I tend not to be an early adopter of tech. With software, it’s because most software in the world exists to solve problems that I don’t have. With hardware, it’s that and the fact that new hardware is expensive as well.
Thus it is that I only recently joined Google Wave.
My impression before joining, based [...]
The Google posts are just piling up here recently. Today, they issued notice that they’re releasing an open-source browser of their own design, with a UI and architecture differing in significant respects from more traditional browsers. Naturally, the release announcent came in the form of a webcomic (by Scott McCloud, no less).
I looked at the [...]
Subtitle: The good, the bad, and the… no, wait; this is a Google project.
XML and Java have the same sort of flavor to them: they’re reasonably good and very widely used; they’re the sort of product that design committees everywhere aspire to create. Their flaws only really become visible after something better comes along. In [...]
I am looking for a specific novel. I read it as a child in a Reader’s Digest condensed version, in an omnibus which included a number of other Reader’s Digest condensed novels. I believe that the title included the phrase “Don Quixote” in a metaphorical allusion to the plot, though I do not entirely trust [...]
It should be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I feel a strong sense of disconnection without regular access to a computer. Despite this, for most of my life I’ve spent substantial portions of each summer travelling, camping, and otherwise incommunicado. This summer was different: everywhere I went during August, I lugged [...]
I have made no attempt to hide my disdain for JavaScript in the past–it’s not that bad a language conceptually, but it is impossible to debug. This is because browsers, unlike any other software platform in the world, attempt to be “user-friendly” by attempting to compensate for code errors instead of complaining noisily. Thus, when [...]
The problem with Japanese (from a machine-translation perspective) is that many basic linguistic concepts (such as time) are handled differently, and you need to understand things at a fairly high semantic level to actually grok what’s going on. Consider the example “昨日、２時まで起きていました。” A nieve translation would be “Yesterday, I was in the process of waking [...]
Having just finished a book, and in the process discovered that five hours have passed with no sensation of the passage of time, I’m starting to wonder about the psychological state I enter while reading.
I’m not trained in psychology and my dataset is limited to what I’ve personally experienced; any conclusions I reach are likely [...]
What do you do when Google goes down? Why, you use the Google Mirror.
I was wondering how domain names resolved when you give them insufficient resolution. So, I typed in some top-level domains, and was surprised to discover that they actually lead to websites.
com -> amazon.com
net -> php.net
org -> apache.org
edu -> exploratorium.edu
gov -> whitehouse.gov
mil -> defenselink.mil
jp -> jpmorgan.com
au -> smh.com.au
uk -> guardian.co.uk
de -> amazon.de
What’s interesting here is that [...]