Archive for May, 2004

Thief: Deadly Shadows released

Monday, May 31st, 2004

I just noticed that Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third installment in the awesome Thief “first person sneaker” computer game series has been released a few days ago. I have been looking forward to this game for a while, so I’ll probably order it tomorrow or pick it up at a local store. Not that I [...]

Bloglines temporarily down

Monday, May 31st, 2004

Argh… After getting back from a late night shopping trip to IKEA, I tried to hit Bloglines as usual in order to catch up on the blogs that I’m reading, only to find that the site is down for a few hours (undergoing plumbing, as they put it). This made me realize how much I [...]

Our new house

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

We had a home inspection for our new house today, and we still love it. We need to do some fairly minor electrical upgrades and fix a few other things, but overall everything is in great shape.

We also took the opportunity to drive around a little in our neighborhood as well as adjacent neighborhoods. The [...]

Don’t panic

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

I did a little more research on the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. Apparently, they have started shooting last month, things are going well so far, and the movie is scheduled to be released mid-2005. The cast looks interesting as well. Martin Freeman, who is known from his role as Tim in [...]

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Movie

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

When Douglas Adams was still alive, he made several attempts to turn the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series into a movie, and he had a hard time doing this. Mostly, this is because the series just doesn’t resemble the structure that movies require, such as a distinguished beginning, middle, and end. Therefore, any such [...]

Gmail - What’s the big deal?

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

Everybody appears to be very upset about Google’s new Gmail service because it analyzes the user’s emails in order to deliver targeted ads. Yesterday, California’s Senate passed a bill that restricts Gmail by requiring it to perform all analysis in real time, i.e. without storing any information, among other things.

Personally, I don’t see what the [...]

Test Driven vs. Test First development

Friday, May 28th, 2004

Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers posted an interesting blurb on the differences between test-driven and test-first development. In Agile / XP circles, these two practices are usually lumped into one, but Dave points out some good arguments for distinguishing between them. Test-driven development simply means that the design is influenced by the unit tests, [...]

Why I like my TiVo

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

Last christmas we finally gave in and bought a TiVo, and even though I had my doubts at first, not being a big fan of TV in general, I have to admit that I like this device a lot more than I would have thought.

Previously, I was fed up with cable TV to a point [...]

Got the house!

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

We got it! Unfortunately (well, I guess fortunately, since we would not have gotten it otherwise) our initial offer was countered and we had to increase the offer amount (which was already beyond our original limit) quite a bit. Oh well… I’m trying not to think about the amount and instead be happy that we [...]

Buying a house

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

I am feeling very jittery today because we are about to make an offer on a house in San Francisco, and while the offer price is high enough that it will likely ruin us financially, we are expecting so much fierce competition about this property that the chances of actually getting it are probably fairly [...]

Sharing bookmarks between Mozilla and IE

Sunday, May 23rd, 2004

Is it just me, or is there really no good way of sharing bookmarks between Mozilla (or Firefox) and IE?

While I used to browse using IE up until recently, I find myself using Firefox most of the time these days, mostly due to its excellent support for tabbed browsing (does anybody else find it surprising [...]

Kids and jetlag

Sunday, May 23rd, 2004

My wife and kids (one almost 3, the other 11 months old) recently returned from an extended Germany vacation, after which I discovered that it is much more exhausting to have children that suffer from jetlag than to suffer from jetlag myself. For the first couple of days, 2 AM to 4 AM suddenly became [...]

Almost missed the blog train

Saturday, May 22nd, 2004

It looks like I almost missed the blog train, but at least I was still able to jump on at the last second. It looks like pretty much everyone else already has a blog. Even Microsoft’s Bill Gates recently acknowledged the importance of blogs.

Oh well, once you’re done reading the other thousands of blogs out [...]

Welcome to my blog!

Friday, May 21st, 2004

Hello, and congratulations on finding my blog. It is somewhat surprising that it has taken me this long to join the blogging community, given that I have been using the Internet since the early to mid-nineties, when virtually nobody had Internet access at home and students like myself were just starting to browse the web [...]