Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » February

What misanthropist thought it would be a good idea to put 44th Road, 44th Drive, and 44th Avenue in the same borough? And not only that, but put them one block away from each other running parallel? It’s amazing anyone ever gets their mail in this borough.

Some weirdness at Amazon this morning. The search boxes appear to have vanished from the top of the page and the sidebars. One is still hiding way down at the bottom of the page. This is a very bad change since site-specific search is one of the primary ways users navigate Amazon. I’m not sure if this is a temporary glitch or a rare example of bad Amazon design. Usually Amazon is one of the more usable and intelligently designed sites, so this comes as a bit of a shock.
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A lot of old fogies are getting bent out of shape over the idea that 20 or 30 years from now today’s teenagers are going to get hammered by random screeds and bad dating habits they posted on blogs or MySpace. Can I chime in and say I really don’t think it’s all that big a deal? By the time any of this becomes relevant, the electorate will have matured enough that they really don’t care about this.
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Either Silicon Valley is declining in importance or New York City is or both. Used to be there were flights between the two every couple of hours. However, I just made my reservations to fly out for SD West and couldn’t get a direct flight out until 5:00 in the afternoon. There was one flight that left at 5:30 A.M., changed planes in Houston, and got there by noon. Otherwise, the earliest I could arrive was 5:00 in the afternoon.

Oh well, at least there’s still a direct red-eye home Friday night. (For a couple of years there wasn’t even that.)

Last night I was at the Silver Swan for Extreme Tuesday NYC, when I noticed on the menu “Wild Canadian Muscovy Duck”. Methinks someone embellished the menu a little too much. Muscovy Duck is a South American species. While Muscovies are commonly raised on farms, and escaped birds do appear regularly at least as far north as New York, I very much doubt anyone in Canada is hunting them. If they are, they’re doing it in city parks. Either these birds weren’t wild, or they weren’t Muscovies.

P.S. I had the beef.

Don’t you just love students who send you their homework problems in the hopes that you’ll do it for them? Here’s the latest example I’ve gotten:

Often in reading an article, a book or a document one comes across a word whose meaning is not known to the reader. This problem can be overcome by providing an on-line dictionary so that a reader could look up the meaning of a word. In order to provide help with reading, you are asked to develop a Java Applet with the following GUI interface:

Labels Text Boxes
Word typed Text box A
Word meaning Text box B

Once a user types a word in text box A and presses return, the meaning of the word is displayed in text box B (provided that word exists in the dictionary), otherwise, the message “word not known” appears in Text Box B. Notice that both text boxes are preceded by a label. For the purpose of testing, it is expected that the developed Applet is able to cope with 100 or more English words

That’s actually not a bad problem: takes in applets, GUI widgets, event handlers, data structures, and possibly network communication (if the dictionary is stored remotely). However it’s not too complex to implement in a week. I’ll have to remember it for my own classes.

In the meantime, if any teacher recognizes this as their own assignment and wants to know where I got it, drop me a line. :-)