Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has again raided the private sector for an agency head: Bryan D. Sivak, 34, is his new chief technology officer.

Sivak replaces interim CTO Chris Willey, who in turn replaced Vivek Kundra, who exited the Fenty administration for a top federal job in the Office of Management and Budget.

Like transportation director Gabe Klein, Sivak is coming from well outside the governmental sphere. He is a founder of software firm InQuira---an Silicon Valley outfit that has done projects for the like of Nokia, T-Mobile, and the British Ministry of Defense. This will be Sivak's first stint living in the District.

"I'm more of an innovator than anything else," he said at a One Judiciary Square press conference this morning.

Contrary to popular belief, every once in a while, LL likes to point out cool, positive things the D.C. government is up to.

Like this: The D.C. Public Library has an iPhone application. And it's great!

It lets you search the library catalog, place a hold on a book, and have it sent to the branch of your choice. Don't know how to get to that branch? You can search a list of branches, get maps, hours, and direction---and even a picture of the building.

Chris Tonjes, DCPL's chief information officer and the guy who came up with the idea back in November, says his is the first library system in the nation to do an iPhone application. "I thought, wouldn't it be fun if we had our catalog on the iPhone? So we started playing around with it."

So far, Tonjes says, at least 3,500 folks have downloaded it since it debuted Jan. 8---enough to make it, as of last week, the 66th most popular free educational app. All that interest came without much more than word-of-mouth; no media's noticed outside of a few library bloggers.

Tonjes says the library's got some new interesting tech items in the works: For one thing, the iPhone app might be seeing an upgrade in the future---perhaps to add the library's Live Homework Help online feature or to directly download videos and music. A Facebook application is in the planning stage, he says, and shortly the library will share thousands of rare photographs through Flickr's Commons project.

And there's some hope for LL, who is not an iPhone user. A BlackBerry version, he's told, is in the works.

Attention local urban sophisticates! You will not be able to visit an Apple Store in the District of Columbia anytime soon!

That scoop comes courtesy of the underappreciated, under-Webbed Current newspapers, which explained in last week's editions [PDF, see pp. 1 and 19] that plans for the District's first Apple Store are held up in a thicket of regulatory approvals, from the Georgetown advisory neighborhood commission and the Old Georgetown Board.

Earlier this month, both bodies rejected Apple's design---the third the company had submitted for the property at 1229 Wisconsin Ave. NW, a Georgetown storefront the company has owned for more than a year---because, as the Current's Carol Buckley puts it, it "would not fit into Georgetown."

Nay, not even this testimonial, delivered by an Apple project manager, can cut through the red tape: "Steve saw this design and really loves it."

That's Steve Jobs, people. Steve Jobs!

When will you hoity-toity bureaucrats wake up and realize that when Steve Jobs loves something, that means you must love it, too?

Read More "No Apple Store for D.C. Anytime Soon" »

A month ago I suggested that Slate was growing old. I based my opinion on a rather untimely article about the word "FAIL." The argument still stands. My evidence? A new article by Farhad Manjoo on how to use Skype.

Read More "Slate’s Tech Writing: Behind the Curve" »