Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas
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Monthly Archives: December 2006
Tagged
Brent has tagged me (and Gus), so clearly I have to respond. If I understand the rules of this game, I need to spew five things which aren’t common knowledge about me.
1) I’ve gutted and cleaned a deer with a 2 1/2″ pocketknife. (Thank god it was sharp!)
2) I have seen and been around the ruins of every medieval castle in North Wales (ordinance survey maps are AWESOME)
3) The only class I ever got below a “C” grade was “French” (I got a “D”), which I took in the 7th grade. I followed that up by getting “A”‘s in Latin the next year. Go figure.
4) I’ve learned the hard way that welding project can quickly grow to the point where you can not physically move the project you’re working on. That led to immediately learning about cutting torches and grinder/cutting wheels. In my basement.
5) I really enjoy baking bread, but I hardly ever do it. I takes an almost entirely unclaimed saturday for me, and I seem to have to be wearing something dark to really make it worthwhile.
Holidaze
That’s what I’m in today. I woke up humming, whistling, and improvising (much to Karen’s amusement) on the standard christmas tunes fare. And some time around 1pm my brain hit a patch of black ice mentally and I’ve been spinning since. The holidaze.
About 3 weeks ago, I was looking forward to days like this – fairly quite, I could focus down without interruption and really get some good stuff done. I believe I simply failed (most likely for the umpteenth time) to realize that I would be dragging as much as everyone else with the inevitable crush of holiday to-do’s, running about, and “is that mailed off yet”.
We’re really doing fine – especially compared to some of the folks not even 30 minutes from our house – the ones that aren’t likely to have power until after Christmas. One of my coworkers lives at 2000 feet in the foothills of the cascades. They have a generator, but they also have a neighbor that prefers not to hear it at 2am. Can’t say as I really blame him, but I’d run a generator if it was my heat source and it was 20 degrees outside too. (He’s more in a daze than I am)
TrenchMice is live!
I’m sure some of you have heard me talk about TrenchMice – a project that has been underway for more than a year focused on reputation and rating. Well, TrenchMice is live as of last Friday.
The site is the brain child of John DeRosa, one of the founders of Singingfish and a good friend of mine. It’s meant to provide a forum and rating mechanism to really tease out the soft data associated with employers – the good and the less than optimal. To really achieve that goal, however, it needs people (you, hopefully) and their thoughts.
Take a second and take a look at the site, check it out, register for a free account, and maybe give some mad props to your favorite company or boss.
It’s also worth noting that the TrenchMice staff have a blog at http://www.cogitooptimus.com/, and today they posted up some thoughts on the site and privacy – always something of an issue with reputation. When I talked with John the other day, he said that more posts of different topics and ideas would be coming.
Update: And it’s all done with the Django web framework.
Huge Congrats to Gus – 5 star VoodooPad
A huge congrats to Gus, author of VoodooPad Pro, which made a fantastic 5 out of 5 stars in MacWorld UK!
Mondrian
Google’s video of Guido demoing their Mondrian code review system is available. It is a fascinating system, and I wonder where the people/attitude component fits in. Technically, the system is really interesting, and I expect it’ll be copied to some extent external to the Google world at some point. Enough people will probably be excited about it… but the Mondrian system is built very internally to Google – using a lot of their private/internal architecture to get things done.
Takes a while to watch the whole kit, but it’s worthwhile.
dat Brent Simmons
heh – spotted this and got a chuckle.
Direct to XBox 360
I’ve got to admit – this is pretty darn smart. Microsoft is making a game development tool set available for their PC’s that will apparently allow folks to develop games and deploy them to the XBox 360.
I haven’t read in depth about XNA, what it does, or how it all hooks together, but all appearances show that it’s something that can be used to do indie game development. And they’ve hooked it towards their Console – making it probably one of the easiest consoles to develop for in that very fact.
At the moment, I’m kind of personally annoyed at DirectX 9.0 for no fault of it’s own – simply that I can’t easily run a graphics intensive game on my Mac because it’s based entirely in DirectX technologies.
Anyway, good for MS. Good move.
when the hell did postfix get so damn complex?
And yeah, before you get all snarky about the venerable sendmail monsters, I should point out that I configured plenty of ‘em.
I spent part of the weekend doing a little mail server install. You know, all the basics – postfix, courier-imap, etc. But man, I gotta tell you – it’s been a while. Postfix has added a slew of features since I last looked, and I’m doing a more complex install than I have in the past. There’s a lot of great details out there, but the sheer volume of things to choose through, figure out, and decide upon is just completely huge. Almost overwhelmingly so.
I’ve got nice virtual domain auths running, you can check you mail, all that good stuff. But getting authenticated SMTP relaying is still a bit beyond what I’ve nailed down. I need to just read the darn docs thoroughly on those sections – no “howto in 5 minutes” is going to give it to me in a fashion that I suspect I’ll want to use. But in the mean time, I’ll take a few moments to whine here about mail systems setup.
packrat
I’m a bit of a pack rat – definitely lean towards the “hoard everything” tendency. And you know what? It’s damn hard to get rid of stuff. Making space for Christmas trees, Karen and I finally decided to get rid of the futon. Not just shove it in her studio, or down in the basement, but actually get rid of it. I found it surprisingly hard, and I can’t even give a reasonable explanation as to why.
But it’s gone now, and the space in the living room is really, really nice to have. True to my pack rat hind brain, I kept the frame (it’s good poplar!) and at some point I’ll disassemble it down to it’s component wood parts. (There’s lots of nice clean wood in it)
Next on the household demolition list is probably the entertainment armoire. It’s a decent piece of furniture, but it’s shoved into a nook that it doesn’t completely take up, and I’d really like to have the entire space of that area available. No particular reason really. It would be nice to have some builtins in that nook instead of what’s there now.
Karen’s advocating for a fireplace insert thingy of some sort, which I know she’d really like – but it’s my turn for something neat in the house and that doesn’t include a fireplace that would absorb all the improvement budget I have to spend on that area.
And no – it’s not french doors from the dining room onto the top of the garage/patio area either. Karen can choose between that and a fireplace in another year or two.