malvasia bianca

The Microsoft FAT patent scares me. In the past, I didn’t like software patents because patenting algorithms didn’t make any sense to me as a mathematician. But patents that prevent reverse engineering are directly harmful, too: those are my pictures on my digital camera, and it’s none of Microsoft’s business if I want to upload […]

The chapters of The Fifth Book of Peace are titled Fire, Paper, Water, and Earth. This, of course, sets up an analogy of paper with air. Which I can relate to, but after thinking about it, it’s either a bit too specific or a bit too general for me. Words = Air: sure, I can […]

So I was just ordering a book for my dad’s birthday. (Cartographica Extraordinaire; I haven’t looked at it, but it’s recommended here.) Amazon was incorrectly claming that it hadn’t been published, and the publisher’s web site was a little strange, so I didn’t feel like ordering from either of them. After a few days of […]

The new Apple laptops look great; I’m pretty sure we’re going to get one. The CPUs should be plenty powerful enough, they have more than enough hard drive to keep me happy, the graphics card is better than I expected (I think; I have to look into its details). I’ll probably wait three or so […]

Looks like there’s a new version of WordPress out. The features look neat, too. I guess I should consider upgrading soon, even though it’s only been a few weeks since the last time I upgraded…

Hey, this is cool. Makes me wish I were still teaching. Well, not really, but still.

Forty minutes or so ago, I turned on the computer (actually, Liesl rebooted it out of Windows), and when I selected ‘Linux’ from the boot menu, it wouldn’t boot. Either things went black immediately or it said “GRUB” at the top of the screen and froze. Not good. At least Windows was still booting. So […]

When I was looking for podcasts, I ended up going to iTunes and browsing the top rated ones. I found some that I like, but the best is the They Might be Giants podcast. Only one episode so far, but it’s really good; I should go and get more of their albums. Other podcasts I […]

WordPress has an option to do ‘pingbacks’ on links referred to in your blog. I thought I’d had this turned on for a while, but I don’t really know; at any rate, when upgrading the blog, I found that I’m now pinging back my own blog. Which, on further reflection, is probably actually a good […]

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2. I still don’t know what was causing the problems I had the last time I tried this, but it seems to work now. Let me know if there are any problems.

In an RSS feed, you get some text plus a link. The link is the link to the original article that the entry in the feed corresponds to; the text is either the entire original article or an abbreviated version of it. Or at least that’s the way it’s conventially done. But in Simon Phipps’ […]

I finished reading an introductory SQL book. (Which seemed decent enough.) So now I don’t really have many excuses to avoid starting the transition of dbcdb to an SQL back end. Which I don’t really feel like doing, even though it’s clearly the right thing to do next. This means one thing: I should split […]

My registrar was having problems yesterday, so name lookups for bactrian.org and gobooks.info weren’t working. Seems to be fixed now.

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

I started playing around with Google Reader over the weekend, and I think I’m going to stick with it as my RSS reader. I don’t have any reason to believe that it’s better than other web sites for that purpose, but it’s good enough for me, and is a significantly better RSS reader than Gnus, […]

If you look at my recently read page, you’ll now see what I’m in the middle of. Which took about 5 minutes to implement. My internet explorer problems are an IE bug: the fifth item in the list of rules in the CSS spec on float positioning says that “The outer top of a floating […]

I did some more cross-browser testing; it turns out that my pages look like crap under Internet Explorer, and probably have for a while. Specifically, on the book card section of the page, the headers (Title:, Author:, etc.) look fine, but all the values are lined up horizontally in a row. I suspect it’s also […]

My pages now have sidebars. And are a bit more colorful. Yay. It didn’t turn out the way I envisioned. At first, I was planning for there to be a darker color (grey, which turned into pink) across the top and left, and for there to be white not just in the data area but […]

I had been having problems with blog spam, but I’ve been mercifully free of it for a while. I’d noticed that they were spamming the same posts over and over (no idea why; I couldn’t see a pattern, though I admittedly didn’t look very hard), so I turned off comments on those posts, and they […]

My first attempt at adding CSS to dbcdb was nice, but it had some flaws. In some places, I didn’t express the syntax as gracefully as possible; it put in an ugly and unnecessary scroll bar if your web browser was less than 900 pixels wide; and bright red is pretty unsuitable for a header […]