malvasia bianca

I do not understand the way Google handles their accounts. I have (well, had) two Google accounts: a gmail account (david.b.carlton) that I never used and another account (associated to my public e-mail address) that I use all the time for reading blogs. On the recommendation of some friends, I decided to start using Google […]

Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.) From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom–related entries. Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.) If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out: (Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.) A fun word-association game. […]

I recently turned on “fast user switching” on the Mac, and just discovered that the login dialog keeps the previous user’s keyboard layout, instead of reverting to the system default. Which is a problem if the previous user uses Dvorak, the new user doesn’t, and the new user is typing in a password so she […]

I was in an Apple store the day before Thanksgiving to get a replacement power brick (the cable on mine had started to fray), and decided to pick up a copy of Leopard while I was there: the .1 update was already out, and while I was worried about the keyboard freeze problems, it didn’t […]

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 […]

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’ve finally finished converting dbcdb from Java to Ruby. I’ve been using the Ruby version of the tool to write the database for about four months, but I’d still been using the Java version to write the web pages. Nothing too deep going on here; I was actually done with everything but the indexes as […]

My favorite bit from my employer’s counterclaim in the NetApp case: COMPLAINT PARAGRAPH 3: NetApp is a pioneer in the design of data storage systems marketed throughout the United States and abroad and continues to innovate new advances in data storage technology. NetApp’s patents cover a host of advanced features found in NetApp’s award-winning Data […]

One advantage Amazon’s new mp3 store has over iTunes: if there’s a song I like, I can just link to it. I believe that the iTunes store is addressible via URLs, but it’s not the same: the URL isn’t sitting there at the top of my browser window, and even if it were, I couldn’t […]

I bought my first mp3s online today; I am very happy to report that I didn’t do it through Apple. I don’t plan to make a habit of it – CDs have served me well for the last 21 years, and I see no reason to stop buying them now – but “And Try” by […]

I was quite impressed by Apple’s recent iPod announcements. Most companies, I think, would have been coasting for some time if they had as dominant a product as the iPod. Apple, however, is continuing to push ahead with a constant stream of improvements ranging from the subtle to the groundbreaking. Which is awesome: what I […]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something. As I mentioned […]

On Thursday evening, I tried to log in from home. My computer got an IP address, but I couldn’t connect to any external web pages. I fired up a terminal, and did some name lookups; that worked. At least more or less – it gave me an address, but also said something about not getting […]

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces: First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer): And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.) I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. Especially […]

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read but […]

Ninja Town. I love the character names. A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.) Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I […]

I just accepted an invitation from a coworker on LinkedIn; when I did so, it presented me with a list of “People You May Know”. The creepy thing was that I do in fact know about half of them, but I can’t figure out how LinkedIn knows that. If it could go through my address […]

For the last several months, Miranda has been repeatedly talking about ideas that she has for a computer game. I idly encouraged her without thinking too much about it; recently, however, she’s been actually filling up notebooks with designs for the game, so it looked like time to start getting serious. She doesn’t show any […]

On the XP mailing list, somebody recently pointed out that never changing IDEs is a sign that you’re in a rut. Which is true; I love Emacs, but I love it less with more recent languages, so why not learn a bit more about what’s out there? Tim Bray recently posted about how well the […]