malvasia bianca

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 […]

A followup to my earlier complaint about the Mercury News’s coverage of the wiretap story: today, they ran an article (the link will go stale in a week, I think) giving a much more nuanced view of the matter, written by somebody (Cass Sunstein) who actually knows something about the topic. Bully for them.

It seems like a lot of cars these days have red rear turn signals, instead of yellow ones. Am I right in thinking that this is a relatively new thing? And is there any good reason for it? It kind of annoys me; yellow turn signals are a well-established part of cars’ external UI, so […]

I just put some recent pictures on my web site. Some from me at work, either surrounded by what’s important to me there (art by Miranda, books, and Emacs) or outside. The scenery really is gorgeous (and comes with horses!); I will miss it when we have to move to Sun’s main campus. Winter is […]

I don’t know if anybody cares, but here’s a longish John Lennon interview that I hadn’t seen before.

I subscribe to the paper edition of CounterPunch, but I’d never seriously looked at their website before today; clearly I’ve been missing something. Some examples, all from stories appearing today or yesterday: This is just scary. It does make me happy that it’s a Reagan appointee and former WSJ editor who’s pointing it out: I’m […]

Just how many Iraqis have died because of our invasion and occupation? The press doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of answering (heck, asking) this question, and it seems to me like a fairly important one. After all, the only potentially legitimate reasons for the war that I can think of are: […]

I e-mailed the author of the blog I mentioned recently, and he was kind enough to put together a lean manufacturing reading list.

Various mentions I’ve seen recently make me think I should learn more about lean manufacturing. An interesting quote: Kaizen activities in lean manufacturing often begin with red-tagging, in which all superfluous inventory, tools and rubbish are marked with a red tag and moved into one corner. At the end of a week, if any tagged […]

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 […]

This is really funny.

Despite my complaints a few days ago, I do think that the Mercury News is a decent paper by today’s standards, and this morning they reminded me why. They’ve been reviewing 700 appeals of local criminal cases; the results will appear in a five-part series that began with a special section of today’s paper, the […]

I just got a piece of spam whose subject line was “functor moustache”; for some reason, this amuses me.

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 […]

This is great. Ricardo Semler would approve. (Found via the XP mailing list.) (My volume of posts that link to something else with minimal comment of my own has increased; I guess I’m turning into a more normal blogger. Which is okay; I try to have at least one more substantial post on any day […]

The Mercury News had an article this morning headlined “Gore says Bush broke law in use of wiretaps”. (The link may go stale after a week, alas.) Which really annoyed me for two reasons: Why can’t the newspapers venture an opinion themselves on whether or not the wiretaps are illegal? This isn’t entirely a straightforward […]

An excellent MLK day celebration. (You’ll probably have to watch a free ad first, though. Which might then dump you at Salon’s home page; I’m not sure.)

I like the way this looks. Though I’m not sure how comfortable it would be…

I finally got around to reading this report on fair use from the Brennan Center. (Which I heard about here.) Quite good.

I didn’t actually watch or listen to the Alito hearings, but I liked Johanna Rothman’s take on the subject. Compare it to her other post her hiring blog that day.