Author: John

ZDNet: Oracle rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse. Obviously this is fairly amusing. The reason that Eclipse was checking the rebranded “Company” value was to work around a different Java incompatibility. It’s pretty clear: the Java team at Sun (now at Oracle) has done far more to destroy the concept of “write once, run everywhere” than the…

NY Times: Botanical Gardens Look for New Lures Here’s another article that mentions the recent financial tribulations of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens — although this time the problems are implied rather than the focus of the article. It does put the issue into a broader context though: Many similar organizations are having to scramble for money,…

Man, I just never seem to get around here anymore! Ahh well. A couple of links caught my eye today: Henry Blodgett: My Kids Are Addicted to my iPad I totally believe this story. In fact, it sounds like Henry is probably underestimating the extent of the problem. The Frati do not currently have an iPad.…

Some bummer neighborhood news: Kmart is closing our local store. Here’s the article in the Plain Dealer. Not that Kmart is a great chain, or that this store is anything special, but this situation is a perfect example of the problems Cleveland faces. With the population declining pretty much everywhere in the city, if a…

In the comments to this post there are a lot of suggestions of language learning sites and software. Much insistence that they are all better and/or cheaper than Rosetta Stone. Both seem possible. Rosetta Stone is OK, but it’d be easy to imagine something more effective. And one thing for sure: It’s expensive! Here are…

When I was a kid we did a lot of traveling including some big trips to Europe while my dad worked over there, but also trips down south and out west. One of the things I remember most about those trips was taking pictures. We took half-frame slides using an Olympus Pen-F. This was a…

There’s been a lot of whining lately that President and Michelle Obama shouldn’t have gone to dinner and a play in New York the other day, and definitely shouldn’t have taken any time out of their European trip to do any sightseeing. Predictably, these complaints went nowhere. I’m pretty sure that  most folks could not…

So there’s this “Green Dog” company called Olive. They specialize in eco-friendly stuff for your hound. Well, they realized that it was dumb to pick up dog doo-doo in a plastic bag that will outlast all of us. So they came up with this. Cool, eh? On a somewhat related item, here’s some catfood I…

Atul Gawande‘s had quite a ride recently. First he wrote an article in the New Yorker that demonstrated how certain communities spent twice as much on health care as other similar communities but with no corresponding improvement in outcomes. (I linked to that article recently. It really is compelling.) Then his data got picked up…

At lunch today one of the guys ordered General Tso’s Chicken. This reminded of me of an article I’d read recently on how, in most of the world, ethnic food is pretty much the same dishes immigrants would have made back in the “old country”. But in the US, the ethnic foods change, sometimes significantly,…