k10n

College basketball probabilities

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 19:56:21 GMT

I've updated my tournament calculator to reflect the current tournament. (Last year's calculator is here.) According to the calculator, the teams most likely to win the championship are:

Kansas 16.14%

Kentucky 14.04%

Arizona 10.81%

Pittsburgh 8.08%

A little InfoPath tip

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 16:15:45 GMT

Like a lot of folks, I've been investigating InfoPath since Beta 2 became available to MSDN Universal subscribers earlier this week. I've been able to get a few things to work, though the lack of documentation has made things difficult. I don't have a sense yet of the range of things I should be able to do, and unlike many of the folks who have been talking it up lately, I don't have anyone more knowledgeable about it to show me things.

Anyway, here's one thing I discovered that has made my investigation a little easier. I read in a faq that the files that are contained in the xsn file (which is really a CAB file) could also be separate files in a folder. I generated a simple xsn file, used WinZip to extract all of the files into a directory, and tried to open manifest.xsf. InfoPath complained that I wasn't opening it through the xsn file. Then I edited manifest.xsf and removed the publishUrl attribute from the document element (xsf:xDocumentClass), tried to open it again, and everything worked. This setup made it a lot easier to experiment with changing the xml, xsd and xsl files that InfoPath uses.

Gibson at his best

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:58:11 GMT

I just finished William Gibson's new novel, Pattern Recognition. Neil Gaiman's prominent blurb on the back cover calls it Gibson's best since Neuromancer. I'd go one step further and say best so far.

Neuromancer was seminal, but I don't think he perfected his style until Mona Lisa Overdrive. Pattern Recognition has the rich Gibson style, a riveting plot, and there's even more of it (350 pages). In his recent books, the enjoyment for me has come mostly from his crystalline prose. This one had a plot that made me want to stay up until four in the morning just to find out what was really going on.

A long time coming, and ...

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 20:26:43 GMT

I just finished Richard Sanford's Long Time Gone, a coming-of-age road novel set in 1968. It was published recently by Xlibris, which I believe is a print-on-demand vanity publisher. I really enjoyed the book and I could imagine it doing well on its merits.

Richard and I were friends for a while as undergraduates (in 1968, in fact), but I lost track of him after college. I bought this book after seeing it mentioned in an alumni newsletter and reading some very good reviews on amazon.com.

I liked it enough that I posted a five-star review on amazon myself. Here's what I said (with one small copy-edit):

The events of 1968 serve as the backdrop for this well-written but accessible novel about a young southerner looking for a missing friend and finding himself. Sanford takes his protagonist, a country dj named Cal, from a small Mississippi River town to springtime Daytona Beach, then up the East Coast to a Cambridge crash pad and a summer romance in Boston, and finally to the Chicago convention with a group of militant anti-war demonstrators. The chapters on the Chicago riots are especially well wrought, but every scene has the true feel of the 60s counterculture. Cal's search for the younger brother of his war-casualty best friend mirrors his personal quest for purpose and identity. A remarkable book.

New from the "steampunk" novelists

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 19:38:16 GMT

Not only does William Gibson have a new novel in the queue, he's started a blog. "I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis," he says in his first post. I hope he is. A chapter from Pattern Recognition, the forthcoming novel, is available at his site.

And I'm really enjoying Bruce Sterling's annual public Well QandA . Here's a taste:

I think [these Raelians have] done us all a favor with this particular propaganda of the deed. It might have taken us years to figure out that cloning infants is not a big deal, but a crazy aberration that only stupid cultists would pull.

Sterling's new non-fiction book is available now. It's called Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years.

These are two that I'm definitely going to read real soon now.