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Miniblog articles for May 2004

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Saturday 1st, 14:44 »

“But complex workflows resist automation, mightily.” —Tim Bray, on web services theory and practice. Agreed. Implement the 80% that's easy, and hire people to do the rest.

Sunday 2nd, 02:38 »

Looking through this miniblog, I find three articles out of 69 that mention socks, not including a reference to Firesocks. Scary what I deem worth writing down.

Sunday 2nd, 14:32 »

More Japanese madness, that spawned the Power Rangers: Super Sentai World! POSE! Sentai appears to mean ‘squadron’ among other things.

Sunday 2nd, 17:50 »

“I think that the next release of Windows is all about making porn easier to manage, and ‘Longhorn’ certainly is an appropriate name given this noble goal.” —Rory Blyth, WinFS and your porn collection

Monday 3rd, 11:23 »

Got to reading Rory's blog now, and particularly like his review of the drug Ambien.

Monday 3rd, 18:30 »

I've installed a plant in the office, next to my monitor. Might make the place a bit more homely or something. The plant has thin green leaves and is called a Foliage Plant (H/PLANT 9CM). £1.49 from Wilkinsons.

Monday 3rd, 18:37 »

The Debian stable backport of bittorrent seems to be old enough that it doesn't quite work. So now I have 3×650Mb files which are very similar to the Fedora Core 1 iso images, but not quite the same. Bastard.

Tuesday 4th, 00:34 »

I just watched Super Sentai World (bittorrent here) and it is, as has been pointed out most amusingly, very Japanese and very tacky. But the fight choreoraphy is just superb, with so many things happening at once. Good stuff.

Tuesday 4th, 08:04 »

Why do people use ‘ourselves’ instead of ‘we’ or ‘us’ when they don't need a reflexive pronuoun? It's not just a more fancy version, it actually has a more specific meaning. Prats.

Sunday 9th, 15:08 »

I think I need an extra phone charger. It always seems that I'm at home and the charger is at work, or vice-versa. Ah well, off to the office then. At least I'll be able to water my plant too.

Wednesday 12th, 17:30 »

Mutt version 1.5.6 changes the syntax of the alternates option. When upgrading, remove the word set and change the = to a space. Bit of a bugger for me, because my config is shared with older versions.

Wednesday 12th, 18:21 »

How to use Japanese toilets (flash). It's bilingual too.

Thursday 13th, 08:36 »

Noushka's BBQ last night. To much wine… Ow.

Thursday 13th, 16:44 »

Cheerful bento boxes.

Saturday 15th, 10:44 »

“…their small briny destiny unfulfilled.” —John Peel, on Home Truths, talking about uneaten pilchards.

Saturday 15th, 22:35 »

“Ha. I eat commas for breakfast, your code will say, with a Russian accent.” —A Hard Drill Makes an Easy Battle, from Joel on Software. Summary: write robust code, then try to break it.

Saturday 15th, 23:52 »

Woo, people are trying to design a clock which will tick for 10,000 years. Groovy. Guess what: the guy who started it is a computer scientist.

Sunday 16th, 01:40 »

If you are a programmer, read this: 16-bit Intel 8088 chip. Now assume the lotus position and ponder the deeper mysteries of code.

Sunday 16th, 04:08 »

Philip Greenspun seems to agree with me: “Lots of relational algebra mumbo-jumbo with Greek letters. Caveperson alternative is the Structured Query Language (SQL).”

Wednesday 19th, 09:14 »

Taken a day of work due to knackeredness. And I need to clean the flat before my mother arives. And there's the tricky process of CityLink getting my DVD writer in the same place as me. Two yellow cards already.

Wednesday 19th, 11:38 »

The DVD writer has arrived! Now of course I've got to shut down the zillions of webbrowser tabs and things I've got open so that I can take the box down. Could take a while. That's the problem with having 23 virtual desktops.

Wednesday 19th, 17:23 »

I've finally got this miniblog up on the actual web, no longer confined to this little text file. I'll maybe write a full blog entry about it soonish.

Wednesday 19th, 17:32 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
凸凹, dekoboko, unevenness, roughness, imbalance. The two kanji, which are more helpfully mnemonic than most, mean ‘convex’ and ‘concave’.

Wednesday 19th, 20:08 »

“Best-in Crunchy Peanut Butter” is not as good as “Sun-Pat Crunchy Peanut Butter”. It's cheaper, but it doesn't have that all-important juiciness.

Thursday 20th, 11:19 »

I've got a nice optical mouse at home now, and once I tried it I couldn't go back. Fortunately I've found one to use at work too. It was hiding in a box on the cupboard, so I'm almost certain nobody needs it.

Thursday 20th, 22:24 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
氷山, hyōzan, iceberg. The kanji literally mean ‘ice mountain’.

Friday 21st, 11:34 »

I'm quite fucked off. Not at or because of anything I can put my finger on, just generally not highly motivated right now. Beer, that's the answer. But not yet.

Saturday 22nd, 09:10 »

“And people, this world is too full of musicians. We need more Britneys, especially ones in red leather space suits.” —Anvil Latrine, on dooce.com

Saturday 22nd, 22:36 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
口語, kōgo, colloquial language. Literally ‘mouth language’.

Saturday 22nd, 23:52 »

“Have you forgotten? Fear makes me stronger. Fear and the terrror of helplessness. These are a few of my favourite things.” —Muldis, in Farscape series 2 episode 5, Picture If You Will

Sunday 23rd, 12:59 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
今日, konnichi, today, these days. Literally ‘this day/sun’. So the greeting konnichiwa means something like ‘about today…’

Monday 24th, 14:00 »

The Scarborough's ‘Club Sandwich’ is really quite large. Now, back at work, it is very hard to move.

Tuesday 25th, 16:58 »

If, like me, you've ever been mugged, this might make you feel better: Attacked By Thugs!

Tuesday 25th, 21:51 »

“We are agents of the free” —REM, Orange Crush, from Green

Tuesday 25th, 22:04 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
小石, koishi, pebble. Literally ‘small stone’.

Wednesday 26th, 14:10 »

Fire alarm just went off at work (don't know why, there wasn't really a fire). Just getting out of the building I remembered that the offsite backup was sitting on my desk. Whoops.

Thursday 27th, 12:12 »

“…urinating outdoors is a favorite past time of Japanese men out in the sticks” —J-list mailing list

Thursday 27th, 20:21 »

Software reality: True stories of development hell. Nice to know I haven't got it all that bad really.

Thursday 27th, 21:46 »

Fun Japanese word of the day:
早口, hayakuchi, fast talking. Literally ‘quick mouth’.

Friday 28th, 19:23 »

Still digging up my old REM albums: “Hey kids, rock and roll.
Nobody tells you where to go, baby.” —Drive

Saturday 29th, 21:55 »

Watching a DVD: the very first thing is a menu asking what language I want. That is so much better than having to sit through minutes of Norsk and Russian copyright messages. “Not for showing on oil rigs yada yada…”

Monday 31st, 14:07 »

“What is this idealistic nonsense of a phoneme you are looking for?” —A Typographic Outcry, Kaihsu Tai

Monday 31st, 15:38 »

“In politics you have to learn to say things with tact and finesse, you berk.” —Yes Minister, series 1 episode 1, Open Government

Monday 31st, 18:37 »

Bluebeard was down again today, but apparently this time it wasn't a hardware problem, at least with my machine. Seems to be fine now.

Monday 31st, 18:43 »

Woo, there's a Latin version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt.”

Monday 31st, 21:34 »

All that fancy Exif data that modern digital cameras put in the images they save doesn't really help if the bloody camera has the date wrong, does it?

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