malvasia bianca

The hosting collective that I’m part of is changing servers this weekend (to an x2100, yay), so don’t be surprised if this blog is offline for a few hours on Sunday. It will also be changing its physical location and IP address some time over the next couple of weeks, so it will be offline […]

Since I’m about to become a Mac owner, and since I seem to be far from immune to Apple’s reality-distortion field, I suppose I should spend a bit of time reminding myself why Apple is, in fact, a bad company. First, why I like Apple: Nostalgia. My first computer was an Apple ][+; I got […]

It was nice to see our stock price going up today while the rest of the tech sector was falling; the cause was an upgrade from an analyst at Lehman Brothers. Apparently, he likes our new CFO; the CFO’s last name perhaps has something to do with that, but the analyst also thinks that the […]

I just got my new router; it warmed my heart to see the following right on front of the box: This product may contain material licensed to you under the GNU General Public License or other open-source software licenses. Upon request, open-source software source code is available at cost from Linksys for at least three […]

I spent some time browsing WordPress themes; I found several that I like, and spent a few hours playing around with them. My initial favorite was 2cDarkGrey; once I actually installed it, though, it seemed a bit dark for me. Also, there were various things that I wanted to tweak, and I had a harder-than […]

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1. Seems to work okay; the main difference from my point of view is that the interface for writing posts has changed completely. (In general, the administrative interface looks quite different.) I suspect that I’ll end up liking the new interface, but it will take me a little while to […]

Cleaning out my list of saved links: A visit to the Ghibli museum. Lean manufacturing books are next up on my reading list. I’m glad some Congresspeople are seeing the DRM light… Because the bad guys aren’t about to let up. I repeat: the bad guys aren’t about to let up. Google’s hardly a saint, […]

I need to download Fedora Core 4 x86_64 CD’s, so I thought I’d give bittorrent a try: the idea of distributed download servers appeals to me. It didn’t work too well, though: the download speed reached 50KB/sec and then stayed there. So, after about 10 minutes, I gave up, and downloaded the images off of […]

I just got back from a shopping trip for accessories for the Ultra 20. I ended up at Micro Center, which was a good choice – fine price and selection, focused on computers (unlike, say, Best Buy), and not only do they treat people who enter in their store as potential customers instead of potential […]

Just in case anybody needs to know this: one way to see all but the first line of a file is to run the command sed ‘1 d’ on it. (I was sure there was a good Unix way to do this, but it took me about 20 minutes to find it.)

I finally got around to knocking off the oldest saved post in my RSS reader today; only 79 more to go. If that were my mail inbox, that number would be just fine, but I kind of doubt that I’m going to take the time to seriously think about (and blog about) what’s in those […]

I’ve ordered the new computers and the network equipment. The Ultra 20 and the network stuff will arrive in a week or so; the Mac will take more like four weeks. Which is just as well – it will give me time to transition my home directory and other assorted data away from this computer […]

My current network plan is as follows: There seems to be a consensus that the Linksys WRT54G is the router of choice. Or at least a member of that family; the cool kids these days sometimes get the WRT54GL. I’m thinking that a wireless bridge is the way to connect the upstairs computer; I like […]

I am typing this on a laptop that blinked a strange orange light when I plugged in the power cord, that has a red line on the left side of the screen, and where a large gap has developed in the upper left side of the case. Clearly, I have to be prepared, literally any […]

As previously threatened, I’ve moved this blog to malvasiabianca.org. (You can also use .com and/or stick a www. in front, if you feel compelled to do so for some reason.) The old address should redirect to the new one, as should all links within the old one (e.g. the RSS feed). If not, please let […]

Given my recent DS-sparked interest in touch screens, I suppose I should link to this. I can’t say that I was as impressed as I was expecting to be, though, given that it was linked to by three blogs that I read. Sure, you’d like a touch screen to be able to handle being touched […]

I’m beginning to feel like my choice of URL for this blog is hopelessly unstylish. Back in the dawn of time, I used my job for e-mail and web pages: carlton@math.stanford.edu, http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/, and so forth. But when I realized that I was going to be leaving academia, that strategy obviously became inappropriate, so I grabbed […]

One of the trendies of new companies is 37 Signals. They have three claims to fame: They’re one of the early AJAX pioneers. They take a delightfully minimalist approach to software design: they figure out a set of core features giving you the value, and make those features as useable as possible. They wrote Ruby […]

I would seem to be quite the lucky fellow: I won another iPod at work. They asked us all to bang on the Sun Grid for a little while before its launch, to try to find some bugs; I did my banging, and my name was drawn out of a hat. About which I feel […]

Amazon has a program called “Mechanical Turk” where people can sign up do to tasks that computers have trouble with (primarily image processing, as far as I can tell) at the request of computer programs. A clearinghouse of human labor for our robotic masters!