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.