malvasia bianca

Not the best week computer-wise. The server that hosts this blog (and that my e-mail resolves to) has been going down daily; I am optimistic that we’ve found and fixed the problem but, well, I’ve been optimistic about that once before in this round, and I was wrong that time. And then I did my […]

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work. Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the […]

I spent a little while yesterday poking around with getting Japanese input to work on my home Linux machine, since I’ll need that for entering vocabulary cards into the memory program. To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by the […]

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area. For those of […]

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes: It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some […]

Another thing that I’d forgotten since the first time I read the GTD book: not everything that advances a project is a Next Action. Some actions are for the future (and hence belong on your calendar or tickler file); some actions need to be carried out by other people. One concrete effect of this realization […]

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can with […]

I just signed up for Twitter. (Should I capitalize the T or not? Hmm, looks like I should.) I mostly did that not because I want to start using it now but rather because I can imagine wanting to use it in the future, and, if I do so, I’d prefer to have a relatively […]

I’m not convinced I like the comment management UI in WordPress 2.5: I accidentally marked several previously-approved comments as spam and then deleted them. Fortunately, I noticed my mistake within a couple of hours, quickly enough that the most recent nightly backup was still around, but it was still an easier mistake to make than […]

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Seems okay so far; the administrative interface looks pretty different, and I’m not entirely convinced by it (the blue and orange clash, maybe a bit too much whitespace). And there’s now a space for commenters’ pictures; not sure what I think about that, I’m tempted to remove it because […]

A postscript to my recent mac repair: when I got my computer back, it seemed that the DVD drive sounded a bit different, and now I’m 80% sure that they replaced it without my asking them. I can’t figure out if this goes in the good column or the bad column. It is true that […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

I seem to have version control systems on the brain somewhat these days. Until not very long ago, I didn’t think much of them: they’re obviously important to have around if you’re collaborating on software, but other than that, who cares? But then I started getting addicted to looking at diffs after having checked in […]

A week and a half ago, I noticed that the latch on my MacBook Pro had stopped reliably holding the lid shut. Which isn’t a huge deal—I mostly use it at home, and turn it off between uses—but at some point it would annoy me. My new organized self recognized that the most likely reason […]

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 […]

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: […]

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 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 […]

The server hosting this blog had some troubles recently, caused (probably) by spikes in e-mail and web traffic happening at the same time. It’s under control now, but that got me wondering: it’s unfortunate that we have a single, not particularly scalable box that we’re depending on to carry that load. Wouldn’t it be nice […]

Pretty sand pictures: (Via Backreaction, which has links to more.) Those are some big crystals. Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. You’re probably already all aware of Why’s […]