Dev Doc Typos v2

Previously on this blog I mentioned a typo I found in the Apple SDK Docs relating to iPhone development.

Today I found this typo in the Twitter API documentation:

The image update methods require multipart form data. They do not accept a URL to an image not do they accept the raw image bytes.

Like the last one its one of those “the spellchecker won’t catch it” typos, and its inconsequential, but it furthers my theory that developer documentation rarely gets the attention that say, marketing copy might receive.

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Today is tax day. I filed my taxes early this year.  This is the first time in 4 years my taxes got in on time (anyone see the pattern?).

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In 1888 Mark Twain wrote:

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Which brings me to wood pussy.

During a scrabble game recently, this word highlighted at the top of the page of my Merriam-Webster’s hardcover dictionary was noticed, with much amusement, obviously.  It’s a noun, go ahead, go look it up.

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Finally, one last note on language.  Do you know the word peripatetic?

It can mean Aristotelian or to describe something that wanders about (both are related, by the way).  I first learned this word this year when reading Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffet.

The author liked to show off her vocabulary, often in ways that made one wonder if she was writing the book with a thesaurus nearby–to increase character count.  I can’t say if she used peripatetic correctly, but she did use some other words in places where simpler words would have fit better.

Snowball is still a good book and you should read it, but after I looked up peripatetic, I never thought I would ever hear or read the word again.

But I was wrong.

I watched the moral drama that is the play turned movie, Doubt recently.  It is fantastic and the acting by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams is really superb, complementing the writing by John Patrick Shanley.

It joins Glengarry Glen Ross in my list of excellent movie adaptations of plays.

In the movie, Meryl Streep says:

“The wind is so peripatetic this year. Is that the word I want?”

I had to rewind the movie to replay the line, and sure enough there it was.

So go rent Doubt, and keep your vocab fresh.

You dirty wood pussy.

Body of work

I want to get this out before I head to Opening Day at Coors Field, I will come back and edit this text later.

Click below for an interactive display of my recent work (click the map), this idea came to me from reading about VisualCV through Guy Kawasaki.

Click to see interactive time based map of my last 3+ years of work

RETS Meeting Preview

I am off to Washington DC  in a couple weeks to attend a NAR sponsored meeting of Real Estate technologists advancing the Real Estate Transaction Standard.  RETS is a HTTP based standard for the exchange of Real Estate data.

During the April meeting there will be four change proposals.  In future posts I will take a moment to summarize and  debate the pros and cons of each change proposal.

If you count the meetings I have gone to with Zillow, Yahoo! Real Estate, Trulia and other active participants of the Schema workgroup I think I have traveled to 25 RETS meetings now.

I am particularly looking forward to the  programming competition at the DC meeting.  I am hosting again, as I have since 2004 when the torch was passed to me by the irreplaceable Bruce Toback.  With some luck I might even have something to present.  One idea I have is a redux of MILC and TIRED.  But I might have to wait until the Chicago meeting later in the year.  Depends on school and snow conditions

Stay tuned for a review of the four change proposals, right here.