After last week, you'd think that Saturday Night Live would avoid lip synching for, I dunno', a week or two anyway, but Eminem not only was clearly lip synching, he did a terrible job!

James Snell is angry that his vote for Bush won't count, because he lives in California. (I mean, it will count, but California is considered a lock for Kerry.) If I still lived in California I'd be angry because my vote for Kerry wouldn't count (I mean, it would, but it would be much less significant than a vote from a person living in Wyoming or Rhode Island.)

Personally, I'd prefer to get rid of the electoral college, but that would require a Constitutional amendment and its ratification would undoubtedly depend entirely on short-term political advantage. In the meantime, proportional electoral voting, as Maine does now and Colorado will either do this election or next (yikes!), seems a clearly good idea.

Now, I'm “lucky” enough to be in what is apparently a swing state, so I'll have a good feeling when casting my ballot on Tuesday.

Dave Jaquay is leaving the .NET world and returning to Java. He sees C# and Java as comparable languages (giving the edge to C#) but is excited about switching Visual Studio for Eclipse. It's an interesting read. I'm doing some Java work now and using Eclipse. A few things I very much agree with Dave about (rebuild-on-save, JUnit unit-testing integration). Maybe it's just that my fingers know the VS keybindings better, but I still prefer VS to Eclipse.

I have to say that Eclipse is a heck of a platform, though.

My latest article on programming the TabletPC is up on DevX.

Boston, you're my home

Oh, how I wish I had an Audiovox SMT5600. I think it's what I want: an MP3 player and digital voice recorder that I can to use to occasionally make phone calls. Seriously. Hey, Scoble, you said that it was good as a phone-first, data-device second -- what about my scenario?

But I can't bring myself to spend $360 for it when I'm three months from qualifying for discounts on a new phone on my rate plan. $120 per month? Too steep for this cheapskate.

The new Photo Story 3, which is really pretty good, is freely available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx

(Back to software development, at least until Game 4 tonight...)

Microsoft has announced a framework and tools for creating Domain Specific Languages in Visual Studio Team System. Your very own DSL will be powered by the same modeling engine that powers the “Whitehorse” Distributed Systems Designer.

Whether this will be a big or small deal hinges on two questions:

1. To be useful in software development, do the majority of diagram types need to share a large amount of common semantics?;
2. Is it a large or small set of software development tasks that can be adequately represented in diagrams?

UML proponents argue for the first -- that one basically needs UML-level complexity/richness to create diagrams that are not just used for communication between people but that actively shape the system under development. This is obviously self-serving for those with an investment in the UML process, but may be true nonetheless. 

The second question is open. I'm a big fan of UML, but primarily for communicating important subsets of the task in question: “here are the key classes and their relations,” “here are the vital calls in this sequence of actions,” etc. Today's display technologies and graphical tools don't provide the information density that text does and the speed of manipulating a diagram is significantly less than making a comparable change in source code.

The tools announced today will obviously be used to implement various diagrams that are known today -- UML, E-Rs, BPMs, flowcharts no doubt. That's all well and good but won't fundamentally change anything. The key issue is whether the type of person who today might develop a complex library or language to express a domain (say... job-shop scheduling or customized-pricing rules) will find in these tools sufficient power to develop an alternate way of expressing the domain.

Wayne Allen wonders if there's an assumption that geeks lean left. I've always detected a very strong libertarian streak in geeks: “fiscally conservative, socially liberal.” I think it's because libertarianism is the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work -- don't spend money on things you don't need, don't tell people what to do.

Are the Undecided's thinking about The Big Issues -- Terrorism, Iraq, Economy, Domestic Policy, Foreign Relations -- and failing to come to a conclusion, or do they just lump it all together into a gut feeling as to whether Bush or Kerry will cause more good / less harm?

Terrorism: the thing about terrorism is that the Bush administration is all talk, no walk. You can't defend America from small groups of suicidal fanatics with conventional military forces, you need to fund, train, and support a huge number of domestic resources -- from the intelligence services to the local cops. I have a friend who joined and then quit TSA because they only officially hire new recruits as “part-time” (no benefits) but then demand mandatory overtime (60 hours) because they're understaffed.

