Steven Engelhardt

I was looking for a free, open source software library for generating PDFs, and Sean O’Connor pointed me to HARU. I’ll have to check it out.

What’s wrong with this code? (It is adapted from something I wrote yesterday)

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In my posts Implementing IXmlWriter Series, I wrote a streaming XML writing class whose interface is based on .NET’s XmlWriter. I recently discovered that MSXML provides its own method to write streaming XML through the class MXXMLWriter.

MXXMLWriter supports a large set of functionality including encoding, indentation, disabling output escaping, and writing XML fragments. The generated XML can be written to an IStream, a BSTR, or a DOMDocument object. However, it’s interface leaves much to be desired. Usage looks like this:

The rough IXmlWriter equivalent is:

However, there might be a case to change IXmlWriter to use MXXMLWriter internally.

The Microsoft XML team recently posted in their blog a set of recommendations on which version of MSXML to use. In short, they recommend using MSXML 6.0 but falling back to 3.0 if it isn’t available.

My product currently tries MSXML 4.0 first — but only SP2 and above. We ran into bugs with previous versions of MSXML 4.0. I will have to evaluate moving to MSXML 6.0.

Via Barry Ritholtz’s blog The Big Picture I ran across the following fascinating article from the Federal Reserve: Recent Changes in U.S. Family Finances: Evidence from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances.

My preferred airfare search engine, especially for international flights, is ITA Software’s Fare Shopping Engine. The month-long search is especially useful if your dates are flexible.

I’ve also heard good things about QIXO.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has been released. While I will likely remain a dedicated Firefox user, I warmly welcome the improvements that IE7 brings.

Developers: Be sure to test your applications against IE7. My product ran into a bug in our code related to IE7’s move to UTF-8 URL encoding.

Long-time readers know that I have a bit of a penchant for error handling, especially with respect to exceptions. I just noticed that I have never, to my knowledge, posted about the classic article “Exception Handling: A False Sense of Security” by Tom Cargill.

Read it and weep.

While parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series are a start, there is still a lot left to understand about the Federal budget. To start:

• How do the numbers look adjusted for inflation? As a percentage of GDP?
• What was the actual source of new revenues? New spending?
• If the unified budget deficit was $247.7 billion and the on-budget budget deficit was $434.0 billion, why did the total national debt increase by $574.2 billion from 9/30/2005 to 9/29/2006? Where did the extra intragovernmental debt holdings come from?
• How are the revenue and spending numbers likely to change in the future? How will we deal with these changes?

While many people focus on the revenue half of government in that they incessantly clamour for lower taxes, to spend is to tax, as Milton Friedman taught us. Therefore we should look at how the Federal government’s outlays have changed over time. Here is a breakdown of outlays from 2005 and 2006 by major agency:

As a reminder, all numbers are from the U.S. Treasury Preliminary Statement of Budget Results for Fiscal Year 2006. Figures are not adjusted for inflation.

I don’t understand why “undistributed offsetting receipts” are counted as negative outlays and not receipts. Regardless, the three largest increases in outlays in percentage terms were from Homeland Security, the Office of Federal Student Aid, and the Corps of Engineers, respectively. The three largest increases in outlays in dollar terms were from Interest on the public debt, Medicare, and Homeland Security, respectively.

The Department of Defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Interest on the public debt comprise over 75% of all Federal spending. However, Social Security is currently running a surplus. If you were to eliminate Social Security along with its associated, dedicated taxes, you would make the Federal deficit quite a bit worse in the short term.

Given current trends, future obligations, and political realities, I am highly pessimistic about the ability to address the Federal deficit from the spending side. The supermajority of future improvement will likely have to come from the revenue side. This means, of course, higher taxes. However, the longer we wait, the more likely it is that Interest on the public debt will continue grow far faster than the rest of the budget, which will make future tax increases or spending cuts even more painful.