DigitalHobbit

I was just browsing through the MIT OpenCourseWare, and the amount of freely available information available is quite impressive. The courses span many departments, although I mainly checked out the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science section. They have lecture notes on many different classes, both undergraduate and graduate, covering pretty much all aspects of the Computer Science field. Some of the courses also come with full video presentations. This is definitely well worth keeping in mind as a source of information.

While going through the paperwork that has accumulated since our move a few weeks ago and paying bills, I had to log into the Cingular and Allstate websites. For some reason, both are down for maintenance right now (and this is not even the first time this has happened to me). Is this really necessary? Even if they need to upgrade their services, it seems like they should be able to do this in a more seamless fashion. And if it absolutely needs to happen on the weekend, at least it should occur at night. Sunday afternoon seems like a good time for people to have a chance to catch up on paperwork, and doing a time intensive website upgrade at that time is a bad idea…

Since we moved to San Mateo a little over a week ago, my commute shrunk from about 25-45 minutes (depending on traffic) to less than 10 minutes. This in itself is great, and I really don’t miss driving. However, it does have a minor downside: I can no longer catch up on podcasts while commuting.

Until about two years ago, I commuted to work by train, about 1 hour each way. I hated wasting so much time on commuting, but on the positive side I was able to get a lot of reading done, both professional as well as personal literature. When I started working in San Mateo, I first listened to the radio but quickly got bored of it and bought an iPod instead. Initially I was quite happy to enjoy my music collection on the road, but I later got into podcasts, and I now have enough podcasts that I regularly listen to to keep me busy for about 4-5 hours each week, about the time I used to spend on my commute.

Oh well, I guess I’ll get into the habit of listening to podcasts at home, while reading email, etc. Now I just have to make an effort to make more time for reading books again…

I had to temporarily disable comments until I have time to upgrade Wordpress and improve my spam protection.

I had barely gotten any comment spam over the last year or so, but since yesterday this has changed again. I am currently getting spammed at the rate of about 2 comments per minute…

It hasn’t been officially announced yet, but as reported by this blog post, Google has launched a new service: Google Mars

It’s just like Google Maps, except that it allows you to view Mars (doh!). There are three different views: Elevation, Visible, and Infrared. There are also clickable landmarks for the various successful and unsuccessful Mars spacecraft, lists of named regions and craters, and more.

Check it out, it’s pretty cool!

Here is a great article from the July 2002 edition of Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.

The article contains 15 great answers to typical points that creationists use to attack the theory of evolution. There are also some good links to additional resources at the end, such as Skeptic Magazine. I might have to actually get a subscription of this, as it seems pretty interesting. The Skeptic Library also contains a lot of great content, such as essays debunking ID and similar topics.

I am generally not a very political person, and while I am a strongly convinced atheist, I don’t have a problem with religion and (non-fundamentalist) religious people, but for some reason this whole Intelligent Design nonsense has struck a chord with me… Faith is one thing, but dressing it up as science is just absurd and not something one should expect from an industrial nation like the US. The thought of my kids having to learn unscientific nonsense like Intelligent Design at schools that are paid for with my tax dollars makes me shiver. Luckily I live in California and not in Kansas or some other state in the Midwest, but still…

Apparently a woman was forced to leave a Southwest Airlines plane for wearing an offensive T-Shirt. The shirt bore pictures of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, along with the caption “Meet the Fuckers”, a play on the recent movie title “Meet the Fockers”. I actually saw the exact same shirt at a store in San Francisco last weekend, and while I didn’t buy it, I thought it was pretty funny…

(via BoingBoing)

08-24-05_0905.jpg, originally uploaded by DigitalHobbit.

This has been lying on the kitchen table in the office since yesterday…

Windows is everywhere…
Originally uploaded by DigitalHobbit.

Windows error message on childrens’ arcade machine

Flickr test, originally uploaded by DigitalHobbit.

Just testing posting images from my mobile phone.

I just successfully switched hosting providers. Looks like everything’s up again and running happily on the new host.

I don’t tend to post political comments on my blog, but Andy Hunt dug up this wonderful, 84 year old quote that seems oddly relevant now:

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard…

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

–H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

…

According to this Slashdot posting, the BBC has announced that it will be releasing new radio adaptations of Douglas Adams last three Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. The clou is that Douglas Adams himself will provide the voice for Agrajag, a character whose reincarnations keep getting killed by Arthur Dent. Apparently, Douglas Adams always wanted to play this part and he therefore recorded it some time before his death.

Can’t wait to hear this!

Martin Fowler shares some of his experiences of synchronizing several computers. Interesting timing, as I have just ordered a new laptop myself (although I admittedly don’t program a whole lot in my virtually non-existent spare time these days, thanks to my two daughters who tend to keep my busy… ). On the PC side, things are pretty manageable with source control and IMAP, but on the PDA side things are still way too complicated My PocketPC, which I really like otherwise, even gets confused when syncing with just two machines (home and work)… Martin also mentions that News Aggregators have problems keeping track of which articles have already been read. The answer to this, at least for me, are web-based aggregators like BlogLines, which do an excellent job for this purpose.

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 there, maybe you’ll get a chance to check out mine.

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 in college. We were using the bland Mosaic browser at the time, and I remember when the much more modern-looking Netscape browser came out. Email was usually handled using command-line tools like Elm, and people were still using Gopher. But I disgress…

Anyway, a good 10 years later I finally have my own blog, and I’ll (ab)use this space to talk about topics of interest to me. On a high level, this includes software engineering and programming, computers in general, games, family and kids, media, entertainment, and San Francisco. On a low level, this fluctuates quite a lot as topics shift in and out of focus. Currently, blogging and TiVo hacking are examples for specific things that I’m interested in, but expect this to change any time.

Please check back often, and bear with me while I’m fine-tuning the site, playing with the design, updating my blogroll, and generally getting up to speed on this whole blogging thing.