LookIt

Walking the half-centrury

People notice round numbers, particularly for events. They're not all that big for me, but I can't help but notice.

Three years ago, I turned 47. I still wish I could get Sheriff John to sing at my party today....

Update:Some people took pictures at the party, here and here.

Killing children with unintended consequences

An article this morning in the San Jose Mercury shows a horrible side-effect of safety laws.

As a result of a very few but very horrific air-bag accidents that killed babies in car seats on the front passenger seat, it is the law that requires that they be seated in back. The unhappy result is that a whole lot more babies die from being forgotten by fatigued parents in hot cars than ever were at risk from air bags.

The article says that there will be some new devices to help remind parents when they are about to leave their kids in a hot car. I doubt that those devices will be mandatory (and I'm not sure they should be). Even if the devices are widely publicized, I doubt the additional babies killed by being forgotten in the heat will drop below what would have been expected as babies killed by airbags.

Linux on CDs and DVDs

If you don't want to download giant Linux distros (well, giant by old standards...), or you get tired of burning what you have downloaded, these folks look like they are the simplest and fastest way to get CDs and DVDs. Heck, they'll even ship you a new 300 Gig drive crammed with everything conceivable.

Responsibility in toy-making

This is getting tiresome. "Senators ask if China toys should be detained". A better question would be whether or not all Mattel / Fisher-Price toys should be detained. It is Fisher-Price's responsibility to keep lead out of the mouths of the children who play with their toys. The fact that Fisher-Price has chosen not to test for lead content either in the toy factories, or even at the ports where the toys are exported to the US, shows that Fisher-Price is choosing to reduce toy costs by delayed testing after the toys are already sold. Testing for lead in paint does not take four months; the toys could easily have been tested before they were sent to stores.

The Chinese manufacturers are partially responsible for this debacle (they know that toys were supposed to be lead-free), but Fisher-Price is more responsible because they waited until months after the toys were in the stores (and kids' mouths) to even do their testing.

Update: OK, this kind of honesty makes me feel better, even if it is a few months too late.

Financial news over Atom

Tim Bray thinks about digitally-signed financial news in Atom. Then, Bill de hÓra sharpens the thought in a way that I agree with (sign it, don't make the integrity checking reliant on hop-by-hop secure transport). But Bill worries about bit rot and signatures: "...though I suspect aggregator chains will result in altered signed data while leaving the signature as-is, a kind of syndication entropy that will take a few years to clean out."

I propose an easy fix: an new atom:link relation of "signed-original". This is to prevent overloading "self", although you could use "self" if you squint a bit. The content at the given URI might or might not match the content you have in your hand, but a computer can tell you what the differences are and maybe even guess if the changes are semantically significant. For that matter, "signed-original" could even be used when the Atom entry itself was not signed.

There's no need to start moving this through the standards process until we have a bunch of Atom readers who can validate signatures and, more importantly, give useful messages when a signature is invalid. Once that is there, signing Atom for financial news seems like a slam dunk application.