malvasia bianca

From Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns (p. 20): Once a set of implementation patterns has become habitual, I program faster and with fewer distracting thoughts. When I began writing my first set of implementation patterns (The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Prentice Hall 1996) I thought I was a proficient programmer. To encourage myself to focus on […]

I was in Japantown in SF today, and picked up copies of Tales of Earthsea and Ocean Waves. (Both in Japanese, with English subtitles available.) The former of which I’m wondering about: no booklet, bad printing, claims to be region 1, and now that I’m poking around, I’m not convinced that there is a legitimate […]

Some things that have passed through my earphones recently: In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something. In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of […]

I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to each other in some […]

Watching Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk was an excellent use of 19 minutes of my time; if you don’t know the examples (both historical and present day) that have motivated his recent work, you’re missing something.

To all you Wii owners, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for Zack & Wiki. I’m not sure whether to call it a point-and-click adventure game or a puzzle game: it’s a sequence of set pieces all revolving around manipulating your environment to get to where you can open a treasure chest. […]

Okay, my stylesheet is mostly back: I’ve turned off comment formatting idiocy, restored my list bullets, turned off double justification, bumped the text back up to a non-microscopic size. I left the widths as-is, though, this time: I wish it were a bit wider, but I can deal with it, and it doesn’t look so […]

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Seems to have gone fine; the fancy window decoration stuff still doesn’t work, but I still don’t care. And, in a fit of industriousness, I’ve just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.3. (I even decided to switch to managing the checkout via subversion, just for kicks.) Now time to […]

Warning: this post consists of discussion of management of queues that matter only to myself, and is therefore extremely unlikely to be interesting to anybody else. Despite which I insist on writing it, because of my excessive fascination with the effects of and management of queues. Two months ago, when discussing my lists of saved […]

xkcd: One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.) Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.) I don’t have much to say about […]

I essentially finished Brain Buster Puzzle Pak some time towards the end of the summer. I’d finished all the built-in levels for the puzzles that I cared about; it has a random puzzle generator, though, which I wanted to explore more. But I never got around to doing that, and then I looked for it […]

Now I know what an earthquake feels like. About time; I’ve been living in the Bay Area for nine years, after all.