dsandler.org

Some late-night reading on the Necronomicon?

Time to go buy art supplies!

Whoa, a ling blog.

Atari industrial design sketches. This stuff is just awesome: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

The 70s graphic-design nostalgia is wonderful, but even beyond that, these are simply visionary. (Memo to self: It’s easy, in retrospect, to be considered to have been visionary, if you happened to be at the right place at the right time, with the opportunity to make those visions real.)

(It’s also interesting that the Atari ID guys included plenty of teapots (err, “pretty girls”) in their sketches. Gotta write an article on teapots some time.)

Almost as interesting: major rumors about forthcoming Palm handhelds and OS 5.

This is a true gem. From MSDN: Visual Studio .NET: Managed Extensions Bring .NET CLR Support to C++

Excerpt: (emphasis mine)

Where Are We?
Unfortunately, as powerful and flexible as managed C++ is, it’s not the native language of .NET, which means that books, articles, courses, code samples, and so on, are not going to be written in managed C++-they’re going to be written in C#. But this should come as no surprise. C++ has never been the native language of any popular platform. Unix and Win32 have C. The Mac has Pascal. NeXT had Objective C (of all things). COM has Visual Basic. Only the BeOS has C++ as its native language, and when was the last time you wrote any BeOS code? The fact that .NET favors C# merely means that another language will be translated into the C++ equivalent, as has been done since 1983.

Heh. Looks like Dave is finally starting to share my pain.

new dsandler.org feature: randomized links (see pale-yellow-colored menu above).

erin (8:25 AM): Armand made this REALLY sad noise while I was finishing up getting ready, so I went to snuggle him a little, and he said they hadn’t eaten in days. I went over to look at their bowls, and Albert chimed in in agreement.

dan (8:25 AM): Is that what he told you? They hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

erin (8:26 AM): They said days. But yeah, I opened the new food and got out a measuring cup to dispense it, because I knew I’d never be able to lift it. They were literally pushing each other out of the way while I was opening the bag. I had to move the trash can to get at the door, and when I poured the food: Albert rubbed his head on my hand so hard that I spilled quite a bit of it and then stood right where the trash can goes to clean up what I’d spilled. I asked him to move and nudged him with the trash can, but he just would NOT move. He was still eating when I left. Mando ate enough and then went under the table again.

weblogs.com is hassling me. The popular weblog aggregator seems to think it can’t reach dsandler.org (although apparently you and I can): Can’t read stream because TCP/IP error code 10060 - Connection timed out. Other aggregators that implement the same XML-RPC protocol (like blo.gs) seem to work OK.

Sorry, Dave. No more weblogs.com for me. Interop’s a bitch, ain’t it?

update: It seems that RPC2 is just totally down now:

pingserver: http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 … Traceback (innermost last):
File ““, line 4, in ?
File “/u/dsandler/src/pw-xmlrpc/xmlrpclib.py”, line 547, in __call__
  return self.__send(self.__name, args)
File “/u/dsandler/src/pw-xmlrpc/xmlrpclib.py”, line 630, in __request
  request
File “/u/dsandler/src/pw-xmlrpc/xmlrpclib.py”, line 560, in request
  h = httplib.HTTP(host)
File “/usr/local/lib/python1.5/httplib.py”, line 51, in __init__
  if host: self.connect(host, port)
File “/usr/local/lib/python1.5/httplib.py”, line 79, in connect
  self.sock.connect(host, port)
socket.error: (61, ‘Connection refused’)

Some thoughts on the State of the Union:

1. “[our enemies] thought that America was weak and materialistic.” Yes, and they found out that we were merely materialistic.
2. Is “compassion” a euphemism? “We will show them our compassion.” It will be laser-guided, dropped from the air, and be equivalent to fifty kilotons of TNT.
3. “football of tyranny” (I think it was actually ‘footfall’, but whatever.)
4. “Evil.” Evil, evil, evil. This is a heavy word to throw around. The last time I heard it this much in a State of the Union address was in the 80s…

<ctate> grrr. in OSX, how do i install new fonts?
<em> ctate: lick them?

Was just chatting with rstevens about aaronjasinski.com … that guy’s got such a wonderfully jointy style. It’s great!

Well, my (ex-)manager just brought me a gag gift of sorts. It’s a “motivational” mousepad. Here’s the gag — it’s not a Demotivator(tm). It’s a real one that she found.

PERSISTENCE
The Race Goes Not Always To The Swift .. But To Those Who Keep On Running.

“Thanks! I’ll use this mousepad in ironic splendor.”

Childhood exposure to Leisure Suit Larry + videgames over Popov vodka = female game designers.

Local severe weather alert.

