Posted in slice-o-life on June 27th, 2005 No Comments »
Courtesy of the Effect Measure public health blog, this gem from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:
There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. [...]
Posted in software on June 25th, 2005 2 Comments »
And it is Mercurial.
I have used BitKeeper for several years, and it is quite simply a fantastic piece of software. But for non-commercial projects, at least if I want to collaborate with other people, it is no longer an option. BitMover will make the “free” version of BK unavailable from July 1.
The result is [...]
Posted in reading on June 25th, 2005 No Comments »
Not too long ago, I decided to start tracking the books I read more closely. Though I had no particular goal in mind when I started this, I had been entertaining, for a while, the notion that I am not graced with much spare time.
The quantity of books I apparently read has given the [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on June 22nd, 2005 No Comments »
We spent the past week near Kansas City, MO, at a wedding-cum-reunion for Shannon’s family.
The sprawl around Kansas City is frightening, making Silicon Valley appear dense by comparison. It was over thirty miles from our hotel to the nearest semi-decent bookstore (a Borders, at that).
The area is blighted by new McMansion developments, many built [...]
Posted in reading on June 13th, 2005 No Comments »
In preparation for a move of house that isn’t actually likely to happen until 2007, Shannon and I have been going through some of our bookshelves. Our (admittedly unattainable) goal is to get rid of half of our books.
Since we don’t know when the move will occur (we first have to get permission from [...]
Posted in python, software on June 12th, 2005 No Comments »
Or why I love popular scripting languages, reason number one zillion.
I use Sage with Firefox to keep up with various blogs, and del.icio.us as a URL dumping ground.
It took me approximately five minutes to find a Python interface to del.icio.us and write a script that turns sets of tagged URLs into an OPML file that [...]
Posted in reading on June 12th, 2005 No Comments »
Shannon and I spent a dizzying hour at Borderlands Books in the Mission last Friday. (I know, I know, it’s been over a week.) Borderlands is the perfect geek bookstore, right down to the unnaturally friendly Sphinx cat who haunts the front counter. It houses an impressive collection of science fiction and fantasy, [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on June 12th, 2005 No Comments »
I’m taking a lazy afternoon away from Shannon and Cian, who are at the beach in Aptos. Atlas is a sublime place to laze.
As I’m tapping away on my laptop, the Mission Chick behind the bar yells out, “You know what, Stuart? I like you. You’re not like the other people here, in [...]
Posted in software on June 11th, 2005 No Comments »
About a decade ago (!), I wrote the Usenet FAQ on multithreaded programming. In spite of the fact that I haven’t maintained the thing since 1997, it surprises me by continuing to get a few thousand hits every month.
Unfortunately, much of the information in the old FAQ is so stale as to be useless. [...]
Posted in software on June 10th, 2005 No Comments »
I found an interesting bug this morning in Apple’s mDNSResponder daemon. This is the Mac OS X daemon responsible for managing automatic network configuration and service discovery, basically the thingy that a Mac uses to tell you “there’s a printer on the network here that you could use”.
The bug is of the “malicious value injection” type: [...]