The programming book market these days is small. Nothing like what it was eight years ago or so. And apparently, programmers don’t read books (any more). It’s mostly true. But of course, there are still books worth reading. I’m going to take as read the easy arguments: let’s assume that you’ve already pared away all… Continue reading Why Reading Books Matters to a Programmer
Month: April 2008
Hardy Heron
After a couple of days of slow servers, today it picked up a bit and I installed Hardy Heron without problems. Well, with a couple of minor problems. First, my /boot partition is still just a little too small, so I had to move a few things around to manage the recreation of the initrd… Continue reading Hardy Heron
LA Times Book Festival
I went with the family to the LA Times Book Festival today. We parked in the same lot as last year, avoiding the snarls off the 405 at Wilshire (signed UCLA) and heading up to Sunset to come in from the north side. This year, we had got tickets ahead of time for three panel… Continue reading LA Times Book Festival
Nostalgia corner: teletext
I want to share with my US readers a little known thing (at least over here) that goes by the name of teletext. This was (still is) a system in the UK that was sort of like the Internet before the Internet. Way back in the 70s the BBC invented a system for transmitting textual… Continue reading Nostalgia corner: teletext
The world’s worst-performing application
A few weeks ago I got a PC upgrade at work. My new PC is pretty much top of the line: nVidia 8800 GTX, 3GB of RAM, and 8 CPU cores. It’s pretty nifty. Which makes it all the more incredible that Outlook 2007 is literally the slowest, poorest-performing application I’ve ever had the misfortune… Continue reading The world’s worst-performing application
Helium
They say soon we will run out of helium. Most people think, “What’s the big dealium? So our voices won’t squeak When we inhale a leak – Balloons will just lose some appealium.” But balloons aren’t the sole use of helium: For industrial stuff, it’s idealium. When released without thought, It can never be caught,… Continue reading Helium
My Experiences with Radioactive Elements
I’ve recently been reading about the elements, and particularly about the rarer ones. Radioactive elements tend to be among the rarer ones on earth. In my life, not counting glow-in-the-dark radium dials/paint, radon emissions from e.g. granite, or other household traces of radioisotopes, I’ve had two interesting encounters with radioactive elements. The first time I… Continue reading My Experiences with Radioactive Elements
Miscellanea
Sorry for the relative blog silence recently. Here’s what I’ve been doing lately: Buying stuff at the local library book sale last weekend. Old maths textbooks FTW! Puzzling over how to approximate spirals with Bézier curves. Or otherwise thinking of a way to draw them. Having lunch with Gary. He actually exists in real life!… Continue reading Miscellanea
Vecto get!
Xach has released version 1.2.1 of Vecto, featuring circle arc paths, and I’m sure a whole lot more on the drawing board. (asdf-install:install :vecto)
A bit of a new look
I broke out the programmer art skills and tweaked the header image to something a bit nicer than the default, and while I was at it, made myself an icon for the site. If the icon doesn’t show up for you, don’t blame me. Get yourself a standards–compliant browser. I don’t care about your pathetic… Continue reading A bit of a new look