brainwagon

Well, last night I decided to try to fix a dangling problem with out of date versions of ImageMagick for one application completely unrelated to my webserver by running portupgrade. Net result: it fubarred mod_perl somehow, and that borked my webserver, which is why it was down for ten hours or so. Sorry for the […]

Orson Scott Card, author of two of the finest science fiction books I’ve ever read (and no, Ender’s Game isn’t among those two) has a pretty strong review of Serenity. Better than I ever could, Card expresses why I agree with him: Serenity is certainly among the best science fiction movies ever made. I find […]

My neighbor picked me up this very cute print of a cat when he was in Taiwan to thank me for taking care of his cats while he was away. Very cute.

Wow, just when you think it couldn’t get any stranger in the Scobleized universe, we get this posting, quoting: Personal note to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates: can I have some money to get Microsoft a significant entry into the Web 2.0 market? A little more than it cost Yahoo to buy Flickr but far […]

Well, today is one of those rare days when I miss two days of work: I’m home sick with body aches, a headache, stuffed head, and a bit of a fever. I was also a bit hungry, so I decided to dig through the fridge, freezer and pantry to see what I could make. I […]

You might know him as the giant squid, and Japanese researchers Kubodera and Mori caught him on film when he attacked a bait trap 900m below the surface of the North Pacific off of the Ogasawara Islands. Size: about 8 meters. That’s a lot of calamari. Link via the Panda’s Thumb. Links: A PDF of […]

Well, in this edition of my podcast, I lament the end of baseball season for the Oakland Athletics, talk about the modifications I’m making to my Linksys NSLU2, and then talk about the predicted death of the PC as a platform for innovation. Links from the show: Jonathan Schwartz of Sun talks about how web […]

In a previous weblog posting, I mentioned that I had bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS (networked attached storage) device that I was hacking away on. I recently dusted it off and started playing with it again, after installing the unslung firmware that lets you run linux on it. What was curious was that I had […]

I have a special treat in today’s podcast: my wife makes an appearance. We chat about our experience at Friday’s Oakland A’s game which the A’s lost (boo!) but which had great fireworks (yay!), as well as a couple of other geeky topics like Jeri Ellsworth’s hackable gadget, the C64 Direct To TV. The Slashdot […]

Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD on. Wackiness! What’s even more wacky is that it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, maybe that isn’t so wacky, after all, would you pay money for a Microvax? 🙂 Basically, I’ve been on a bit of a […]

I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to read. Unfortunately, it is often hard to find blogs that are interesting. I suspect that is because most of the blogs that I find interesting are in the long tail, rather than the short head, and search engines rely on the short head. For instance, witness […]

Well, Adam doesn’t read my blog, but today is his birthday. Happy Birthday, Kiddo. His girlfriend is coming into town this weekend, so we’ll be holding off on the celebration mostly till then. The milestones of life just keep tickin’ by….

Today’s podcast recaps a bunch of topics which have floated to the top of my conciousness: a recap of last night’s baseball game, my experience in programming the old Atari 2600 video console, what it might mean to have a video game console which promoted consumer experimentation and programming, some musings about Field Programmable Gate […]

Whew. It’s September, and the A’s were two games back of division leading Anaheim going into last night’s game. Carmen had some homework to do, and the weather seemed beautiful, so I decided to go to the game and see the A’s versus the Twins. The weather was beautful. I had seats right behind home […]

Summed up neatly: “UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” Doug Gwyn I like to do clever things. (Cribbed from this BoingBoing post about how Hollywood is going to wage a technical war on their customers.)