I was too busy wrestling with WTL yesterday to post anything.  WTL is Microsoft's unsupported C++ template library for Win32 UI.  Its just like ATL but seriously undocumented.  Strangely enough, WTL is popular.  Popular enough for Microsoft to keep updating it in step with ATL despite several efforts to drop it.  Anyway, I was busy yesterday trying to coerce a dialog to auto-layout on resize.  Usually, this is pretty simple stuff, but the dialog just happened to be a wizard which loads in several forms into same dialog.  I wasn't expecting this much trouble over resize, but I had to fight through it.

It was not unlike our war with Iraq which seems to be going well enough for an armor column to go for a joyride through Baghdad.  Who knows if anyone will ever notice, let alone use, that tiny sizebox on the bottom right and appreciate the gruntworks this highly paid consultant went through to get it working.  Sometimes I spend days fiddling with architectures and diagrams.  Other times, I am huddled in a corner like a clockmaker and grunts all day.  Yeah, its difficult to explain to my son what I do for a living.

SARS reminds me of the story about how a butterfly fluttering its wings in Peking could cause tornados in Kansas.  Just yesterday, a jet landed in San Jose with five passengers suffering from SARS like symtoms.  That's just 30 miles from where I live.  One of my clients whom I visit frequently is just five miles from the airport.  Stil, I am not worried.  What worries me is my trip to Toronto three weeks from now.  Out in the open, I have confidence in my ability to avoid SARS.  But on airplanes, I have to share the air with hundreds of people.  I wonder how effective those masks are.  If SARS can be transmitted by air, maybe I should wear one of those wholebody condom suits.

Why is it that China seems to be exporting new types of colds and flus every year?  Last year, it was a nose-and-throat-without-fever cold that lasted a full month of coughing and sneezing.  This year, it's SARS.  If things get any worse, I wouldn't mind seeing an Iron-Curtain raised around China if that will keep these killer colds at bay.  If Bush can start a war because he is impatient, shouldn't I be able to quarantine a few billions because I am paranoid?  Just kidding, folks.

They are not exactly horses, but who cares?  Check out the betting action on Saddam and Bin Laden.

Looks like Saddam is going to use chemical weapons pretty soon.  I don't know what we can do in response though.  Use tactical nukes on those Iraqi divisions?  I guess we'll have to do something that drastic to prevent copycats.  What about Baghdad though?

Yesterday, I was poking around Documentum website to see what is involved in developing software for Documentum.  There was almost nothing to download other than some fluffy whitepapers.  Unless I am mistaken, one must become a Documentum Partner to develop anything that works with Documentum.  What does it take to become a Documentum Partner?  $10K per year.  Ouch.  Documentum is an exclusive club of sort.  A competitor smart enough to leverage the open source community should be able to run circles around Documentum.

I don't know exactly what causes IE Favorites sort parts of itself out of the blue, but its driving me nuts.  I usually organize them in the order of my visits.  News aggregator is great, but its doesn't feel like a daily stroll through the neighborhood.  So I start with Scripting News and moving down the list in the order of "must read" to "occasionally interesting".  Except now, its A to Z.  Argh!.  I am this close to pausing all other projects and redoing Favorites the way I like it.

John Gruber's rant about anti-aliasing is misguided in my view.  He has his preference, others have theirs.  I want even small fonts anti-aliased because when you mix anti-aliased text with non anti-aliased text, uneven sharpness really bother my eyes.  Let people decide for themselves what they want to see.

I wonder how they found and fixed the the software 'glitch' that killed a RAF Tornado?  Also, could the same bug have also caused a Patriot site to lock its radar on a F-16?  How do they handle software update in the field with a war raging around them?  I get this image of marines running around in a battlefield with floppy disks.

Say hello to K-Dog, an awesome member of American military might.  Unlike some of our troops, he hasn't got a tatoo yet.  The famous chickens of our KFC unit I previously mentioned were decimated before the war unfortunately, but courageous flocks of American pigeons are making up for the loss.   Lets hope they return to our city parks safely after war. <g>

 

Amazon's interest in web-ad patent is not surprising.  After all, they have a goldmine for ads.  When a person buys a book, that person is making a significant investment of his/her time as well as money.  If I buy a book on stock options, you can be sure that I am interested in stocks and likely to respond to stock related ads.  So ad space on some of Amazon webpages are of high value.  Since ad space value can differ across pages, auction model works best.