Someone knocked on the front door about half an hour ago. We tend to get a lot of “get out the vote” traffic, and while we did mail in our ballots, they probably only arrived today, so on the assumption that it was someone canvassing the neighborhood and ignoring our “No Soliciting” sign, I [...]
In a tutorial he gave yesterday, Alistair Cockburn came across as something of an asshole. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (after all, one of my best friends is an asshole). I’m not highly inclined to give him money, though…
Must. Have. Cheeky. Beer. Stein!
Easily the coolest presentation I’ve seen all year. (Upshot: by putting most of the computational responsibility for, e.g., a soccer game into the field itself, rather than into the players, you can achieve very flexible AI behaviors, and this architecture lends itself well to parallelization.)
Too bad the software he used in the demo [...]
Yesterday, in the course of my work as a student volunteer (yay, free admission!) at OOPSLA, I spoke with people from:
Finland (via Germany)
Germany
Latvia (via Italy)
Sweden
France
Canada
New Zealand
England (at least 3, although I have taken classes from two of them at PSU, so they only sorta count)
China, via Portland State University (a Ph.D. student gave me a [...]
Just sat down for a demo of WebTest, which probably looks pretty cool if you’re stuck in the land of Java and Ant, but reminds me of Selenium for people with an XML obsession. Now to excuse myself from the room quietly…
Up before the newspaper is delivered. Bleorgh.
Who knew you could write so much about gourmet salt?
My sweetie is coming home from her service trip to New Orleans tonight — I’ll be very happy to see her again. Yesterday, she posted a brief update.
It sounds like it’s been quite an interesting experience: cockroaches, mice, and no hot water in the place she’s staying (fortunately, they do have cots to [...]
Dan North introduces BDD. Starts with an explanation of how the concept of BDD evolved from confusion around TDD, and towards the end, includes some interesting snippets of JBehave’s support for acceptance tests. Quite interesting (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Nifty site: BillMonk lets you keep track of shared utility bills, restaurant tabs, IOUs, and borrowed stuff. Heard about this via the Ruby on Rails podcast. Sounds pretty cool! (Oh, and it’s free.)
With fawnapril out of town, I’ve filled up the Netflix queue with crap. (Actually, Returner, which she hasn’t been interested in watching, is quite good — I’d forgotten just how much fun it was.) Case in point: Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God.
Yeah. Not only did they make a [...]
Worksman makes some interesting-looking cargo trikes. Also, their website is one of the worst I’ve seen in quite some time.
From the San Jose Mercury News:
E. coli linked to cattle ranch
Health officials have matched the deadly bacteria found in bagged spinach to samples of cattle manure found near a field where spinach was grown, providing a major clue to the source of an outbreak that killed three people and sickened nearly 200 last month.
[...]
“This is [...]
My WinXP box is currently taking forever to shut down. Why is it shutting down? Because I ran Windows Update, which reported that it failed to install any updates. “Well, then,” I hear you ask, “why should it need to shut down?” Good question. It kept popping up an alert [...]
Every once in a while, I either get hit by a car, or encounter an unstable person on the bus, or (as happened today) have to deal with dumb teenagers on the road. Every time, I look back and think, “man, it would’ve been nice if I’d had a camera with me.”
So, curious and [...]
Movies the Ruby Way. (Note, however, that the code for Fight Club rule #4 contains a bug.)
[EDIT: Corrected the boundary condition bug. I'm such a geek.]
I just ordered another Mac Mini to act as a server, this one for a different project. Guess that means I should work on getting the first one ready to ship off before they pull a Tribble on my desk. (Actually, a cluster of Minis would be kinda cool…)
Bob Woodward published excerpts from a memo written by our own Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently Rumsfeld wants a “broad, fundamental reorganization” of “both the executive and legislative branches”:
The broader [U.S. government] structure is still in the industrial age and it is not serving us well. It is time to consider a new Hoover Commission to [...]
Discworld wedding cake. (Link via tragerstreit, she of the meat cake.)