malvasia bianca

God of War is a quite well done beat-em-up. Basically, you wander through a mostly linear, pseudo-ancient-Greek world, beating the crap out of tons of monsters that appear in your past, occasionally taking a break to either solve a bit of a puzzle or fight a boss monster. I’m not sure that there are any […]

Hey, Jonathan’s blogging about Thumper. Neat.

I am still looking for music recommendations. Several of the bloggers that I read occasionally recommend either individual artists or podcasts; since I seem to agree with said bloggers’ tastes in other matters, I usually give them a try. Alas, all such experiments have proved unsatisfactory. Fortunately, the artists that they recommend have sample songs […]

I was just looking at the front material of a book and saw that its “SBN” was 671-21320-2. I didn’t know that there was a pre-international version of the ISBN. And here’s some information if you’re curious about the 13-digit ISBNs that have been appearing recently.

I think I made the right decision to give up playing go: I just don’t want to spend one evening a week doing that. But I was just looking at a picture of a game in Hikaru No Go (nine moves into the Ota vs. Akira game), and memories came back. It can be a […]

Translators, beware. Banana phone! Just in time for the primaries. No, we don’t need webcasting rights. Fun with flash. Um. Well.

Our beloved Alyosha is fourteen years old. He’s been showing his age for a little while now – aside from slowing down in general, he started getting excessively grumpy three or four years ago. At a vet visit not too soon after that happened, the doctor said his thyroid levels were low; he went on […]

I can now handle books with more than two authors. Yay. Nice to be able to spend ten or fifteen minutes making a change that actually affects what books I can handle instead of spending months making a change whose effects nobody else can see. Not that I’m done with the behind-the-scenes changes yet – […]

I’m trying to fill an opening in my group. If you know any good programmers who live in the S.F. Bay Area, who are looking for jobs, and who think that it’s a good thing for code to come with tests, please point them at that link or send them my way.

Up until a few months ago, the way I would, say, add a new book to the list of books I’d read was to edit a file (WriteDbc.java), compile it, and run its main, which would write out HTML pages directly from the Java data structures that it built up. Then, a few months ago, […]

Driven by my recent mania for all thing lean, I just finished Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck; I wish I’d read it a few years ago. I’d been aware of it for some time, but I passed it over when doing my initial tour of the agile literature. I had assumed that […]

This will not, I think, be the most useful discussion of Knights of the Old Republic, simply because I can’t help but viewing the game through the lens of Bioware’s latest, which had the benefit of a couple more years of experience. With that warning in place: Fun game. I kind of nibbled at the […]

Today’s book: The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida. Or rather, the book of a couple of months ago; I really need to start blogging right after I finish something. The book claims that something called the creative class has become hugely important over the last few decades, now outstripping the working class […]

For whatever reason, XEmacs decided tonight to crash on me when I fire up Gnus. Not good – I like to be able to read my e-mail. Fortunately, there’s a workaround – it doesn’t happen if I touch my .newsrc first – but otherwise the crash is quite reproducible. Sigh. I’d seen XEmacs crash once […]

It would seem to be E3 time again; hmm. I suppose the world does not need another blogger talking about it, but I have nothing better to do. Besides, I never got around to talking about the name “Wii”. Which is a stupid name. I know they’re trying a blue ocean strategy, I think that’s […]

I looked into using delicious for this, but its automatic blog posting doesn’t quite do what I want. So I guess I should cook up some way of transforming its RSS feeds, or something. (An excuse to learn about XSLT!) In the mean time: This seems to be sticking with me. Glad I didn’t buy […]

Sorry I’ve been so quiet over the last month or so. One reason is that I’ve been spending a fair amount of time playing Knights of the Old Republic. It’s not that I was blown away by it: I was just enjoying it enough to want to finish it while realizing it was a long […]