Iraq: once the Bush administration unilaterally decided to confront Hussein, I supported an invasion because I thought that it was important that neither the U.S. nor the U.N. look like paper tigers (and I was under the impression that Saddam was developing nukes and that he was so crazy, he'd probably use one on Israel). But how can you vote to rehire those responsible for running this totally incompetent post-invasion occupation?

Economy: I don't think Presidents have much to do with economic cycles, but the Bush admin has been extremely effective in passing tax cuts that are running up the national credit card while triggering very little positive economic growth. The Bush admin says “Well, the recession was a short one...” and credit their tax cut, but remember that your kids are going to have to pay off those credit cards. It's not in the economic self-interest of anyone making less than about $200K to vote for Bush. The Republicans fear-monger about the Democrats passing tax increases, but remember that the Republicans control the Legislature. The truth is that Kerry won't be able to pass tax increases beyond maybe rolling back some of the tax cuts to the highest-end payers. (Of course, that means that he's not going to be able to deliver universal health care and he's not going to be able to fund 100% port inspections, and so forth. Democratic Presidency + Republican Legislature == lack of fundamental change.)

Domestic Policy: this is the one area where I think the Bush administration is most effective (Republican Presidency + Republican Legislature == fundamental change). I don't agree with their domestic policy initiatives, which have mostly been either direct giveaways or ill-advised deregulation for industries. Meanwhile, when asked what to do about out-sourcing, Bush's answer in the debate was “Learn a skill at community college.” Again, from an economic self-interest standpoint, unless you're at the “live-in help“ level, it doesn't make sense.

Foreign Relations: apparently, Bush voters believe that the world secretly approves of what the Bush administration is doing, that we're playing a kind of global “good cop-bad cop“ thing. They don't.

The conservative life-style issue is about the only area where I can understand a person coming to a pro-Bush conclusion. You think the assault-weapon ban was a bad thing, you think it's important that Christian references be explicit in the public sphere, you think gay marriage should be constitutionally forbidden: Bush is your guy. (Although for me, even if I felt that way about those issues, I can't see how I'd let them outweigh the threats to national security and our economy resulting from the other failures of the administration.)  

Obviously, just about exactly 50% of the electorate disagrees with my conclusion that Kerry must be better for the country than Bush. I'm going to guess that the “conservative life-style” issue accounts for about half of that 50%. I'm going to guess that another 15% fall for the administrations bull about how they're better against terrorism. But I think the reason the election is too close to call is that people fear that Kerry would appear weak, as Carter appeared.

I think the debates probably swayed some of those who had that fear, but obviously things are still on a razor's edge. For that reason, I don't have great confidence that the undecideds will break heavily for Kerry, which is the common wisdom (although everyone admits that it's all too close to call).

I'd love to read something from a true undecided that gives some insight into how someone could not have formed a strong enough opinion about the current administration to know how they'll vote. Anyone?

MSR has a paper describing a very clever trick for video. They describe it for automatically creating cartoons, but the applications extend beyond that. Basically, one of the things those clever kids have been paying attention to is looking at video as a 3-D structure and applying algorithms to the resulting “shapes”. In this case, you lay down reference points on two frames, and they tween the reference points not by linearly interpolating between X and Y, but by creating a spline that follows the defined color/shape as it goes through Z (time).

According to a study quoted in a recent New Scientist, the companies in the Fortune 500 with the highest number of women in senior management positions had 35% higher return on stockholder investment than those with the fewest. Sounds good, but be aware that the study was done by “Catalyst, a 'on-adversarial advocacy organization,'works to advance women in business leadership with a particular focus on placing women on the boards of Fortune 500 companies.”

Researchers at USC have modeled the transforms associated with production of memory. It's a black-box: they aren't interested in the subjective experience of the transform, just how inputs (short-term memories) are turned into outputs (long-term memories). The article speaks of prosthesis for memory disorders, which is certainly the first market, but once you've figured out the IO model for memory you're in major-league Philip K. Dick territory. What happens when you record my inputs and play them into your hippocampus? Do you end up with a personalized version of my experiences?

Cat. Zero-G. I'll bet anything it's been declawed.

Continuing the mini-trend of posts that have nothing to do with the software development industry...

The HydroOptix dive mask seems like an excellent idea: instead of a flat piece of glass, the mask is fronted with what underwater photographers refer to as a “dome port,” eliminating refraction and providing a dramatically better field of view that traditional masks. 

