During a fun debug session at work, Drew and I tracked down the cause of a misbehaving web app. The problem related to how Apache Tomcat decides to recompile JSPs and how some of our source code was branched and modified. Beware of modified JSPs in branches when you move to newer branches. The problem appeared… Read More »
This week I attended a showing of beer-related films at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Cal. Research anthropologist Ira Jaknis, curator of the ongoing exhibit 99 Bottles of Beer: Global Brewing Traditions 2500 B.C. — Present was our host for the films. Sadly, only three other people were attendance. But, because the Prelinger Archives… Read More »
Thanks to my ever alert colleague, Rob, I’m celebrating Wombat Day today. I’ll be taking in my stuffed wombat that was handmade in Australia with what almost appears to be actual wombat hair, but I’m thinking is actually dyed wool.
For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with Arduino (“open-source electronics prototyping platform “) and Processing (“open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”). Both are very, very cool. The Arduino programming environment is based on Processing, so learning both isn’t much extra effort.… Read More »
The Daily Show on Wednesday was brilliant. Jon Stewart and his team did a fantastic job of letting Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, Dick Morris, and Nancy Pfotenhauer demonstrate their extreme hypocrisy by playing recent videos of them completely contradicting videos of them from the last few months to a year ago. Palin provides a message… Read More »
The University announced they were trimming some of the contested oaks this morning. Well, I’ve heard from someone on site that they’ve “trimmed” seven of them to the ground. They’re now trying to get the rest of the tree squatters out of the trees. While I consider myself an environmentalist, I’m with the University on… Read More »
My favorite real conversation from tonight: Child: Do you kave Kit-Kats? Me: No Child: Then I’ll take a handful of whatever. She’s lucky the broccoli was in the kitchen and not close at hand. Instead, I gave her more candy than anyone else.
A thief recently scraped the registration sticker off the license plate on my car. The California DMV charges $17 for replacement stickers. I just hope whomever stole it puts it on their plates and then gets pulled over by the police for some other infraction. Then they will get to explain how the DMV’s computer… Read More »
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1 (improvements to the editor on the “Write Post” page alone are worth the time spent on the upgrade) and have run into an issue with get_links(). The first argument to get_links is the category id. If you don’t specify an argument or pass in -1, all links are returned.… Read More »
It embarrasses me to know that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales not only attended my alma mater, Rice University, but was actually granted a degree. Throughout his reign of cluelessness in the Attorney General’s office, he has made many statements that have left me cringing and wondering how he can say these things with a… Read More »