While the mini-Elbeno and I were horsing around today, he managed to get me in the eye with a fingernail. Luckily our next door neighbour is an optometrist, and she took me down to her office tonight to check it out. So I have a scratched cornea, not too bad – although it is painful.… Continue reading Ow
I’m Jaunty
A pretty smooth upgrade – Freeciv(-client-gtk) seemed to barf, so I just uninstalled it. The new Amarok is nice, even if the jaunty version isn’t totally up-to-the-minute. I did have to install phonon-backend-xine though. LLVM is v2.5, hurrah! GHC is still v6.8.2, boo.
Fixed gate
Today we had a new automatic gate opener/closer installed, so our driveway gate will now stay closed as a rule. This also means that we can let mini-Elbeno out into the yard or the driveway to play or trundle about on his trike while we are nearby, without having to constantly shepherd him or prevent… Continue reading Fixed gate
Battle of the Bands
The buildup started 5-6 weeks ago with band formations and rumours of entries. Then came the posters stuck up across the campus advertising the various bands. Finally, at 5pm today it all kicked off – the second annual Blizzard Battle of the Bands. When I worked at EA, we had the odd band contest –… Continue reading Battle of the Bands
Book Festival
This weekend we all went to the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA. The number of stalls was noticeably smaller this year: a whole row of children’s publishers was gone. We saw the following panels: Real Science (K. C. Cole moderating, with Carl Zimmer, Leonard Susskind and Avery Gilbert). A good panel discussion with… Continue reading Book Festival
Re April 1st
Dear Internet, I refer you to my thoughts of 2 years ago about April 1st. yours grumpily, Elbeno
How a Bug Made Me a Better Programmer
This is the tale of a bug. A challenging bug I encountered some time ago, and which changed my career for the better. It was late 2004. I was lead multiplayer engineer on Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, a title which could charitably be described as mediocre, but I like to think the networked multiplayer game was… Continue reading How a Bug Made Me a Better Programmer
I wrote my first Python program
Last Friday. Knowing almost no Python at noon, by 5pm I had some code to munge XML and do something useful for my current project. So it’s not bad. It’s good for productivity. Mostly because: It has useful libraries. Bread-and-butter data structures are built in, i.e. lists and dictionaries. I don’t care too much about… Continue reading I wrote my first Python program
Tips for night owls, midnight snackers, etc
If, like me, you often stay up late, finding yourself in a dark, quiet house, with the rest of the family asleep, then you are probably accustomed to moving about stealthily and not really needing much in the way of light to do so. I almost never turn lights on when moving about the house,… Continue reading Tips for night owls, midnight snackers, etc