dsandler.org

In the spirit of costumes: Why BSD is better than Linux. It’s so, so true. (Thanks, Marco.)

Joel: We used to write algorithms. Now we call APIs.

I posted a short guide to champagne-sabreing technique to MetaFilter. You just never know when a skill like that will come in handy.

Dan’s champagne-slicing quick reference

1. Hold the bottle (in your non-dominant hand) pointing away from you and tilted upward about 30°.
2. Hold the knife in your dominant hand, level with the horizon, blade away from you. Place the flat of the knife on the surface of the bottle (on or around the label).
3. In one smooth, firm, confident motion (believe me, this helps), sweep the knife down the length of the bottle, maintaining bottle contact the entire way. Imagine that you will slice cleanly through the neck of the bottle, because this is what will (hopefully) occur.

The pressure of the champagne is focused on a weak point in the glass of the neck of the bottle, and it (the neck) will split along invisible lines of cleavage. You’ll be left with some champagne on the ground, the bottle neck somewhere across the room, and a bottle of champagne ending in an elliptical conic section, ready to be poured out to your admiring friends.

Thermodynamics entertainment for the day:

1. Start with an empty ceramic mug.
2. Use the water valve on an espresso machine to fill it with about two ounces of boiling water. Swirl for 5-10 seconds. (This is ostensibly to flash-clean the inside of the mug.) Empty into sink.
3. Fill mug with cold water from water cooler.
4. Hold the mug in both your hands; over the course of about 20 seconds, the hot ceramic will be palpably overcome with cold.

When Steve Jobs touted the new iPod as a “breakout device”, he wasn’t kidding.

This isn’t the first time Apple engineers have snuck a version of this classic videogame into a shipping product as an Easter egg; seems it has special significance for Steve.

There’s something really terrible about the top story on Slashdot: Wil Wheaton Responds to your Questions. I mean, there’s an element of sadness to this. “We’re all such Star Trek geeks that we’ll salivate over juicy tidbits from an actor who played a character so annoying that he had his own hate newsgroup!” I mean, I got the ST:TNG reference in last week’s Buffy episode, but I’m not this bad (am I?).

I’m not often amused by spam, but I received this a couple of days ago and it’s quite a gem. Prepare to be amazing!

Be free — skate nude.

Even in blase San Francisco, spinning around town clothes-free is illegal under an indecent exposure statute, according to police spokesman Dewayne Tully, who couldn’t resist suggesting that the event “adds a whole dimension to the phrase ‘ball bearings.’ ”

The 2002 Demotivators^TM are available.

CONSULTING
“If You’re Not a Part of the Solution, There’s Good Money to be Made in Prolonging the Problem.”

If I’m not careful, I will spend all day twisting my brain around these situational puzzles.

The site for Apple’s new iPod just (and I mean just) went up.

A recent Slashdot post on the topic of “being effective when promoted from engineer to architect” really made me sit up and take notice. I mean, how often does that happen? On Slashdot?

Reading through the rest of the comments (at +3, for my own sanity), it’s quite startling how many good tidbits have appeared. There really is a lurking Slashdot community of wise people, all evidence to the contrary.

It’s threads like this that make me wonder about the temporal nature of discussion-oriented sites like Slashdot (and newgroups in general). Information, knowledge, cleverness, wisdom appears out of thin air — and then disappears again like Brigadoon. Like antiparticles in a collider, having lost their way and stumbled into our universe by chance. How do we capture these subatomic gems? How can we save them for later, when we need them?