malvasia bianca

On Thursday evening, I tried to log in from home. My computer got an IP address, but I couldn’t connect to any external web pages.
I fired up a terminal, and did some name lookups; that worked. At least more or less - it gave me an address, but also said something about not [...]

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces:
First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer):

And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.)

I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. [...]

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read [...]

Ninja Town. I love the character names.
A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.)
Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. [...]

I just accepted an invitation from a coworker on LinkedIn; when I did so, it presented me with a list of “People You May Know”.
The creepy thing was that I do in fact know about half of them, but I can’t figure out how LinkedIn knows that. If it could go through my address [...]

For the last several months, Miranda has been repeatedly talking about ideas that she has for a computer game. I idly encouraged her without thinking too much about it; recently, however, she’s been actually filling up notebooks with designs for the game, so it looked like time to start getting serious.
She doesn’t show any [...]

On the XP mailing list, somebody recently pointed out that never changing IDEs is a sign that you’re in a rut. Which is true; I love Emacs, but I love it less with more recent languages, so why not learn a bit more about what’s out there? Tim Bray recently posted about how [...]

Last weekend, we were driving back from the Exploratorium, and were listening to the iPod in shuffle mode most of the time. As expected, it gave us a delightful selection to listen to: Stan Freberg (”There’ll Never Be Another War”, the Civil War version as opposed to the WWI reprise); a 10-second snippet of [...]

Some random notes from our recent trip to Boston and its environs:

T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I read others’ blog posts using Google Reader. It shows me the unread posts in reverse chronological order, I go through them and read them; if I want to keep one around for a while for some reason or other, I hit the ’s’ key to star it. If [...]

Amazing walking wind-powered sculptures.
Impressive optical illusion.
Oh yeah? I’m building a topos in my attic.
Not easy to make a shift like this.
I’m a sucker for things like this. Given that I am interested in some sort of physical training and don’t seem to be getting around to restarting aikido, maybe I should give the [...]

One other fun thing about the Fowler-DHH interview that I mentioned recently: about 37 minutes into the podcast, the conversation turns to large companies and their involvement in open source in general, Ruby in particular. They initially start off dubious about the concept, with Microsoft as their example, which made me wonder “hey, what [...]

I reported my problem to the author of fsck yesterday; today, I had an e-mail waiting for me, saying he thought it was a bug he’d fixed recently, and asking me to try a new version. I did, and at first it seemed to get stuck in the same place; while I was poking [...]

I just rebooted my computer, and it decided that some of my filesystems needed to have fsck run on them. (It had been more than 20 reboots since they were last checked.) And fsck decided to hang 4.6% through the initial check on one of them. Rebooting didn’t help: after every reboot, [...]

I finally got around to upgrading my Ultra 20 from .5GB to 1.5GB. Sun’s web site wasn’t very useful in trying to understand the machine’s somewhat picky requirements (something about the Opteron memory controller requires matching DIMMs, I believe), but fortunately Crucial’s excellent memory finder was up to the task.
As with the x2100, the [...]

Following a suggestion from Chris, I gave the desktop effects from Ubuntu 7.04 a try; not the nicest experience. To be fair, it warned me that the feature was experimental, and gave me a chance to turn it off right after selecting it; for better or for worse, though, I didn’t realize immediately that [...]

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04; seems to have gone smoothly. Haven’t noticed any vast improvements, but that’s fine: I’d rather have a distribution that subtly improves frequently than one that saves up for big bang changes. Nice to be able to do it (in a supported fashion) by downloading packages over the [...]

I had the pleasure of going to the StreamStar launch in New York. In a private jet, no less; Sun execs occasionally take them, Fowler was using one to get to the launch, and the rest of us got to tag along.
Which was fun. Not a transcendent experience or anything: the food was [...]

As promised, here’s some more information about StreamStar. (Which is officially known as the “Sun Streaming System”.) It’s an extremely high performance video server, targeted at cable companies and telcos trying to move into the video space; its distinguishing features are that it can pump out an extremely high number of video streams [...]

The product that I’ve been working on for the last four years has launched! I am very excited. I will blog more later; nice to be able to finally talk about this.