Yikes. These are the first few lines of a piece of code I’m working on:

/*****************************************
*
* Copyright (c) 1994-1999 3Com Corporation
* or its subsidiaries.
* All rights reserved.
*
* PROJECT: Pilot
* FILE: Starter.c
* AUTHOR: (redacted): May 20, 1997
*
****************************************/

#include <Pilot.h>

Yeah, that’s the stock PalmOS development starter.c file from 1997. This is old code. (I mean, “Pilot.h” ??)

The regulars among you may have noticed that I’m moving things around. Most of this is part of a migration to dsandler.org. It’s important to me that old links (from stardot.com) direct you to the new site (while at the same time returning the requested content; I really hate linkrot. If you notice any broken links, or food in my teeth, or whatever, please give me a hint.

Palm Inc. unveils their second-generation wireless handheld, the i705. The major change from the VII is the “always-on” features (incoming email/instant-message notification; live instant messaging). The VII was strictly “pull”, which made it impossible for developers (or Palm) to build apps that could report live data or that could receive information without the user’s involvement. (Actually, that last little bit is also hampered by the strictly single-tasking PalmOS. A minor impediment.)

Another big improvement over the VII: form factor. It’s smaller and lighter than the VII, and doesn’t have the ugly fold-out antenna (although if you don’t mind the slightly poorer reception, you can remove the antenna on the VII and rotate it so that the internal switch thinks the antenna’s raised when it’s really not).

As expected, most Slashdot readers are underwhelmed.

New Line is “pretty certain” it will add a Two Towers preview reel to the end of Fellowship of the Ring (reels already in theaters) after the Oscars. “We’re going to give (moviegoers) a preview of (the second episode of Rings). We’re going to change the last reel out and do a preview of Two at the end of the last reel. (People) are screaming for it.” (article)

Those bastards! A blatant pitch to grab more of my money. Where do I sign up?

Best Slashdot post I’ve seen in a while, thanks to AlterSlash.

The essence of compromise in married life “OK, I’ll stop and get hot dogs and mac&cheese, but I’m getting Kraft m&c this time, since we had Velveeta last time.”

Yuck. Our source-control database has been down all day. I finally got all my code working, and I can’t check it in!

Ex-Enron exec found dead in apparent suicide. “Police in the suburb, Sugarland, confirmed the death of 43-year-old J. Clifford Baxter, a former Enron vice chairman. He was shot in the head.”

+$0C9E 5F04EDFA BLT.S   RewriteCrappyCode+$0C7C

We. Are. Out. Of. Coffee.

OK, OK, don’t panic. They sell Starbucks down in the cafeteria. Things might turn out OK.

<twitch>

New Joel: Rub a dub dub (referring to “code scrubbing”, an alternative to a possibly-suicidal full rewrite).

Funny quote: “Somewhere, someone with a big stack of 4×6 cards is sharpening their pencil to poke my eyes out. What do you mean you didn’t design your classes?”

Sage quote: “Occassionally I would encounter a weird nugget in the code. These nuggets were usually bug fixes that had been implemented over the years. Luckily I could keep the bug fix intact. In many of these cases, I realized that had I started from scratch, I would have made the same bug all over again, and may not have noticed it for months or years.”

Ha-shem I’m so hungry. Is it too early for lunch?

How is it that I’ve never heard of 90% of the sites nominated for the 2002 bloggies? I guess that’s because the Web is still a big enough place that you can not know everybody. (I think that’s probably a good thing.)

Man, this guy is good.

Will Clarkson has a tutorial for building an AirPort software base station in OS X, which currently has no Apple-supplied SWBS solution.

I know, I know, another /. link. But this one’s pretty interesting – an economic analysis of EverQuest.

fstmdbx. What the hell is that? The ARM compiler generated it, but neither the ARM emulator nor the ARM Architecture Reference Manual (yes, the “ARM ARM”) have ever heard of it.

[Update: it’s a non-core floating-point instruction. f (floating point) st (store) m (multiply) d (double precision) bx (condition expression).]

In the “run, forrest, run” category: Enron CEO resigns (AP).

This story rocks: AppleScript vs. the Bad Guys, in “iLoJack”.

New OSX software (not by me): pic2icon.

Joe Bob (UPI) on How Enron Works. link from sk

Lunch: California rolls (6), cucumber & pepper salad, miso soup. Bottled water. $5.25.

Wow, Bethon — a (reasonably) complete BeOS Interface Kit / Application Kit wrapper library for Python. Awesome.

<dsandler> According to the menu, the “A La Minute” offering today is “Spaghetti and Matballs”
* dsandler wondered what happened to that office-chair mat he used to have.