malvasia bianca

My current network plan is as follows: There seems to be a consensus that the Linksys WRT54G is the router of choice. Or at least a member of that family; the cool kids these days sometimes get the WRT54GL. I’m thinking that a wireless bridge is the way to connect the upstairs computer; I like […]

Hey, this JDBC stuff really works! I could really do without checked exceptions, though: every single time I call a JDBC function, I have to add four lines of try/catch wrapper code, because an SQLException could be thrown at any time. Sigh. And I can’t think of a good way to avoid that, given that […]

As a manager who is drawn to XP, one question that reading First, Break All the Rules raises is: how compatible are agile methods with the book’s recommendations? Let’s start by going through the questions. 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? This is a strength of XP (and other agile […]

When playing a video game, I usually start a new game once, and continue an existing game twenty or so times. So why do so many games default to “new game” every time I boot it up? Maybe they could even use the annoying logo time during boot to look to see if I already […]

I believe I have complained here in the past about my DVD/DVR player that crashes periodically. Today, its DVD drive decided to stop reading disks, too. Sigh; by far my worst electronics purchase. And now is not a good time to be spending more money on stuff like that; fortunately, we have enough other devices […]

I am typing this on a laptop that blinked a strange orange light when I plugged in the power cord, that has a red line on the left side of the screen, and where a large gap has developed in the upper left side of the case. Clearly, I have to be prepared, literally any […]

Yay for boys who like painted nails.

A total cheese bomb – one pound of cheese is a lot of cheese if you’re pairing it with one pound of pasta. Requires managing three pots simultaneously, but it’s actually about as easy as can be imagined given that. It does take a bit of time, though, partially because of that but mostly because […]

I wrote my first SQL statements today. I haven’t gotten as far as actually inserting data yet – they just create the tables as described here. But it’s a start, and I also started doing the modifications to the code to dump the data to the database. I’m definitely past my programmers’ block now: I […]

We spent the middle of the day yesterday at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The first time I’d been there; quite nice, I will go back again. Though my favorite part was just listening to Miranda and Jordan talk to each other while they were walking through the galleries together. Anyways, I bought […]

I just finished taking a new manager training class at Sun. (I’ve been managing for a year and a half now; I only recently learned that I was supposed to take this class. Oops.) They gave us a copy of a book called First, Break All the Rules which, despite having a title guaranteed to […]

I agree with Keith Ray’s endorsement of Pascal van Cauwenberghe’s “Things I Didn’t Learn” series.

The GameCube version of Animal Crossing was one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played. I didn’t normally play it for hours at a stretch (though I did that more than once), but I played it for at least ten or fifteen minutes almost every single day for about a year. You live in […]

I had a very pleasant lunch yesterday talking with some other people at Sun about XP. At some point, the conversation turned to “superstar programmers” who do their best not to help other people, giving perfunctory answers to questions, sending various signals that they don’t want to be bothered, and even being actively insulting to […]

I earlier complained that “if Bush walked into a 7-11, pulled out a gun, and killed everybody there, the papers wouldn’t venture an opinion as to whether or not doing so is illegal”; given the events of recent days, it would seem that I was perhaps a bit pessimistic. Most kind of the executive branch […]

As previously threatened, I’ve moved this blog to malvasiabianca.org. (You can also use .com and/or stick a www. in front, if you feel compelled to do so for some reason.) The old address should redirect to the new one, as should all links within the old one (e.g. the RSS feed). If not, please let […]

Happy birthday to me. Not that I would describe my current life as a selva oscura; the first half has been pleasant and is ending quite well, and I am optimistic about the second half.

Given my recent DS-sparked interest in touch screens, I suppose I should link to this. I can’t say that I was as impressed as I was expecting to be, though, given that it was linked to by three blogs that I read. Sure, you’d like a touch screen to be able to handle being touched […]

Or at least like it; the episodes don’t do much for me, but the Egg Song is quite something.

It will take me a while to process Plain and Simple. (Which I learned about from the bibliography of the XP book, for what that’s worth.) Some facets: There can be well thought-out, stable systems of behavior that are strong enough to exist for quite some time next to American society without being absorbed. It’s […]