thousands of tiny files … Continue reading →

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Yahoo stands firm behind its search API

Posted on December 23, 2006 by David Megginson

Early in the week, I posted about the end of the Google search API, and speculated that — since everyone else tends to copy Google — it might be the start of a general trend away from open data APIs … Continue reading →

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