Bits, No Pieces

Some friends of mine hang out on monkey.org. Today, while trying to remember what I was looking for, I was clicking randomly amongst the user pages of other folks there and found Rayzor, a Common Lisp ray tracer that looks neat. It uses CMUCL, but the author says it should port pretty easily.

Also, thanks to Matt, this NY Times article on Schenectady (log in required, no-cost registration). It's shorter than I would have preferred, but then what's there to write about? It fairly accurately describes Schenectady's decline, but I would have liked if it had gone into more historical detail rather than the policy angle. Policy is important, and it plays a part in why Schenectady is like it is now, as well as what can be done to revitalize Schenectady, but I believe that the story of Upstate New York is a story of many once-great cities now facing Schenectady's reality. Without that context, I don't see how any policy move will be anything other than half-hearted. Maybe I'll write up a longer piece that better describes what I'm thinking.

Just downloaded and installed the latest w.bloggar build, v3.03. Seems a bit faster on loading, and has title support, which is nice. This post is powered by w.bloggar.

In other software news, WinEdt Team just released WinEdt 5.4. They're calling it a beta on the website, but it feels like a finished release to me. I haven't had a chance to seriously exercise it yet, but there are a few Windows XP improvements that I noticed right off the bat.

Fair and Balanced, meet Cease and Desist

Wendy rightly scooped me on this; I sent it around to an internal list inside my selection of daily blurbs from many news sources I get each day in email. Sorry. I'm still adjusting to the concept of working a blog into my dissemination media. I'm still an email-driven, Usenet-reading kind of guy by default.

From today's NewsScan:

MURDOCH ACQUIRES DIRECTV

Rupert Murdoch is a man who's never been intimidated by the status quo: he
successfully ignored Britain's state-owned BBC to launch that nation's first
pay-TV service, and in the U.S. established Fox as a lively competitor to
the three established TV networks. And now the 72-year-old Murdoch is hoping
to turn satellite television into a medium as common as cable, which is in
70% of homes. On Friday federal regulators approved Murdoch's News Corp.'s
$6.6-billion takeover of satellite television leader DirecTV from General
Motors Corp. Legg Mason industry analyst Blair Levin predicts: "He'll have
an army, an air force and a navy when everyone else has at best one or two
of those things. He could drive a bunch of consolidation in the industry."
And Jamie Kellner, a former Murdoch lieutenant who went on to found the WB
network, agrees: "With DirecTV, he'll be very aggressive in marketing. He'll
use all the tools he's used around the world to get a larger market share
here. Murdoch is willing to take risks that others wouldn't." (Los Angeles
Times 22 Dec 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-murdoch22dec22,1,1775291.story?coll=la-headlines-technology