Embracing Chaos

The house where my nameserver lives lost power today. I’ve moved DNS service to a professional hosting service to avoid similar problems in the future, thus continuing the trend of moving services into the server cloud. It’s probably best since the server closet at that house is also the laundry room. When we set up that house we understood something few MIS folks do — computers really love warm damp environments. Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience. Everything should be back to normal in a few hours. (If you’re reading this, it almost certainly is.)

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The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world. Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember. The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent. Anyway, here’s the video: Enjoy!

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It’s thing like this that make me love Flickr: The Stick Figures in Peril Photo Pool. Demonstrating the unbridled power of internet community…

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I’ve had my own system for interpreting that “chance of rain” numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing. I wrote about it here a little while ago. The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be “rain.” I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard…

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Some people complain that the holidays have become too commercial. That the holiest of christian holidays has become an excuse to accumulate material things, and that the true meaning, whatever that was, is being lost. I disagree. I think now is the time to Buy More Stuff! I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word. Someday soon I hope to have time to join them. The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue…

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Yesterday I got all excited about a journal article indicating the possibility of faster-than-light communication through quantum entanglement. But I got excited before fully reading the article, and once I had I wrote a quick comment apologizing for the false alarm. It’s not a peer-reviewed article, and it’s not very scientific. I actually spent hours digging through their references trying to understand what they were saying, and wrote a longish post to a mailing list about it, so I figure I might as well share the analysis here. First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number…

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Ever wonder what Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were saying to each other before it all fell apart? Now you can read it for yourself. Check out the Enron Explorer. It lets you browse over 200,000 internal Enron e-mails. It’s got a nifty java applet for exploring connections and even has shortcuts for interesting topics like the FBI and shredding. Let’s hear it for information democracy! Thanks to Charles Armstrong for putting this together.

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I have a hat in my office. It’s a magic hat. You can ask it any question about software engineering, coding, or object-oriented design, and it will give you the answer. Just reach in and pull out a slip of paper and be amazed at the wisdom of the hat. Follow its advice and you’ll never go wrong. Every slip of paper says the same thing: “Encapsulate it.” Back in the 1980’s we all knew that global variables (or common blocks in Fortran) were evil. They led to subtle, hard-to-find bugs. We all know the kind — you call a…

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I recently noticed that Red Elvises got added to the Rhapsody catalog. Yay! Last time I checked, which was a while ago, they weren’t there, which effectively means I’ll never listen to them. (Like I’m gonna dig up a plastic disc to listen to music! Okay, I might dig through my fileserver for some mp3s, but it’s such a mess, I rarely bother.) If you don’t know them, take a listen to their first album: http://play.rhapsody.com/redelvises/groovingtothemoscowbeat (how about that URL, eh?) It brings up fond memories of repeatedly running into them playing on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica….

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Pike or Pine? For those of us who live in Seattle, this is an eternal question. Often rhetorical. The two streets run parallel from downtown through Capitol Hill and nobody can keep them straight. This fact was institutionalized by the local sketch comedy show Almost Live in a game show called “Pike or Pine?” where contestants were asked which of the two streets various landmarks are on. “Where is the Paramount Theater?” “Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work. It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off. It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!”…

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