This makes it official. Today is the first day of the Winter 2003 quarter at UCLA, and I’m not enrolled in any classes. My short career as a part-time graduate student has come to an end. I enrolled in the MSCS program at UCLA last year in part because I was hoping to round out […]
Reading List for 2003
I finally finished reading Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month this past week as I was recovering from a nasty chest cold. Even though the book is now 25 years old, it’s still got some fantastic insight on why software projects are perennially late, over budget, and full of bugs. Still on my software engineering kick, […]
After all, it’s just a perl script
Someone at work volunteered to port and maintain our proprietary package-management tool to Solaris. All twelve thousand uncommented lines of it. Good luck. I’m sure someone is going to notice, and they’ll want to spend the next 3 months of their time doing a Linux port, too. It seems to me like it would be […]
blogs.yahoo.com?
Home pages are dead. Yahoo! GeoCities should re-invent itself as a blog site. Fresh content is better than stale content, and blog authors have an incentive to keep their blogs up-to-date.
It’s a Wonderful Life
Every year around X-mas time I’m sure to mention the story about how It’s a Wonderful Life became a holiday classic due to a snafu with copyright law. Earlier this week, NPR reported on this very story: NPR’s Rick Karr reports on how a 1946 box office flop became so ubiquitous on television this time […]
Duraflame and egg nog
We lit a fire tonight in our fireplace. It was the first time we’ve had a fire in our new home. A chimney-sweep came out a few weeks ago and said our chimney was OK to use as long as we didn’t have a fire for more than 8 or 9 hours. Avital drove out […]
Keeping my blogroll up-to-date
My blogroll (the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to, which appears in the right-hand column of my blog page) is now going to be more consistently up-to-date. Here’s how I did it. First, I set up a cronjob to fetch mySubscriptions.opml from my Radio Userland page. Next, I’m using Jeremy’s opml2html.pl script to convert […]
Dog-sitting
We’re dog-sitting this week. Our friends Rob & Lamelle are in east Asia, so we’re watching Chaya, their Israeli mutt. I’ve been told by friends before that dogs are much more work than cats. You’ve gotta walk the dog two or three times a day! Luckily, Ariella has been taking mornings (I like to sleep […]
Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes
Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002: “Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.” As usual, Jakob is right on the money. Did you notice […]
Ray Sun has a blog
My friend Ray Sun, longtime MSFT employee and all-around kewl guy, now has a blog. I set him up with my tool of choice: MovableType. I didn’t even bother to run uname -a or perl -v. I just unpacked it, tweaked mt.cfg, and the thing just worked. Ray used to be a program manager for […]