dsandler.org/wp

Sitting here by the coffeehouse, catching up on email to the stirring sounds of “ABBA Gold???. Confession: I have to concentrate in order to avoid singing along. So when you’re near me, darling, can’t you hear me S.O.S.

Tonight I released version 1.1.0 of the Buy Now screen saver. The changes are minor—I added a few translations (which are entirely likely to be wrong) and cleaned up the code a bit. The download is now just a zipfile containing the saver; no disk images or other intermediate junk.

Suggestion: Install it on your friend’s Mac on Thursday night. (You know, the last day in March.)

Todd points out that Joel Spolsky has shown his hand: Fog Creek is a Hungarian shop. (No, not that kind of Hungarian; this kind. I must confess that I use a very light Hungarian in my code, of the m_ and g_ sort. But that’s about it.) So Said Todd:

I shall be very interested to see whether Hungarian notation experiences
a popular revival now that Joel has come out of that closet.

I was not aware that there are sects in the religion; certainly the semantic notation Joel describes is marginally less repulsive to me than the typological notation.

(Aside: A certain former employer had a bunch of Hungarianesque voodoo rituals all over the core code; like everything else in the codebase it was a bizarre cargo-cult version of something cribbed from the original Macintosh APIs and programming practices. It was the worst kind of Hungarian notation: instead of any kind of marginally useful semantic information, the random characters prefixed (and suffixed!) to variable names offered a redundant reminder of the declared type of the variable. Well, I guess it was somewhat useful: some functions spanned many hundreds of lines (!), and so it was common to forget the storage class of a variable which was declared several pages ago.)

Erin is getting out of the synopsizing business.

I’m going back to being a private citizen, merely a consumer of television. I’m sorry if this disappoints anyone.

You may recall that back in June of 2002 she began her synopses so that she could help her friends discover the hidden gems of the TV schedule. Erin accounts for most of the Google (and other) search-engine hits to dsandler.org, so it looks like there are others out there who have been helped by her service.

Fig. 1.   Yesterday’s search query distribution (pretty typical).

Since then, however, her friends have either started watching these shows, or haven’t; the shows in question have either gone off the air, turned dull, or are on hiatus. The only one left is Lost, which is much less fun to watch when you know you’ll have to go through it later and write down every flashback, every occurrence of The Numbers, every nickname Sawyer gives Kate. So our TiVo fills up with un-synopsized shows, staring back at her mockingly every time she reviews the Now Playing screen.

So, observing this state of affairs, I assured Erin that she is allowed to quit at any time if it interferes with her enjoyment of TV. It’s not as if she’s being paid, so she’s got no incentive to continue writing summaries of her favorite TV programs if she doesn’t enjoy it any more.

One final program note…

I’ll wait a week before deleting the backlog of Alias and Lost that I haven’t synopsized from my Tivo, just in case there’s a clamor for me to go ahead and finish the season.

del.icio.us is Joshua Schachter’s little bookmark manager that could (which began as muxway, his scrapbook for potential items to post to his popular Web culture collection, memepool). Josh sent this to the delicious-discuss list this afternoon:

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and
then consume all my waking hours, I’ve decided to quit my job and work
on del.icio.us full time.

Update 3/30: Slashdot happens to be carrying an article today about del.irio.us, an open Perl implementation of del.icio.us. +5 Funny:

What’s really amazing is that in the course of copying it, the few things they changed all managed to make it look worse. I guess that’s how you tell it’s open source.

We were a little worried about our seats for Elton John; they weren’t listed as obstructed-view, and were pretty close to the floor, but they were behind the stage.

Fortunately for us, the stage had no back, so we had an unbeatable view. I think it was better than being front-row, because we could actually see everything on the stage.

Oh, and, to the Texas queen with the enormous black cowboy hat and matching black mesh tee shirt sitting in row 2 or 3, dead center: You, sir, rock.

Update 3/28: The Chronicle has a pretty accurate review of the concert. “Nearly an hour into the performance, John finally struck that first masterful chord of Bennie and the Jets, and the crowd collectively leapt to its feet.” That is, in fact, exactly how it happened.