FOB

This PowerPoint slide cracked me up—in particular, the upper-right-hand panel.

BTW, I was initially mightily confused as to how to get a plain ol' RSS feed directly off the Presentation Zen website. Fortunately Donnie pointed out that there's a perfectly good text link; it's just close enough to the body text color that I thought it was a caption. Sigh.

Looks like the best pace I'll be able to sustain for this blog for now is 2-3 posts per week. I'll promise two (with the usual caveats about counting anonymous blog and private journal entries) and we'll see how it goes.

My apologies.

Knackered is an English term for when you're completely exhausted by everything. Since the weekend I've been surviving on a complex rocket fuel of rum and coke in the evenings and coffee in the daytimes- carefully administered, spirit alcohol has very useful stimulant effects! Work work work all day then it seems like working even more all night, sorting people out and doing the things one must do to maintain a certain position in life with respect to certain provisions.

I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that one can only transcend one's limitations by pushing to the very edge of them- how do you know you could survive a week without sleep unless you try it, for instance. Sure, everyone thinks they could but how many have faced down the cold fevers and hallucinations?

I'm tired! Man I need to have soem kind of a holiday soon, even if it's just a change of opinion that casts everything in a new light. Behold, I have only had a blog for one day and already I'm being all "feelings" and "thoughtfulness," how sickening!

Um, hello? I am still unsure what this is, some kind of blog? This is how bad I am at this sort of thing. I've never done anything bloggy before, my girlfriend once tried to get me to do a livejournal but I told her it would be sollipsistic and banal. I mean come on, most of those journal things are the pubescent rantings of 14 year olds right? Yeah?

Anyway, before I start to tangent into which Backstreet Boy has the dreamiest eyes or how no one understands my beautiful unique soul, I am having trouble with my page's tagboard, which causes popups, and dunno what to do about it. So Bart, you seem to know a bit about pages right? I saw your forum post and will take you up on that offer of help if you have any ideas. And hey, if you want some graphics or pictures or whatnot in return that would be fine, pictures I can understand tagboards make me confused and disoriented.

I don't even know if I'm putting this in the right place... all I know is I'm writing inside a big white box. Ummm, there's words around the box.... and something about "plain old text" underneath which frankly is bloody cheeky because I think my text has a certain style and suaveness if you don't mind. Anyways, I'll post it and see what happens, can't hurt right?

I'm slowly learning Haskell. Today's project was something that arguably should be way faster for a fluent Haskell programmer than for a C programmer. It wasn't for me, since I'm still learning the language.

The recent BoingBoing posting on "nontransitive dice" is something I'd seen before and found interesting…

I've been called lately by a few people on the fact that I normally talk about "open source" rather than "Free software". Since the leaders of both movements seem to agree that each category subsumes the other, I've felt free to assume notional equivalence between the two…

One of the most pervasive success stories of open source development is distributed, asynchronous teams working by email and IRC. This is an area in which open source is providing a working model for proprietary software development teams. Yet a huge percentage of the open source developers I work with live here in Portland, Oregon…

It turns out that Persian has a character ت called "teh". I plan to use it often; it's ت lEEt. (The word "lEEt" means "elite" and is rendered "1334" in haxxor, at least by me.) The phrase "ت 1334" should look like "" if everything is working well.

BTW, try to type "ت 1334" in a Firefox text field for loads of 1334 fun. Get it to look right in a comment attached to this message. Seriously, try it: no peeking with "view source". The implementation of mixing left-to-right Latin text with text from a right-to-left Arabic language seems kind of wacky. Key observation: "arabic" digits are language-independent.

UTF-8 is awesome, but I don't think it's quite ready to save the world yet.

[Note: I have edited the above for clarity several times since posting. Hopefully it's easier to understand now.]

It was time tonight to get USB High Speed working on my home office desktop box. I forget why it was time, it just was…

I gave a class lecture the other day in which I gave a little spiel, as I sometimes do, about the dangers of metaphor and analogy as techniques for reasoning about software systems. Some of my students reacted pretty adversely. Certainly, since then any use of metaphor or analogy around them has led to intense ribbing . Needless to say, this was not what I intended…