October 26, 2012

I finished the fence on my Inca table saw.  Check the top-nav for a link to that page.

October 3, 2012

Broadband access to my neighborhood in Southwest Portland is limited to one vendor: Comcast.  They have a lock on wired broadband and exploit that in their pricing.  Comcast's offerings include broadband, cable TV, and telephone services all based upon their wire-based infrastructure.  They have competitors in TV and Telephone (dish network and Century Link, respectively), but not in broadband Ethernet.

What can the consumer do to foster competitive service offerings?

• Clear is available for wireless broadband, but not effective for the large-scale streaming that would be required to turn off Comcast's TV service.
• DSL is not an option.
• Dish Network will provide TV, but not broadband.
• Don't really care about telephone, but need a land line for alarm monitoring.

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!