malvasia bianca

Last weekend, we were driving back from the Exploratorium, and were listening to the iPod in shuffle mode most of the time. As expected, it gave us a delightful selection to listen to: Stan Freberg (“There’ll Never Be Another War”, the Civil War version as opposed to the WWI reprise); a 10-second snippet of Katamari […]

Some random notes from our recent trip to Boston and its environs: T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I read others’ blog posts using Google Reader. It shows me the unread posts in reverse chronological order, I go through them and read them; if I want to keep one around for a while for some reason or other, I hit the ‘s’ key to star it. If I run […]

Amazing walking wind-powered sculptures. Impressive optical illusion. Oh yeah? I’m building a topos in my attic. Not easy to make a shift like this. I’m a sucker for things like this. Given that I am interested in some sort of physical training and don’t seem to be getting around to restarting aikido, maybe I should […]

One other fun thing about the Fowler-DHH interview that I mentioned recently: about 37 minutes into the podcast, the conversation turns to large companies and their involvement in open source in general, Ruby in particular. They initially start off dubious about the concept, with Microsoft as their example, which made me wonder “hey, what about […]

I reported my problem to the author of fsck yesterday; today, I had an e-mail waiting for me, saying he thought it was a bug he’d fixed recently, and asking me to try a new version. I did, and at first it seemed to get stuck in the same place; while I was poking around […]

I just rebooted my computer, and it decided that some of my filesystems needed to have fsck run on them. (It had been more than 20 reboots since they were last checked.) And fsck decided to hang 4.6% through the initial check on one of them. Rebooting didn’t help: after every reboot, it noticed that […]

I finally got around to upgrading my Ultra 20 from .5GB to 1.5GB. Sun’s web site wasn’t very useful in trying to understand the machine’s somewhat picky requirements (something about the Opteron memory controller requires matching DIMMs, I believe), but fortunately Crucial’s excellent memory finder was up to the task. As with the x2100, the […]

Following a suggestion from Chris, I gave the desktop effects from Ubuntu 7.04 a try; not the nicest experience. To be fair, it warned me that the feature was experimental, and gave me a chance to turn it off right after selecting it; for better or for worse, though, I didn’t realize immediately that something […]

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04; seems to have gone smoothly. Haven’t noticed any vast improvements, but that’s fine: I’d rather have a distribution that subtly improves frequently than one that saves up for big bang changes. Nice to be able to do it (in a supported fashion) by downloading packages over the net, instead […]

I had the pleasure of going to the StreamStar launch in New York. In a private jet, no less; Sun execs occasionally take them, Fowler was using one to get to the launch, and the rest of us got to tag along. Which was fun. Not a transcendent experience or anything: the food was so-so, […]

As promised, here’s some more information about StreamStar. (Which is officially known as the “Sun Streaming System”.) It’s an extremely high performance video server, targeted at cable companies and telcos trying to move into the video space; its distinguishing features are that it can pump out an extremely high number of video streams at a […]

The product that I’ve been working on for the last four years has launched! I am very excited. I will blog more later; nice to be able to finally talk about this.

I turned on Akismet a little more than a month ago; since then, it’s caught just shy of 20,000 spam comments for me, or just under 600 a day, allowing less than five a day to make it through. I haven’t noticed any false positives yet (though admittedly I get a low enough rate of […]

There had been rumors at the end of last year that, some time this year, EMI would allow non-DRM versions of its music to be sold online, so I wasn’t completely shocked by the recent announcement. But I was still surprised, and surprised it happened so early. Nice to see one record company behaving sanely. […]

My apologies if you’ve had problems accessing the blog the last few days – our ISP had AC problems. Should be fixed now, but we may be ISP shopping soon. Any recommendations for good colocation facilities in either the Bay Area or Chicago? I’m not sure what our monthly bandwidth is – last time I […]

I might as well comment comment on Jobs’ recent DRM is bad letter. At first, it was really exciting. But there’s a fair amount of intellectual dishonestly there, too: Item: The statistics are bogus. You can’t just divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold and get anything meaningful. […]

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute. Gyoza stadium sounds awesome. Star Wars in ASCII. I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…) I suppose you’ve already seen […]

A couple of things that I’m a bit non-plussed by: I roll my eyes at the decision to have /bin/sh not be bash. It’s not like it was hard to update my shebangs, or to figure out what the problem was with my scripts, but I’m not sure what I’ve gained by doing so. Either […]

I’m running Ubuntu now. My first experience was rather negative: I put in the install DVD, went to fiddle with partitions, and found it didn’t understand LVM. Sigh. After a bit of thinking, I decided to go with an ext3 root partition that only took up a quarter of the new drive: I was pretty […]