I *heart* Fortune

courtesy of fortune(6)

You worry too much about your job. Stop it. You're not paid enough to worry.

Another Time Suck

So I stopped at borders yesterday and picked up a copy of quicksilver, Neal Stephenson's new book.

First impression: It's good. It's long, and probably won't be a quick read, but overall I like where it's going.

Interestingly, for those who are having trouble understanding some part of it, there appears to be a wiki devoted to the book. I haven't delved too deeply into the wiki yet, since I want to avoid finding out too much about the book before I read it, but I can definately see why this kind of thing would be useful in the future...

New Stamford Art

Well, apparently whoever is in charge of all the random artistic things that go on in downtown Stamford wasn't willing to settle for filling the city with interestingly painted circus animals, and so now we have these showing up all over the place.

Random Geek

So I was walking down the street today, wearing this t-shirt, and some random guy passes me (going in the other direction, so he had only seen the "SYN" part at that point), and he turns to me and says "ACK".

Perhaps there are more geeks in Stamford than I thought...

Avast You Landlubbers!

Don't forget that it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Yarr! It appears the scurvy sea dogs of London.pm are in the proper frame of mind for the day, and all the rest of you had better follow along or I'll make you walk the plank!

A Tax On People Who Are Bad At Math

Apparently one of my neighbors has been having some trouble with their morning paper...

I don't really have anything interesting to say about this, but I thought the sign was amusing, so I had to share it with the internet ;-)

Checks and Balances are Overrated Anyway

Interesting NYT article on some of the new changes our fearless leader is asking for in his fight against terrorism...

I think my favorite part is this:

Officials could not cite specific examples in which difficulties in obtaining a subpoena had slowed a terrorism investigation.

So they're not willing to actually give examples of why this is needed, and we should just take them at their word that it's a good idea, and accept their assurance that it would only be used when it's in our best interest.

Pardon me if I'm less than thrilled about this concept.

Too Dman Fnuny

This is great.

Of course it wouldn't be complete without an implementation in perl...

Naturally, the license in that script is the best part ;-)

Implementing Condition Variables on Win32

So there's been some discussion on various APR and Subversion mailing lists recently about exactly how to implement POSIX style condition variables on a Win32 system.

The existing implementation in APR is buggy, and we need a better one before we can merge the work that's been done on making svnserve use a pool of threads into Subversion's trunk. After everyone and their brother posted their (flawed) schemes on how to do it, Branko finally posted a link to a paper containing more than you ever wanted to know about implementing condition variables on win32 systems.

I doubt anyone who reads this is especially interested in this stuff, but I wanted to post it here so I remember to go back to it later and read the rest ;-)

M-x nxml-mode

So James Clark (of expat, DSSSL, and probably many other things) has created a lovely new XML mode for GNU Emacs.

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to waffle back and forth between loving and hating both vi and Emacs, but this, this is really really nice. If you do any amount of XML editing in Emacs, I suggest you check it out at once.

Oh My...

I continue to be amused by Rob's stash of incriminating photos.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Cory Doctorow (of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom and Boing Boing fame) has a new book out.

This one is a series of short stories, one of which (0wnz0red) was published a while back on Salon. Most of the rest are available off the book's website, but for a few of them you'll have to shell out some cash for the hardcopy.

If you think it's a little weird that he's giving away most of the book for free off his website, I suggest you read a little about his reasons.

Personally, I'm putting in an order at amazon before I even start reading the ones he's putting up for download, and I suggest you do the same.

Disappearing Icons

Ok, so this is really confusing me.

For some reason both Photoshop Elements and Acrobat Reader have both managed to lose their icons on my powerbook. They're both just showing up with that default icon that you get when an application doesn't have it's own icon. Reinstalling the application doesn't seem to help, and neither does cleaning out the various cache directories in the system (~/Library/Caches, /Library/Caches, /System/Library/Caches...), or rebooting, or any combination of the three that I've been able to figure out.

Anyone have a clue how to fix this short of a clean reinstall of the system?

Ted Koppel On The Dangers Of The Patriot Act

It's nice to see that the press is coming to it's senses and saying what a lot of us have been thinking for some time now.

Damn Neighbors

Ok, so I'd just like to point out that 6AM on Saturday morning is not the most fun time to be woken up by a fire alarm because one of the downstairs neighbors had something in their apartment catch on fire.

On the bright side, everything is fine, nobody was hurt, and I was back in bed within half an hour or so, but still, not the way I would have chosen to start the weekend if it was up to me.

Another $COMPANY Weblog

Apparently Roberto went and got himself a blog.

Of course he started it months and months ago, and I'm only noticing now because someone mentioned it during breakfast today, but still...

In Defence of O'Reilly

Nat Torkington has an interesting post in his use.perl journal where he answers some of the common questions people have about O'Reilly these days.

It seems to me that O'Reilly is a damn fine company, they make a good product, help the community when they can, and are just generally nice people.

It's becomming a cliche, but "Times are Tight", so yeah, everything isn't they way they'd like it to be, but despite that, they do manage to do an awful lot of really cool things, and I'd hate to see people forget that because of a few understandable shortcomings.

Making The Move

so i figure that since my free month is up, and i'm pretty satisfied with typepad so far, i'm going to take the plunge and move over. my blog's new location will soon be at asdf.blogs.com, so head on over there in the future. as soon as they get their domain mapping working (it's planned for early september, i'll think about pointing this URL over there, and for those of you using the rss feed, i'll be installing a permanent redirect in my apache config once i've finished the migration.

thanks blosxom, it's been fun, but the lure of typepad is just too much for me...