The admitted downside of this is that you need to focus just a few inches from your eye to see this (essentially, you focus on a “virtual image” on the inside of the mask). But, it so happens that the needed myopia matches my prescription of -4.5 perfectly, so for me, I just take my glasses off, put the mask on, stumble my way towards the big blue blur, and the instant I'm in the water, Bob's my uncle.

The optics are excellent. You get a massive improvement in peripheral vision and if the water is clear, it translates into a noticeably improved vista underwater. Unfortunately, as a mask, the product just plain sucks. It has a tiny skirt and seals onto my honestly-not-abnormal nose so tightly that I literally could not equalize mask squeeze without using my hand to loosen the mask. And everytime I did that, the mask leaked. And since the mask has a huge volume and purge valves, clearing it requires an obscene amount of air.

Yesterday, I tried freediving with the HydroOptix. Horrible. Just absolutely worthless. I couldn't descend past 20', I wasted my lungs clearing it, and on those few occasions I did get to a decent depth, when I ascended the air in the mask expanded, cracked the seal, and once again, the mask flooded.

Worst, a pod of spinner dolphins swam by. Tina dropped down to 40' and hung out while the dolphins swam right past her. I had to bounce along the surface, watching them cruise by beneath.

The Iowa Electronic Markets are a real-money trading system that is used to attempt to predict political outcomes. Right now, a $1.00 pay-off on the Presidency will cost $.58 for Bush. In other words, Bush is favored. There's a strong case to be made that “real money” is a vastly better predictor of the future than polls, but I watched the IEM during the Democratic primaries and Dean, whose “lead” proved absolutely illusory, consistently led in the IEM.

So I'm pretty dubious. I think it'll come right down to the wire and then (got my fingers crossed) the undecideds and un-pollable kids will break strong for Kerry. God, I hope so. I was going to write a polemic about why I like Kerry or, more specifically, why I think that Bush and Co. are cynical betrayers of everything that America stands for, but I was stymied by the idea that this election is going to be based on people who are undecided. I can't for the life of me understand being undecided -- I can understand being a Republican (especially when the alternative is being a Democrat), I can understand valuing conservative principles over liberal ones, I can even understand (barely) interpreting Bush's behavior as “steadfast” and principled.

I can argue respectfully with conservatives. But I just can't for the life of me figure out what to say to someone who's undecided.

Umm... I know you'll think I'm kidding, but Has Been is really good. I mean, really, seriously good. Not ironic good. Like, good good. I mean, Shatner works as essentially a spoken-word poet over the tunes and he's got his distinctive cadence, but, y'know, that's how the majority of hip-hop works, too.

EverNote, a note-taking app that supports the TabletPC, has entered public beta. I'm very excited about this app, as it has a couple great things that I've been dreaming about in a note-taking app: a timeline view, the ability to add custom categories, and templates for to-do and shopping lists. The result appears very promising for time-management in the “Getting Things Done” manner.

Software Development has published their annual salary survey. Essentially, slow growth. The most interesting graphic to me is the one that shows trends to the question “If you're seeking a new job, what is the reason?” which shows a marked shift from passionate reasons (join a startup, new challenges) to defensive ones (job stability, etc.). The acute pain of the dot-com hangover may be over, but now we've entered the “I'll never drink again,” stage.

A word of caution: salaries vary so widely over the country that the overall median numbers are close to worthless. The charts and tables for the various regions are much better. Say... wouldn't it be cool if SD provided a Web Service that allowed you to retrieve relevant data by zip- or area-code? Would you pay $5 via Paypal for that?

My latest column for SD Times discusses Borland's recently announced initiatives...

My latest on programming the TabletPC is up on DevX. This one talks about putting ink on the World Wide Web.

DevX is paying me to write a couple of articles about “Pynk”: my Python interactive environment with ink-editing. That means I can spend time on it during the week in a guilt-free manner. Excellent!

Helping numb the sting of having predicted at this time last year that “Whidbey” would ship by the last day of 2004, the C# team today announced that C# will support “Edit & Continue” in Visual Studio 2005. Not having been a major VB guy, I can't say that I've missed E&C, but I'm sure I'll grow to love it.

Clearly, Bush's “hump“ is not placed specifically for the debate:

Compare and contrast: