malvasia bianca

A couple of things that I’m a bit non-plussed by: I roll my eyes at the decision to have /bin/sh not be bash. It’s not like it was hard to update my shebangs, or to figure out what the problem was with my scripts, but I’m not sure what I’ve gained by doing so. Either […]

I’m running Ubuntu now. My first experience was rather negative: I put in the install DVD, went to fiddle with partitions, and found it didn’t understand LVM. Sigh. After a bit of thinking, I decided to go with an ext3 root partition that only took up a quarter of the new drive: I was pretty […]

Miranda’s really nagging me about wanting to use my Linux computer. But, before letting her do that, I want to do two things: replace one of the drives (the original one, which I’ve been using for everything but backups) with a larger one, and install Ubuntu. Following John’s suggestion, I’m moving /home and /usr/local to […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

We’re planning an upcoming vacation; we’ll be in Berlin for four days, then elsewhere in Germany for a few days, then in Amsterdam for a few days. Details will probably be worked out on the fly – we’ve bought the plane tickets and done a hotel reservation in Berlin, but no train tickets or non-Berlin […]

I’m in the middle of (very painfully – it’s been a while) attempting to compose a letter in German. I’ve had to refer to a bilingual dictionary several times over the course of the process; oddly enough, it turns out that the dictionary doesn’t list the words for either English or German (in either language). […]

When I mentioned my earlier post about questions I had about driving in traffic, Jordan pointed me at this article that claims that a single driver, by leaving a large amount of open space while entering a traffic jam, can actually (at times) break up the jam. Which is pretty amazing, if true. The author […]

Right now, the 51st book on my Amazon recommendation list is Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization, while the 52nd is p-adic Numbers: An Introduction.

See, this is why Apple is so annoying. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t want one. I don’t have a video iPod, I don’t want one. But the iPhone sounds awesome, despite being a jazzed up combination of those two. I’m not going to go out and buy one on release or anything, […]

Bully is the latest free-roaming game from Rockstar, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. A quite pleasant experience. Lower-key in many ways compared to the only exemplar of the latter that I’ve had the pleasure of playing. A smaller environment, not as long a game, much less over the top in terms of […]

Now that I’m seeing queues everywhere, I’m getting curious about both the underlying math and the underlying pragmatics. Take a highway, for example: say you want to get the most use out of one. What does that mean? I guess it means maximizing total throughput, or more specifically the car miles driven on the road […]

I seem to have been letting Wii experiences build up; time for a dump. I’ll probably forget some things, but hopefully I’ve remembered most of the things I want to say. I’m not planning to go out and buy more minigame compilations, but I’m definitely glad I got Rayman. The minigames vary in quality, but […]

One of the things I need to do in Ruby is read and update data stored in an existing SQL database. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I thought I’d look at existing libraries that provide this functionality. The pickaxe book didn’t give anything useful, but I saved some posts in a newsgroup thread on […]