malvasia bianca

I was thinking about ways in which production might be building up between stages of pipelines that I’m involved in, and I realized: I have forty or so books sitting on my “recently”-bought-but-not-yet-read shelf. That’s several months of inventory – probably well over half a year, actually, given my depressingly low current reading rate and […]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends a […]

I’m too cheap to get a fixed IP address, and at some point recently, my router’s external IP address (i.e. the one assigned by my cable provider) changed. So I’d like to write a cron job that runs every hour and dumps my external IP address on a computer somewhere else, so I’ll always know […]

And now Jane Jacobs is dead. Sigh. Go out and read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, everybody. I really like this picture of her.

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post: the reason why my boss was so concerned about integration testing was because of customer feedback. Which is a perfect example of why customer representatives should be involved in writing tests (instead of, say, just handing off requirements and leaving it up to the engineering […]

We had a (very useful) meeting at work today which, at one point, turned to the extent to which our end-to-end tests should extend beyond the software that we are writing and actually invoke our software via our partners’ software. (As opposed to driving our external interfaces through test clients that we’ve written ourselves.) My […]

I’m in the middle of reading some Christopher Alexander, which of course gets me thinking about how our house works. And my conclusion is that I quite like it, but that Miranda can take almost sole credit for that. The downstairs has one largish L-shaped room, a small kitchen, and a small den. The upstairs […]

Today’s game: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, for the DS. It’s the sequel to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, for the GBA, and is not entirely dissimilar to the Paper Mario series. The gameplay is quite similar to its predecessor; in particular, the DS’s special features are almost entirely unused. (It could easily have […]

Currently, I’m performing SQL queries that look something like this: select id from books where author_id in (select * from ((select 106 id) union all (select id from compound_authors where author_id = 106)) as extended_authors); I have a hard time believing that the select * from bit is really necessary, but I can’t find a […]

I’m pretty sure this is from The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Reed, but that book was Jordan’s, so I can’t say for sure. The original recipe recommends spaghetti (or even vermicelli, which really doesn’t sound like a fit to me), but I prefer the fusilli that another recipe recommends: that way, the […]

Antibubbles. More IP insanity. I wish I could get more info about this, but I haven’t yet been able to find German sources. Links to pretty bug pictures I could watch this for hours. How to tell if your methods are too long. Another Octavia Butler tribute.

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.2. (From 2.0.1; largely a security fix.) Pity they don’t make patch files available. Let me know if you see anything weird.

I saw four kids playing patty cake on the playground at school last week. I hadn’t realized that you could do that with more than two people: basically, whenever you would clap the other person’s left hand, you instead clap the left hand of the person to your right, and whenever you would clap the […]

I was really glad to see all the pro-immigrant protests last week. Nice to see a bunch of students willing to cut school for that, which I totally wasn’t expecting – I wouldn’t have though a priori that immigration would get that sort of response. Shows how much I know, I guess. (Of course, I […]

I haven’t been all that excited about the upcoming baseball season so far, but here it is. Kicking off with an Indians / White Sox game; I can support that. I picked up the new Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Some nice tweaks to PECOTA (their player forecasting system), and the articles on the Indians and A’s […]

The mac is pretty well set up now. I’ve finished transferring all my music to it; the long part was just getting it on the USB drive from the old computer. (And I’ve even ripped a few more CD’s: I was really running out of room on the last computer’s hard drive.) The only thing […]