Definitely, not definately…

Grrr

Wow!

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe’s and Macromedia’s closing prices on Friday April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock.

Lessee, $3.4 bio, $41.86, that’s… hnnn 81 million shares, give or take. I hadn’t realized Macromeda had grown this much.

This, 10-15 years ago, would’ve been a non-question, since A) I spoke something that passed for British English and B) I wasn’t exactly fluent. Sure, back then, I spoke good English, for a foreigner. Let’s just say that these days I am as close to native as I’ll ever be. This was achieved at the cost of my English’s UKness, and while I still use sometimes British-only expressions, they’re pretty rare now.

Anyways, I took the test (via Richard Tallent’s excellent blog). Here’s the outcome… 15% Dixie?!?!?

I have implemented a partial framework for browsing and querying eprints web sites. From an IRC channel…

This is part of my ongoing IRC bot project, Yaspyb (Yet Another PYthon Bot). I stumbled upon Cogprints, and managed to build rapidly a minimal framework allowing me to browse top- and second-level categories, search title lists for keywords, and even send the full-text (when available) as a text file (via pdftotext, sometimes first via epstopdf, since some articles are in .ps).

Then I realized that as an open-source project, there had to be more users of eprints. Indeed there’s a bunch out there. I picked a couple of them, and lo and behold, after some tweaking, I can search, from IRC a bunch of web sites, for academic publications. Yaspyb builds a couple of small indexes at startup, so that it knows where to find the top-level and secondary subjects. Most of the data gathered from user queries are cached, so the impact of the web sites is low – unlike a certain experiment of mine involving viêtnamese and chinese characters, ahem…

Of course, browsing for journals in an IRC channel is not the most convenient way, but my bot is a very convenient platform to integrate web-scraping/indexing/encoding-conversion code, and I suppose I could rewrite many of its functions into a desktop application – and a faster one too! I love Python, but fast it isn’t…

This at WTF.com:

try
{
  try{email.ConfigValue = row.Email.ToString();}
  catch{email.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{loginNameText.ConfigValue = row.LoginName.ToString();}
  catch{loginNameText.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{fullNameTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Name.ToString();}
  catch{fullNameTextBox.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{companyTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Company.ToString();}
  catch{companyTextBox.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{phoneTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Phone.ToString();}
  catch{phoneTextBox.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{addressTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Address.ToString();}
  catch{addressTextBox.ConfigValue =“”;}
  try{enableUserCheckBox.Checked = !row.Disabled;}
  catch{enableUserCheckBox.Checked = false;}
  try{passwordTextBox.ConfigValue =“******”;}
  catch{passwordTextBox.ConfigValue =“******”;}
}

finally
{
  this.IsDirty = false;
}

kudos to Damien, la Tortoise Cynical

Drag these guys in the backyard, flog them, emasculate them, feed them their balls and them shoot them in the belly. Twice. Damn!