malvasia bianca

I did some book shopping in Paris. A bit silly, in these days of www.amazon.fr, but old habits die hard. And FNAC is still pretty cool, though not quite as impressive to me now as it was the first time I set foot in it. I bought most of Bruno Latour‘s books that hadn’t been […]

Ever since I read Refactoring to Patterns, I’ve been thinking that I should use Compose Method more. (I should really reread Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns to see what other low-level patterns I’ve missed.) But I’m too timid to perform quite that drastic surgery to the thicket of code that I’m working on. I just finished […]

I spent a little more time playing around with doing the upgrade piecemeal; it turned out that, while there were some pleasant groups of packages that came together in a clump of 10-20, most packages either were happy to be upgraded individually or were part of a huge clump that required a few hundred packages […]

As threatened after my last OS upgrade, I’m upgrading to FC4 relatively soon after its release. This time, the release notes are very clear about the easiest way to upgrade: install a single RPM (which basically tells yum to look for FC4 packages instead of FC3 packages), and then do yum upgrade. I’m actually not […]

Despite what I said a week and a half ago, maybe the A’s are going to make the playoffs; they’re tied for the lead (and about to take the lead) in the wild card, after all. Even the AL West title seems not out of reach right now. They will, of course, cool off eventually, […]

We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle last weekend. Actually, Liesl and I went the weekend before that, to make sure it was okay for Miranda; we decided that it probably was, though we checked first with Miranda to make sure. We all enjoyed it, though I don’t think it will end up as one […]

Prompted by Knuth’s delightful article “The Errors of TeX”, I just read his collection Literate Programming. (Which contains the aforementioned article, among others.) A fascinating read, for multiple reasons: Knuth is a really smart guy, whose opinions I very much respect, but he’s writing from a context that I frequently find very hard to understand. […]

I’ve thought a bit more about the whole strategy of the weak thing. In some sense, actually, the DoD’s analysis is reasonably on-target. The analogy here is to think of the US as a bully: we’re the biggest, strongest kid in the school, and we have no compunctions about beating up people who are substantially […]

From a DoD policy paper: Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism. Like Scott Rosenberg, I am appalled. Several years, I came to the conclusion that the term “terrorist” was almost never a helpful one, […]

Whenever I go to Europe, I’m happy that the coins reach higher denominations there than in the US: it seems to work pretty well. The thing is, though, I’m not sure that it would work well in the US: my change purse is always a lot fuller than my wallet, and I’m not sure that […]

Bonny Doon is the best.

When in Paris, I read the International Herald Tribune daily. Which was a change of pace: it’s been years since I regularly read any paper other than the Mercury News regularly. (In particular, it’s been a while since I’ve read the New York Times regularly; I read several news magazines regularly, but just the one […]

It was very pleasant reading the International Herald Tribune every day (except Sundays) over our vacation, and watching the A’s get closer and closer to .500, and finally reach it. (It would have been nice if they’d given baseball a bit more space in their sports section, though; ah well.) And then we got home, […]

A couple of trips to Paris ago, Liesl and I discovered the joys of raclette. We had it at a restaurant (attached to a cheese shop) called the Ferme Saint-Hubert; they gave us this huge chunk of cheese, stuck it on a rack with a heating element, gave us some meats and potatoes, and told […]

Just got back from vacation; I trust that my weeks of silence didn’t cause any distress to my legions of loyal fans. We spent a couple of weeks in Paris; our first vacation since our honeymoon that didn’t involve visiting relatives. (This is what happens when one has a child.) Loads of fun; I will […]