Posts

Ian Murdock (of Debian Linux fame) has joined Sun to head up “operating system platform strategy.” Nice hire for Sun. He describes what is an almost universal experience with Sun hardware among geeks of a certain generation: Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch. ...

Donald Knuth, the perfectionist computer science professor and author, writes to his former Stanford boss, Condi Rice, on the subject of the war on terror. The content of the letter isn’t particularly interesting, but the fact that reasonable, otherwise occupied people find themselves in Knuth’s state of mind, is.

Greg Beeman’s Heroes blog had an interview with writer Chris Zatta called “Living the Dream.” Zatta has worked as a writers assistant on the show this season, and wound up getting a writing credit for episode 18 of the show, which is apparently quite unusual. He broke in, as many do in the television and film industry, as a production assistant. Here’s how he describes the work: Photocopying. Getting lunches for the producers. Getting coffee. Getting breakfast for the cast. Delivering scripts to people’s homes at night. ...

Jason Kottke posts about a recent study that shows that when presented with a picture of a baseball player at bat, men check out the guy’s crotch. Women do not. Let a thousand jokes bloom.

The Washington Post has an infographic that explains how the subprime mortgage industry works, but it doesn’t explain why it’s failing right now. It worked fine as long as the people who subprime mortgages were being sold to could keep making their mortgage payments, but suddenly many of those customers are getting behind. The real driver in this industry has been selling people houses they can’t afford through the use of tricky mortgages with low monthly payments and no money down. Common forms include interest only mortgages, where you don’t pay any of the principle of the mortgage, or payment option mortgages where you don’t even pay all of your interest every month, and the part you don’t pay gets added to the principle of the loan. That’s how people with modest incomes have been able to buy homes in overheated markets in places like Los Angeles. ...

Everybody’s talking about Twitter, so I’m giving it another shot. Feel free to add me to your friends list if you like, as I think the best way to get a feel for this sort of thing is to see how other people are using it. To be honest, I’m still not exactly sure how much of my presence I want to advertise with others, but I imagine it’s useful for other things as well. ...

Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace not Apartheid has to have entered the hall of fame of books most discussed by people who have not read them. I’ve discussed the book with several people myself and haven’t read it. That discussion mainly focuses on his characterization of the current situation in the Palestinian territories as apartheid. If you need more fodder for the discussion, and still don’t want to read the book, I’d recommend Joseph Lelyveld’s new piece in the New York Review of Books that discusses the aptness of the use of the word apartheid in depth. Here’s a taste: ...

It all stated with Talking Points Memo noting the unusual firing of the US Attorney for Arkansas. It has since grown into something much bigger. Next we learned that 8 US Attorneys had been fired, then we learned that Congressional Republicans had unethically leaned on some of them to convict Democrats. Now two professors have done the math and found that US Attorneys have investigated five times as many Democratic politicians as Republicans since President Bush came to power. Ugly. ...

Last week I left my Motorola PEBL in the pocket of my pants and laundered it in the washing machine. I took the battery out and left the whole thing out to dry for a few days, and when I turned it on this morning, everything actually worked, including the camera. I’m not sure what to say about that, other than “Go Motorola!” It kind of makes me want to launder phones from competing brands and see how they hold up. ...

Denver Westword has a huge article about World of Warcraft celebrity Leeroy Jenkins, the foolhardy adventurer with the infamous battle cry. The first time I saw the video A Rough Go, I thought it was the epitome of humor. I kind of still do.