I've been thinking about the bailouts a lot, lately. The more I do, the angrier I get.

Setting aside the argument of whether or not it was necessary to do, let's assume it was. I don't believe that but will accept it for the sake of this argument. Let's assume that, for instance, we had to cover all of those risks that AIG unscrupulously took upon themselves in order to keep the banking industry from collapsing. Why is it that we had to pay AIG for their poor judgment?

Why couldn't we have handled it more like FDIC, where we covered the payouts that AIG should have made up to a certain point. We could have bought up debt owed by AIG, protecting the banks from significant losses while still allowing AIG to drown. Instead, we just handed them a bunch of money and said "Hey! Great job, asshat's."

Giving diseased organizations like AIG money because they might cause other, slightly healthier organizations to fail is like saying "Oh look. I have an infection. I'd better pour some sugar in there to make sure the surrounding tissue stays fed."

I am so excited about my upcoming course on database agility. We've got a lot of great people signed up and I think it's going to be a really good discussion. I am really looking forward to it.

I keep hearing the term "intention-revealing names." I get the idea but I don't think that's the right term.

Intentions shouldn't be revealed by names - do you really care what I intended when I wrote something? I know that I don't care what I was thinking when I wrote something. No. Intentions are coupled to developers. They are too subjective to be tied to the name of a class or a method.

If anything, tests should be what reveals intention.

What is it we really want to convey with, say, a class name? I think we want to convey it's responsibilities. We want to tell other programmers what that class does. In short, we want to describe the value encapsulated by that class. So why not "value-revealing names," instead?

I don't know about you but I'm getting pretty tired of the "I or no I" debate. It's pretty silly, really. Would anyone even consider labeling an interface with an "I" on a platform other than Microsoft?

Consider this: If you are okay with an "I" at the beginning of your interface names, why not an "M" at the beginning of a method-name? Why not a "C" at the beginning of the name of a class or an "S" for a struct? Why not a "D" at the beginning of a delegate name? Why not include an identifier's visibility in its name?

The logical conclusion of this naming scheme yields something like the following.

public class PubCSomeClass
{
  private void PriMErrorMethod(object pU) // "p" is for "parameter"
  {
    if (PubPBag != null) { PubPBag(pU); }
  }

  public delegate PubDBag(object pU);

  public PubDBag PubPBag { get; set; }
}

Pretty stinky...

The argument in "favor" (if you can call it that) of an "I" at the beginning of an interface name is that Microsoft does it a lot of the time. The argument against is that it couples all of the clients of an interface to the fact that it is an interface.

There are those who call for us to rise up against religion and it is probably true that certitude of any kind is a destructive force. In the grand scheme of things, though, poor coding practices are probably more corrosive than religion will end up having been.

You can keep your invisible wizard who watches your every move. You can keep your notgod who justifies your actions by its nonexistence. (Dawkins, I'm looking in your direction) Just please think twice before you push that goddamn "I" key again.

I have marked this entry as being on the subject of "entertainment" for obvious reasons.

The state of Washington was gearing up its slaughter machine for its first judicial murder in eight years and then decided to change its mind. I say "bravo." This is, probably, the first redeeming act I've seen from Washington and I hope it is not the last.

People: This issue is actually really cut and dry. The most heinous act a government can perpetrate - worse than genocide - is to murder someone in the name of "justice" for a crime he or she did not commit. ...and guess what? Everyone might be innocent. You can no more be certain that someone is guilty of a crime than you can that there will be an afterlife waiting for them after your blood lust has been sated.

There is only one way to prevent execution of the innocent and that is to prevent executions altogether. That is an indisputable fact.

If you believe in the death penalty, you are a bad person; plain and simple. If you believe that innocent people should be killed just to quench the public's thirst for retribution - and that is the very nature of the death penalty - then you do not deserve to live. To be honest: You are probably a worse person than those whom you would have executed and your running free is certainly more detrimental than their sitting in a prison-cell. The world would better be served by striking you from its surface than by the death of any incarcerated individuals.

The problem is that the only people despicable enough to kill you are those like you. So... um... I guess the question is this: If you are vile enough to support capital punishment could you just go ahead and kill yourself? That seems like it would be a really tidy solution to the problem of you.

Those of you who know me, know that I have been working with Addison-Wesley to get a digital shortcut on the subject of database agility released. Mot people who know that, and perhaps a few more, will be happy to hear that it is now in production.

I should be reviewing cover art, soon. Yay!

Our favorite purveyor of bottom-quality software has outdone themselves.

I was messing around with my site and I dared to have a paragraph in italics with a line break in it to the left of a float-right block containing my menu. Outrageous! Who would ever do such a thing. To my absolute shock and horror, it turns out that IE 7 disables links in a float-right block at the same elevation or below a line-wrap with italics.

Now... we can rattle our farming tools, light our torches, and charge up the hill to slay the monster. I fully support that, at this point but, first, I want to ask this: How the hell did this happen? Who, exactly, was responsible for this bug getting into IE 7 and what, precisely, were you thinking when you put that bug into the code?

Seriously. In that person's mind, there was a rationale for what they did and I want to know what it was.

This speaks to the larger question in my mind: How do a lot of programmers live with themselves? I mean. We all make mistakes. I make a lot of them but I generally know what I'm doing. The number of people in this industry who seem to be "faking it until they make it" but will probably never "make it" is astounding. I implore those of you in this boat to either take the steps necessary to become real programmers or go do something to which you are better suited.

Below is the snippet that, at least on the three with which I have tested, generates this absolutely baffling behavior.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>
	<div style="float: right">
		<p>
			<a href="http://www.google.com">B</a>
		</p>
	</div>
	<div>
		<p>
			<em>Bar<br />
				.</em>
		</p>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

This is awesome. Some people are taking one homeless man who appears to be salvageable and using their web-marketing skills to elevate his visibility.

Not only is this a great way to help one person and a cause that most people can probably get behind but its a very Lean way to deal with homelessness: Solving one problem at a time. If they succeed, instead of slightly bettering the lives of a large number of people who will slip back down into their old lives as soon as the lifeline is gone, they will have taken one person and turned him into a productive member of society. It's the shortest path to value and has the capacity to feed on itself.

Bravo.

Revenge first, then people, then retribution, then money, then things, then revenge.

What is the deal with vanity plates?

Here's what vanity plates say to me:

"Hey! I just paid the government extra to make it easier for them to single me out!"

The March 2009 Nice Shot Contest benchmark video has been posted.