malvasia bianca

I’m trying to hire right now. Which means that I get to read lots of resumes, mediated by various pieces of technology. Which is annoying, among other things because the format in which the resumes are most easily read isn’t necessarily preserved by those mediating technologies. Specifically, Sun’s internal tools only accept resumes in either […]

In the spirit of “every long e-mail I send somewhere should be shamelessly recycled on my blog”, I present some random thoughts on testing. Why do we release products with defects that we weren’t aware of? This is a sign of flaws in our testing; two possible causes are: We don’t know what to test […]

Recently, we’ve been watching some videos on our TV via our Mac, using an appropriate video adapter and Front Row. Which works pretty well; I don’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s nice to know that the option is available for the times when I want it. Actually, I take that back: […]

Half a year or so ago, I retrieved my Nintendo 64 from a friend’s house, since I thought Miranda might enjoy some of the games on it. The one she settled on was Harvest Moon 64, a delightful little farming simulator. So, when Christmas came by, I thought she might want another Harvest Moon; I […]

For the first time ever, or at least since the dawn of time, I listened to an episode of JapanesePod101 today that showed up in my RSS reader earlier this same month. So the end of that backlog is in sight! I’m not quite ready to declare victory yet—at my current rate, I still have […]

Behind Closed Doors recommends that you have frequent one-on-ones with your team members: it says that One-on-one meetings provide managers an opportunity to ascertain status, solve problems, and provide positive and corrective feedback. Which I was a bit dubious about: daily standups provide a mechanism for me to get status from my team members every […]

I’ve been going through some changes recently in my Japanese study. I finished the Manga-based grammar I’d been reading sporadically, and finished going through the characters in Read Japanese Today. Which I recommend (both of them, but I’m thinking particularly of the latter here): in my experience, you need as many methods as possible to […]

I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.) An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL. Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama… For no particular reason, a random bit […]

I have rarely been so proud of my alta mater as when I learned that they (or at least Arts and Sciences) adopted a rule requiring faculty members to make their research be freely and openly available. I have no idea why academic presses didn’t start crumbling five or ten years ago; open access to […]

We’re writing an IDL compiler at work, to generate C++ code from a file containing a list of attributes. We’re doing this in TCL, which turns out to be surprisingly easy and fun: just define some procedures that correspond to the syntax of your language, eval the contents of the file, and you’re off and […]

I’ve linked to Hans Rosling before, but his 2007 TED talk makes him worth a second mention: A good speaker, with some very interesting facts to present and ways to present them, and make sure you stay for the surprise ending! (A warning, it’s 19 minutes long.) Found via Presentation Zen, who also links to […]

I’ve been in a state of disillusioned disconnect about presidential elections for the last 15 years or so. (I was excited about Bill Clinton; that lasted until he made a 180 degree turn on his campaign promises within days of being elected.) To some extent, I was wrong about that: I underestimated George W. Bush’s […]

Xanh (warning: web site has completely gratuitous Flash usage), our local excellent upscale Vietnamese restaurant, just moved into larger digs; glad they’re doing well. The new digs are a bit hip for me, and in particular the room that pairs interesting artwork with green ceiling lights (washing out all the colors in the artwork; I […]

I’m not the only person in the house who likes Love Hina: Liesl liked them, too, and Miranda is halfway through the series now and is finding them highly entertaining. Glad it’s not just me…

I’ve been tinkering with my GTD system in the two weeks since I first posted about it; I’m quite pleased with the system, and wanted to talk a bit about how it’s going and the changes. First: I really am getting things done. Simple things that should get taken care of immediately are, in fact, […]

I’ve talked enough about Zack and Wiki that I’m not quite sure what to say here. It’s a puzzle-solving point and click adventure game, with excellent use of Wii motion-sensing controls and a great sense of humor. And a great set of puzzles: Liesl and I thoroughly enjoyed working through them; I was continually amazed […]

As my coworkers can attest, I am a big fan of Trader Joe’s cocoa-covered almonds. So, on a recent trip to the store, I decided to branch out into their other chocolate/almond combinations, and bought a package of chocolate-almond clusters and a package of almonds covered with chocolate, sugar, and salt. The former were quite […]

Portal is a first-person puzzle game. The controls are like a first-person shooter, but your gun shoots portals onto flat surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling): you can have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the two teleport you from one to another. The game starts out with simple puzzles: you need to get to […]

According to a helpful informant on rec.games.go, Viz has stopped publishing the Hikaru no Go DVDs in English: Viz has cancelled the release of the remaining DVDs as single disks due to poor sales. Basically, they’ve discovered how expensive it is to translate and market, and are instead focusing their energies on the shounen market […]

I hooked up a spare USB drive to my Mac a couple of weeks ago and turned on Time Machine. Seems to be very easy to use; certainly the process of making backups is painless, and while I haven’t tried a restore yet, the GUI looks easy to manage. My only complaint so far is […]