malvasia bianca

I’m typing this on my new Mac. Which is adorable, and seems to work well enough, though there’s still a bit of work to do. I don’t have my music transferred yet – I tried sharing my music folder from my old laptop, but for whatever reason I can’t get the mac to see it. […]

Each of my dbcdb web pages corresponds to an instance of a class called Entity. And each entity has a key, which is the number used in the web page. The class Collection represents the collection of all the entities. Currently, each entity knows its key. As part of the change that I’m about to […]

Every time I read My Name is Asher Lev, it makes me want to spend hours hanging out in art museums. Or even start drawing or painting, but I always come to the conclusion that I don’t want to take that up only to drop it before I get even vaguely competent, and I never […]

I planned to say more about First, Break All the Rules, but I seeem to have gotten excessively sidetracked on computer and programming geekery, and worse yet geekery of relatively limited interest. For which I apologize: I’ll try not to let it happen again to quite that extent. Anyways, one last thing that I liked […]

I’m now generating my HTML pages based on the data in the SQL database. I’m still first assembling all the data in memory using Java method calls, and writing that out to an SQL database, but then I throw away the in-memory copy and regenerate it from the database. I can’t really say that that […]

The old laptop’s screen is now being held on with duct tape. Truly a marvelous substance. Fortunately, Apple claims that I’ll get the new laptop in the middle of the week.

The new Ultra 20 (panini) is all set up now – I’ve transferred my home directory, and I’m reading mail from there, doing svn commits there. I still haven’t set up backups properly, but that’s something I wasn’t doing right on the laptop, either, so it’s not a reason to hold up the switch. Notes: […]

A good DMCA policy paper. Maybe I should switch to zsh… Microsoft is evil. Mit Gott an unserer Seite. Yes, that is a static image. A different Z-Machine. Hmm. Laser monks! Pretty. Hmm: having been confronted with a few posts that look similar to the above in other blogs, I am starting to see the […]

I get DNS service through my registrar; twice this week, it has failed. (The only reason why I can write this is because I’ve edited my hosts file.) Clearly, I should look for other options; problems happen, and I don’t want any more single points of failure than necessary. The server that hosts this blog […]

Sigh. But I can’t stand to unsubscribe from any of them!

This contest is fun! (Marred by their misspelling of Sanskrit.) I’m quite confident of my answer on ten of them, pretty sure of a couple more, and am much less sure of the remaining four.

This article rather scares me – while there’s a lot I don’t like about the way my country’s government works, I had taken it for granted that laws were actually passed by the House and the Senate. Apparently not, in one recent case: why bother reconciling details between competing versions, if you can find a […]

A week after installing FC4 on the new machine, I wiped it and installed FC5. Which one of my coworkers recommended; I was planning to do an upgrade, if for no other reason than to avoid having to burn 5 more CD’s, but it refused to upgrade from local images. (Sigh.) So I had to […]

I can’t wait to see how this turns out. Don’t get me wrong – the proposed law won’t leave us in an ideal situation, but I am glad to see a real stand for openness, and sensible penalties for making unauthorized personal copies. On a related note, I laughed at this quote from an interview […]

The ip address for this blog (and my personal e-mail) has changed; it may take a day or two to percolate. And right now something strange is going on – I can’t resolve my domain names to either the old or new IP address. Anyways, it should sort itself out soon enough. Many thanks to […]

I upgraded packages on the new computer today. At first, everything went quite well – I was impressed at how quickly it downloaded the 300-odd packages it needed. (Apparently the networking works well!) And then it started installing packages; unfortunately, when it was most of the way done installing, the computer became unresponsive. (Largely: it […]

95¢ A FAWCETT CREST BOOK M1146 Wherever Paperbacks Are Sold Buy this Fawcett Crest Book from your paperback bookseller. If sold out, send only price of book plus 10¢ for postage and handling to Mail Order Department, Fawcett World Library, Greenwich, Connecticut 06830. If order is for five or more books, there is no postage […]

I burned some FC4 x86_64 CDs earlier this week. Then I went to install them on my new computer, but did a media check first. Three of them failed. I re-burned them; the new copies failed, too. Next: read an installation guide; it suggested that installation over a network or from a USB hard drive […]

I was listening to Herbert Grönemeyer’s first two albums in the car today; as they always do, they reminded me of the game Trinity. It is by far the strongest association I have of any piece of music with any other work. (Other than soundtracks, of course.) Which is pretty weird – the two have, […]

During recess at school today, I saw three kids playing together. One of them was a kindergarten girl from Miranda’s class; another was a first-grade boy from Miranda’s class. The third was an older boy (fourth-grade, maybe?) whom I didn’t know; I kind of think I might have seen him at a PACT function, but […]