Category Archives: Musings

Company F, 2/23, is ready to go. Godspeed, boys.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that a significant number of America’s worst social problems would be alleviated by summoning the insurance industry’s top managers to an economic summit, and then setting packs of wild dogs on them.

1. William Gibson, one of my favorite authors, has a blog.
2. Apple‘s new Safari browser goes back to your specified home page when you press Cmd+Home, just like IE for Windows does.

They say you never forget your first time. I remember mine: I was about six, wearing some blue pajamas. All of a sudden, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, I started throwing up. Matt underwent a similar experience last week, after getting his Hib and DTaP shots; according to the literature the doc gave us, this happens in about 2% of cases. The poor little guy was completely baffled: he kept throwing up even when there was nothing left in his stomach, and I could tell that he was upset as much by the vomiting’s unpredictability as his inability to do anything about it. About midnight, he stopped, and he and I spent the rest of the night snuggled on the living-room floor, with a stack of clean-up towels nearby. Fortunately, he was back to normal the next day, although all of us are battling a low-level stomach-cramping, generally-yucky bug of some kind.

Wow, long time no post! I have a ton of stuff to write about, so it’s going to be trickling out over the next few days. We had a terrific family Christmas, with plenty of snow. Stay tuned for further posts over the next couple of days.

I like OS X a lot. It runs well on the modest hardware I have for it (a G4/450 Cube), and it’s been very stable. I love having the ability to pop open a UNIX command line while still getting usable versions of Office. There are still some features OS X doesn’t have that Windows XP does (including offline files and 802.11 auto-discovery), but on the other hand X has some features missing from XP (like Rendezvous). However, there is one thing I’m very unhappy about in OS X.

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Even if you have no snow you can still go sledding! Check out Toboggan Run (courtesy of Inluminent.)

OK, so he’s a racist pig. (No, really: I think he is.) Although I’d be delighted if the President would run him out of town, he might still be able to save himself by letting everyone know that he really is sensitive to minorities.

What do Whoopi Goldberg, Philip Johnson, and Suzanne Farrell have in common? Apparently, me. They’re the results I got from the “find your mentor” page.
Update: according to this page, I am also Hal C. Clement, an underappreciated science-fiction writer. I’ve heard of him, but I don’t think I’ve ever read any of his stuff.

I was writing a column, and the next thing I knew, I was researching the history of nursery rhymes. How’d that happen? Well, I was writing about how to be prepared for hardware or software failures: keep your product keys handy, make sure you know where your support contracts are, and so forth. I included the well-known rhyme “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe, the horse was lost…” My editor asked for a citation, and the best I could find was that it was attributed to Ben Franklin because he published it in the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Who knows what bizarre connection will arise from my current work on the Orapig?

Yeah, like the starship Enterprise. In today’s WSJ, my buddy Gary Bloom is quoted more-or-less saying that Linux is going to storm the datacenter and nip Microsoft in the bud. The article says “Big computing shops haven’t yet put a lot of Linux into their holy-of-holies data centers, says Bloom. But that could change next year, when outfits such as Veritas have their entire product lines available on Linux.”
Right. So, Veritas has mostly been unable to sell its suite of products for Windows– which are actually quite good– because a) no one’s heard of them and b) they’re quite expensive. This despite the efforts of folks like my friend Joe Hand, the world’s greatest evangelist. At the same time, they’re going to sell a ton of products in the Linux space, which is a much smaller market space that has a proven resistance to paying actual money for software.
“We bring enterprise credibility to Linux,” said Bloom, “just like we did for Sun.”
Gary, Linux already has enterprise credibility, and it has nothing to do with you (or /., for that matter.) It’s a useful tool for some applications, just like Windows, Mac OS X, and even dinosaur iron.

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