Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else.
–Will Rogers
Shawn came to town this weekend to see the Dropkick Murphys concert. Dropkick Murphys are a Irish punk rock band out of Massachusetts; so think heavy metal drinking songs. These smaller concerts are always more fun because you get to be directly involved with the band. Half the people at the concerts seemed to get invited on stage at one point or another. It was also the first concert I have been to in a couple years… although Heather and I have one next month.
This post is comming to you from a Blackack II with Windows Mobile 6.0. I am not a fan of Windows, and the iPhone was easier to use (especially the web browser) but the full Outlook integration has simplified my workflow so dramatically that I already cannot imagine not having it. The AT&T had Windows Mobile, but without a full keyboard was almost unusable.
So until I find something better, the Blackjack II is my new phone.
I have been converting some of my old cvs repositories to subversion with cvs2svn. It is a pretty handy little tool (even if it is fairly limited.) Here are a couple hints I had to figure out via trail and error.
Here is a dump of my home computers bookmark folder.
Is it just me, or has every other .Net program, with an option to install onto a network, now require everyone to have full control of some random directory on a network share? I am starting to wonder why I bother with a network security policy.
Someone at Reddit posted this wonderful list of innovative Microsoft products. When most people make positive comments about the software giant, they generally say things like “sure they are a monopoly but think of all the great technology they have created.” While I have a great deal of respect for the company that Microsoft is, it is important to realize that, much like Dell, they almost NEVER creates innovative new technology. In the last 5 years (post dot.com bust) computer start-ups and open source advocates have done more to advance cutting-edge information technology than Microsoft has done during the entire course of their existence. This doesn’t make Microsoft a good company; it doesn’t make them a bad company. It is just a fact of history.
Quick link that I meant to post a long time ago. Seemed relevant for some reason.
Suse has NOT made me happy lately. I built my first Suse box at the new job, and then (not a day later) they go and make this agreement with Microsoft. Why is it that Novell can never seem to learn from the failures in it’s own history, or the results of dealing with Microsoft in Linux’s history, OR the effects of this kind of deal in Microsoft’s history. I need a new distribution.
So I finally finished Ulysses. I have been poking at it for the better part of 18 months; the longest time I have ever spent reading a single book. It’s not simply that it is an intellectually challenging book, but the book itself is something like a garden path sentence in that reading it straight through causes you to miss much of the underlying meaning.
Ulysses holds another distinction for me; it is the first book I have ever read the cliff notes for. I purchased the cliff notes because I desired to have a dialog about what I was reading. The cliff notes didn’t allow for the give-take of discussion but they did provide an additional view of some of the symbolism in the book.
So, what is my recommendation? I will never read the book again; but I am keeping my copy as it is an amazingly quotable book. I would NOT recommend it to most people but if 1) you enjoy total literary immersion and 2) you have a group of like-minded piers to discuss it with; then it could be an interesting cognitive exercise.
Overall, Ulysses is something of a mixed bag. Like puberty, I am glad I did it; but I wouldn’t want to have to do it again.
Sysprog.net has a list of programming quotes that anyone who is a developer will get a chuckle out of. Here are a couple of my favorites:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
–Nathaniel S Borenstein
[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!
–Mark Andreessen
Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover.
–Charles Hoare