September 20, 2012

Bridgette made a pseudo-palindrome in an email, causing me to look for a list of common palindromes.

I fired up VirtualBox today and noticed that I had an image of ReactOS from two years ago, which somehow reminded me of playing with Plan 9 (a research OS from Bell Labs).  On the Plan 9 Wikipedia page, I found a quote by Eric S. Raymond that does a nice job of stating for techies a truism of salesfolks: you can't sell your new product if it doesn't provide a clear benefit over the old.  ESR's quote:

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough. 

Not today's but still stuck in my head as one of the all-time great comics, I present XKCD's click and drag.  For those who don't want to scroll for 20 minutes, here's a nice scalable version

I was peeved last night at George R. R.. Martin's map in his most recent slab of the saga of "A Song of Ice and Fire", since it seems to show only disconnected portions of his world.  Google helped me find a fan's rendering of the entire world.  Here's the link.  It's interactive!  It's cool!  It's really slow!