malvasia bianca

Acceptance testing has not been one of my fortes. Honestly, it took me a long time to be convinced by it – why isn’t unit testing alone enough? I’ve been caught out enough times by acceptance tests which I put off writing and which, when written, turned up bugs, that now I’m pretty religious about […]

I’ve finished working through the examples in that SQL book, I’ve read a JDBC tutorial, and I’ve downloaded a JDBC connector for MySQL. So I guess I don’t have any excuses not to start getting my fingers dirty. (I first typed “getting my features dirty”; I hope that isn’t a Freudian slip…) Next weekend is […]

I’m beginning to feel like my choice of URL for this blog is hopelessly unstylish. Back in the dawn of time, I used my job for e-mail and web pages: carlton@math.stanford.edu, http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/, and so forth. But when I realized that I was going to be leaving academia, that strategy obviously became inappropriate, so I grabbed […]

I finally got around to putting up some 2003 pictures of Miranda. Which is good; it was embarrassing to have skipped an entire year. Acceptable when one’s child is older, but, up until recently, she looked quite different from year to year. (And yes, I know there aren’t any 2005 pictures up, either; they will […]

I’ve never been interested in collectible card games, but Perplex City sounds pretty cool. It probably wouldn’t be wise to indulge, though: if I enjoyed it, I would be tempted to spend rather too much money on it…

Meteos is a DS puzzle game. It’s in the “objects falling from the sky” genre; a new take, enabled by the touch screen. The goal is to line up three blocks of the same color (either horizontally or vertically); you can do this by moving blocks up and down in a column using the stylus. […]

I did not know about these.

I’m really not sure what to say.

One of the trendies of new companies is 37 Signals. They have three claims to fame: They’re one of the early AJAX pioneers. They take a delightfully minimalist approach to software design: they figure out a set of core features giving you the value, and make those features as useable as possible. They wrote Ruby […]

Somebody was just asking about this recipe recently, so here it is. From the excellent Bittersweet; I’ve presented the version that is for standard bittersweet/semisweet chocolate (50 to 62 percent); if you’re using darker chocolate than that and want to know how to modify the recipe, buy the book! I did include some of the […]

It turns out that I misinterpreted the comment about not sending the new iPod to me because of the cost. So they will be happy to send it to me, if I or a coworker can’t pick it up in person; it will just take a little while, because the person who would take care […]

I would seem to be quite the lucky fellow: I won another iPod at work. They asked us all to bang on the Sun Grid for a little while before its launch, to try to find some bugs; I did my banging, and my name was drawn out of a hat. About which I feel […]

A followup to my earlier complaint about the Mercury News’s coverage of the wiretap story: today, they ran an article (the link will go stale in a week, I think) giving a much more nuanced view of the matter, written by somebody (Cass Sunstein) who actually knows something about the topic. Bully for them.

It seems like a lot of cars these days have red rear turn signals, instead of yellow ones. Am I right in thinking that this is a relatively new thing? And is there any good reason for it? It kind of annoys me; yellow turn signals are a well-established part of cars’ external UI, so […]

Anybody have any good Japanese pop recommendations? I suspect that there’s music to be found there that I would enjoy, but I don’t have any good routes in. So far, I’m dipping my toes in based on video games and movies, which is fine, as far as it goes. From the former, “Everlasting Love” continues […]

The third in our “chicken curry by country” series. Or, I suppose, the fourth in our “chicken curry” series; I don’t have a single Indian version to highlight, but we’ve already seen one from (or at least inspired by) that country, and I’ll doubtless come up with more. Don’t worry about finding all the ingredients […]

I just put some recent pictures on my web site. Some from me at work, either surrounded by what’s important to me there (art by Miranda, books, and Emacs) or outside. The scenery really is gorgeous (and comes with horses!); I will miss it when we have to move to Sun’s main campus. Winter is […]

I am juvenile enough to be amused by the phrase “his ancient vocal technique, known as ‘yoik’.” (From Gierran, by Wimme. The vocals are pretty interesting; I could have done without the decidedly non-ancient accompaniment, but Scott warned me when he lent it to me that he probably likes electronica more than I do.)

Despite appearances, I have been making progress on dbcdb recently; it’s just been taking a little while to go through the examples and exercises in Learning SQL, and I was busy last weekend. (As I am this weekend, but I’ll find time tomorrow somehow. I have a big backlog of posts to write here, too.) […]

For the week of January 16 – January 22, eight of the ten bestselling video games in Japan were for the DS, an outcome I would not have believed half a year ago, let alone at launch. The only reason why the hardware chart for that month doesn’t show a similar skew is because Nintendo […]