Joe Burns, Ph.D..-.And Remember: Mind your Ps and Qs! No matter which history of the term you give, someone has a different one they proclaim is correct. There are two that are most often stated as being the correct history. One is that Ps and Qs stood for pints and quarts. Barkeeps would keep a tab of drinks by marking P and Q down on a sheet. So, to mind your Ps and Qs was to keep an eye on what you drank. Tell that to someone. More than likely you'll get that that is wrong. He or she will most likely tell you the term came from early printing whereas the letters were placed, one by one into a plate that was then loaded into a press. The problem was that all the letters were backwards so they would print correctly on the paper. To mind the Ps and Qs was to make sure the correct letter was being used. Those are just the big two. Another is that the term is a shortened version of "Mind your Please and Thank-you" used in order to remind children to be polite. What about the theory that is came from the French? The term might have been from dance suggesting to students to mind their figures pieds and queues. I actually found seven different theories in just a quick look around.

Opensecrets.org--Money in politics data... Can big campaign contributions determine which bills become law? Find out where special interest groups stand on important issues, which elected officials received campaign contributions from those groups, and how Congress is handling related legislation.

Nolo Self-Help Law ... "When it comes to self-help legal stuff, nobody does a better job than Nolo." -- USA Today

A Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP 1.1... This document describes a subset of SOAP 1.1 that forms a basis for easy interoperation between different environments. When we refer to "SOAP" in this document we're referring to this subset of SOAP, not the full SOAP 1.1 specification.

Adobe helps graphic designers turn ideas into art. Adobe also helps turn security experts into felons.... On 16 July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by federal agents in Las Vegas, Nevada. His crime: pointing out major security flaws in Adobe PDF and eBook software.

Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.... Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Case highlights law's threat to fair-use rights (7/18/2001)... Under the DMCA, it's a crime to spread the word about technology that maintains your fair-use rights. One of these days, it may be a crime to talk about anything that displeases the control freaks who run the entertainment and software industries.

Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches... Strawberry Pop Tarts may be a cheap and inexpensive source of incendiary devices. Toasters which fail to eject Pop Tarts cause the Pop Tarts to emit flames 10-18 inches in height.

Guardian Unlimited:Douglas Rushkoff ... The internet is for amateurs.

Yahoo - Online Report Cards Draw High Marks... Web-based report cards are getting high marks in schools across the country, as online grading systems replace traditional paper reports.

XML's Greatest Hits (And Misses)... Tim Bray, CEO, antarcti.ca systems, co-editor XML 1.0 specification. The co-inventor of XML takes time off to evaluate what worked -and did not work- and suggests directions for future growth of the language. [2001-06-25] (0:39:24)

Patterns: Non-Software Examples of Software Design Patterns - AGCS... Software design patterns have roots in the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander, and in the object movement. According to Alexander, patterns repeat themselves, since they are a generic solution to a given system of forces. The object movement looks to the real world for insights into modeling software relationships. With these dual roots, it seems reasonable that software design patterns should be repeated in real world objects. This paper presents a real world, non software instance of each design pattern from the book, Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software [13]. The paper also discusses the implications of non-software examples on the communicative power of a pattern language, and on design pattern training.

Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq... The instant message has fast become a staple of European corporate communication. The technique spread from Finnish children to businessmen because the kids taught their parents. Nokia employed anthropologists to tell them this. Finland has become the first nation on earth to acknowledge formally the childcentric model of economic development: if you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed to promote rapid technical change, and if you intended to promote rapid technical change, you needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority.

The Parking Meter Page - History... The world's first installed parking meter was in Oklahoma City, on July 16, 1935. Mr. Magee had been appointed to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce traffic committee, and was assigned the task of solving the parking problems in downtown Oklahoma City. Apparently, folks who worked in the area were parking on downtown streets, staying all day, and leaving few spaces for shoppers and others who visited the central business district.

IBM: Web services : A Primer for HTTPR... Reliable HTTP (HTTPR) is a new protocol that offers the reliable delivery of HTTP packets between the server and client. This solves a number of issues that are evident in current HTTP and opens the way to reliable messaging between Web services.

Top VC Doerr apologizes for helping fuel dot-com frenzy (7/15/2001)... Silicon Valley's highest-profile venture capitalist, John Doerr, publicly apologized Sunday for his famous statement that characterized the Internet as ``the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.''

From blackholebrain - an interesting article on libraries in the internet age:... But why aren't writers suing the public libraries? Maybe the more important question is why do people still buy books? I believe the library system still works for many obvious reasons, but the primary reason libraries exist today is the same as *forever ago* when the first libraries were established: love of the craft. Writers love to write... and they love to read... and they want as many other people doing the same.

Zoom in on Los Angeles, California -- The image shows the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles, California. It is the final frame in an animation that demonstrates the wide range of spatial resolutions viewed by current state-of-the-art sensors.

Watching the Creation of Southern California's Largest Reservoir ...The new Diamond Valley Lake Reservoir east of Temecula is billed as the largest earthworks construction project in U.S. history. Construction began in 1995 and involved 31 million cubic meters of foundation excavation and 84 million cubic meters of embankment construction. See it from space courtesy of NASA's Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR).

Summer Friday Nights - Old Town Temecula... July 6th through September 28th - every Friday Night (5:00pm- 9:00pm) - it's HOT SUMMER NIGHTS IN OLD TOWN TEMECULA - bands, singing, carraige rides and more(909) 694-6412.

Roy Rogers (Leonard Franklin Slye) -- Encyclopædia Britannica Article -- American cowboy actor-singer (b. Nov. 5, 1911/12, Cincinnati, Ohio--d. July 6, 1998, Apple Valley, Calif.), starred in some 90 motion pictures and over 100 episodes of a weekly television show from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s and reigned as king of the cowboys...

OpinionJournal - Court Ruling Was No Victory For Microsoft -- King Pyrrhus, meet Bill Gates. BY ROBERT H. BORK AND KENNETH W. STARR -- While trumpeting last week's "victory" in the Court of Appeals, Microsoft executives would do well to recall the words of King Pyrrhus after his famous battle with the Romans: "One more such victory and we are lost." ...

Who would call this a win for Microsoft?... Thomas Madsen-Mygdal has excerpted and annotated the decision, showing text that affirms the lower court rulings. Microsoft hasn't won. It's just that a different judge will determine the punishment.

Noted in one of this week's Infoworld columns: "If you were supposed to understand it, we wouldn't call it code."

Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction. A simple design always takes less time to finish than a complex one. So always do the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you find something that is complex replace it with something simple. It's always faster and cheaper to replace complex code now, before you waste a lot more time on it. Keep things as simple as possible as long as possible by never adding functionality before it is scheduled. Beware though, keeping a design simple is hard work.

Australian IT on WEBLOGS - BLOGGING is an unfortunate word. It sounds like some worthy, rather dull activity, yet keeping a weblog, at its best, is nimble and quick-witted, hard to capture in old media prose.

Andrea's Weblog: Fried Rice Recipe - TRADITIONAL MANDARIN FRIED RICE Recipe Courtesy of Ming Tsai, (modified by Al Hawkins)

Inheriting Physics, By Susan Kitchens on her gandfather's 100th Birthday - - ... Susan writes: I'm so glad to be able to come here and hear stories about your growing-up years and your working years and to learn all manner of things that took place before my time. And grandpa, a love of learning is just one of the many things that you've demonstrated that is part of a rich intangible inheritance. I rejoice in the vitality of your mind and heart. I'm so proud to have a grandfather who has reached such a splendid great age. Even now you are still learning, and I gladly claim that as a thing I have inherited from you. Happy Birthday!

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