malvasia bianca

I just tried to write a blog post containing some Unicode characters (I was blogging about 日本語 learning), and found that WordPress helpfully converted those characters to question marks. After digging around, I ran into this web page describing the problem (see also this thread): basically, if you created your database in a pre-2.1.3 [...]

Despite our earlier plans, we are now back on cable TV again. We actually went pretty far in carrying out the plan: after getting lots of useful advice, I bought a Mac Mini and a PS3, along with various accessories, spent an hour or two rewiring things, and spent several hours over the next [...]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here.

A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark.

Everything you’d want to [...]

Comcast is forcing us to switch over to digital TV soon; given that this will break our DVR, we’re thinking that we should just give up on this whole cable TV idea, and set up a computer as a media center instead.
Conveniently, Apple has just upgraded the Mac mini, so we’re going to go with [...]

This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects.
The examples just get funnier and funnier.
Very interesting take on GlaDOS.
I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had four basic tastes.
The [...]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going.
Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here…
Interesting way to think about [...]

One complaint about twitter (and other websites which I have less experience with, e.g. Facebook) is that they provide a sham of real connection: you’re not really friends with all of those people, it’s just a sort of faux intimacy.
This is true, but it’s actually a strength rather than a virtue, and being at a [...]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit.
My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview.
The backlog as a map. [...]

Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis.
Jordan on David Foster Wallace.
My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve had [...]

I’d been feeling a bit nonplussed for some time by the fact that I was using the WordPress default theme for the blog. But not nonplussed enough to actually do anything about it: I have other ways in which I’d generally prefer to use my limited free time, I don’t have strong design skills [...]

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length…

Visualizing the Python commit history.
Leadership, responsibility, and sausage.
Solving sudoku games via package management.
Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.)
Breakpoints as a checklist.
Programmers, insecurity, source control.

I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that walk along beaches) before; the creator [...]

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run [...]

Not the best week computer-wise. The server that hosts this blog (and that my e-mail resolves to) has been going down daily; I am optimistic that we’ve found and fixed the problem but, well, I’ve been optimistic about that once before in this round, and I was wrong that time.
And then I did my [...]

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work.
Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the opening [...]

I spent a little while yesterday poking around with getting Japanese input to work on my home Linux machine, since I’ll need that for entering vocabulary cards into the memory program.
To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by [...]

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area.
For those of [...]

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes:

It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; [...]

Another thing that I’d forgotten since the first time I read the GTD book: not everything that advances a project is a Next Action. Some actions are for the future (and hence belong on your calendar or tickler file); some actions need to be carried out by other people.
One concrete effect of this realization [...]

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can [...]

I just signed up for Twitter. (Should I capitalize the T or not? Hmm, looks like I should.) I mostly did that not because I want to start using it now but rather because I can imagine wanting to use it in the future, and, if I do so, I’d prefer to [...]