malvasia bianca

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building: Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as […]

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses: This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69) It requires a system of communication in which the building is […]

About a year ago, I was browsing a local comic book store, and decided to pick up the first volume of Kabuki. Pleasant enough – I’m as happy to read comic books about attractive women beating the crap out of people as the next person – but flawed in its own ways, too. Still, I […]

I’ve gotten permission from Sun to release a C++ unit test framework that we (largely I, but with significant contributions from others) wrote. Here’s its web page; there’s still a significant amount of work to before I want to announce it more widely, but the source code that’s there works just fine. I’ll try to […]

We went to a (quite nice) party yesterday. Hosted by friends of ours, lots of people around our age present, most of which were couples with kids. I’m pretty sure that Miranda was the oldest kid there; in fact, she may have been two years older than any of the other kids. Which is pretty […]

Anybody have a favorite C++ XML parser? We might need to add an XML/HTTP interface next to an existing CORBA interface soon at work, and I’m not too familiar with the options out there. It’s a very simple interface – a few simple short requests, a few simple, short responses plus one simple, long response. […]

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a […]

I had hopes for France, but not much seems to be coming of that. But now Norway is stepping up to the plate, and is demanding action fast. Aside from the DRM issues, I like that they’re complaining that Apple “reserves the right to change unilaterally consumers’ rights to access material already purchased.” Yes, that […]

Doctor Fun has ended its run. The last remnant on my bookmarks page of the early days of the web…

These sound to me like desirable characteristics for open source decision makers.

I finally got around to putting up pictures of us (well, mostly pictures of Miranda) from last summer.

My dbcdb pages now can have a list of external links attached to them. This is a feature that I’d been wanting to add for a while – until now, the links from within these blog entries probably served as more of an annoyance to my readers than anything else, since the information on those […]

One thing I wanted to learn when I started reading about lean: given that Toyota is supposed to be so great at everything, why is it that, when I last shopped for a car, fully intending to buy one of their models, the experience was so bad that it (or rather they, I tried two […]

We got back the results of Yosha’s blood work; it would seem that his kidneys aren’t functioning at full capacity. Which might even explain the vision problems: kidney problems can lead to high blood pressure can lead to vision problems. We’ll see; we’ve gotten bags of special “easy on the kidneys” dog food, and hopefully […]

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress. We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

I wasn’t expecting to like How Buildings Learn nearly as much as I did. I learned about it from the XP book‘s bibliography, and certainly you wouldn’t have to look very far in the book to find inspiration for your programming. But I was surprised at how interested I was in the actual topic of […]

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