malvasia bianca

Congrats to Alice and Ravi on their new baby!  (Born yesterday, for the record.)

My router seems unwilling to hand out static ip addresses to clients with certain Ethernet addresses. Which is unfortunate – unless I’m misunderstanding things (always a possibility), it seems that I’ll have to hard-code nameserver addresses on the machine that I want a static IP address for. And I’m not in control of the nameserver […]

Here’s more on Octavia Butler, if anybody’s curious. (Requires clicking through a free ad first.)

The hosting collective that I’m part of is changing servers this weekend (to an x2100, yay), so don’t be surprised if this blog is offline for a few hours on Sunday. It will also be changing its physical location and IP address some time over the next couple of weeks, so it will be offline […]

Octavia Butler died two weeks ago. I’d just finished her most recent novel, Fledgling, a week before that. Very good; I think of her as really hitting her stride, for while I seem to recall enjoying her earlier novels, I thought Parable of the Sower was great. I should go and reread that book and […]

Since I’m about to become a Mac owner, and since I seem to be far from immune to Apple’s reality-distortion field, I suppose I should spend a bit of time reminding myself why Apple is, in fact, a bad company. First, why I like Apple: Nostalgia. My first computer was an Apple ][+; I got […]

It was nice to see our stock price going up today while the rest of the tech sector was falling; the cause was an upgrade from an analyst at Lehman Brothers. Apparently, he likes our new CFO; the CFO’s last name perhaps has something to do with that, but the analyst also thinks that the […]

I just got my new router; it warmed my heart to see the following right on front of the box: This product may contain material licensed to you under the GNU General Public License or other open-source software licenses. Upon request, open-source software source code is available at cost from Linksys for at least three […]

I spent some time browsing WordPress themes; I found several that I like, and spent a few hours playing around with them. My initial favorite was 2cDarkGrey; once I actually installed it, though, it seemed a bit dark for me. Also, there were various things that I wanted to tweak, and I had a harder-than […]

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1. Seems to work okay; the main difference from my point of view is that the interface for writing posts has changed completely. (In general, the administrative interface looks quite different.) I suspect that I’ll end up liking the new interface, but it will take me a little while to […]

Cleaning out my list of saved links: A visit to the Ghibli museum. Lean manufacturing books are next up on my reading list. I’m glad some Congresspeople are seeing the DRM light… Because the bad guys aren’t about to let up. I repeat: the bad guys aren’t about to let up. Google’s hardly a saint, […]

I have doubtless said this before, but the idea that protected visibility implies package visibility is screwed up. I’m in the midle of a refactoring where I’m creating a superclass out of an existing class; at some point in this refactoring, I wanted the compiler to force me to use the new superclass instead of […]

If memory serves me well, about a year and a half ago I was feeling kind of down on video games. The start of this generation had been quite nice (largely because of the Dreamcast), but for the last year or two, it had seemed like the best I could hope out of a game […]

I need to download Fedora Core 4 x86_64 CD’s, so I thought I’d give bittorrent a try: the idea of distributed download servers appeals to me. It didn’t work too well, though: the download speed reached 50KB/sec and then stayed there. So, after about 10 minutes, I gave up, and downloaded the images off of […]

I’m now fully populating the database with information from my collection. It took longer than I expected; I’ll keep that in mind the next time I plan to work in a unfamiliar area. (It wouldn’t have been so bad, of course, if I were working in chunks larger than an hour or two at a […]

Last night, I had dinner with friends at Korea House in Santa Clara. (Which I recommend.) They had a raspberry wine on the menu, which I decided to try; it was okay, but the best part was the explanation of the name (punctuation, grammar as in the original): A hungry monk, eating wild black raspberry […]

I just got back from a shopping trip for accessories for the Ultra 20. I ended up at Micro Center, which was a good choice – fine price and selection, focused on computers (unlike, say, Best Buy), and not only do they treat people who enter in their store as potential customers instead of potential […]

Just in case anybody needs to know this: one way to see all but the first line of a file is to run the command sed ‘1 d’ on it. (I was sure there was a good Unix way to do this, but it took me about 20 minutes to find it.)

You’ve (or at least I’ve) got to love this: Among those who ate the most chocolate–averaging more than four grams a day–average systolic and diastolic blood pressure was 3.7 and 2.1 millimeters of mercury lower than their chocolate-spurning peers. This result did not hold true for other sweet foods nor did it vary among men […]

I finally got around to knocking off the oldest saved post in my RSS reader today; only 79 more to go. If that were my mail inbox, that number would be just fine, but I kind of doubt that I’m going to take the time to seriously think about (and blog about) what’s in those […]