obfuscated.org

Dear The Sun,

Thank you for not being hot today. You’ve really been busting my ass for the last few weeks with the hot and the heat and the sunny and the bright and the holy crap I’m going to die it’s so warm, but today really does make up for it. Keep up the good work.

Your pal,

cp

• Investing GTD-style
• Belgian monks run out of beer, close their store
• CSS rounded corners with one image

Dear Coworkers,

If you’re going to a meeting or a talk on campus, try to put at least a minimal amount of effort in to showing up on time. When you show up five, ten(!), or even fifteen(!!??!!!@#!R%) minutes late, it distracts the audience, it disrupts the speaker, and it’s disrespectful to everybody involved. So please, just show up on time for the next talk you attend. I bet you’ll be happier for doing so.

XOXO,

cp

The good people at Konfabulator just published the Mindset Widget that I slapped together at work. So, hooray, I guess.

What’s fun about this widget actually has very little to do with the widget itself and everything to do with some very minor yet important modifications to the Mindset search service. Specifically, you can now specify slider position in the URL (via the “thold” parameter, which usefully accepts values between -2 (full shopping) and 2 (full research)), which will eventually allow for permalinks to Mindset search results. Now all Mindset really needs is a web service interface.

Anyway, enjoy, happy searching, etc. I hope you enjoy the widget.

A few months back I decided to try to get back up to speed with Windows. This was largely a career hedge — I was worried that I’d been doing server-side Unix work for so long that I was becoming a little one-dimensional, and this didn’t please me.

The toughest part about development in Windows is the lack of tools. In Unix, there are 1,000,000 different tools that fit perfectly in with the OS and you use the one that’s best for the task. Sure, Windows has most of the tools that you can find under Unix, but they don’t work with the OS nearly as well.

Microsoft’s .NET platform promises to change all of this for the better. Their goal seems to be making the entire system run under .NET and the tools are following. MS has their entire tool suite generating code for .NET. Unfortunately, they offer only a very limited range of languages — C#, a niced-up Java (which isn’t saying much if you aren’t a fan of Java); VB.NET, a niced-up piece of crap; managed C++, which will be great once the get the likes of Boost working with it. What really makes .NET cool, however, is that third-party developers are starting to write implementations of other languages — interesting languages — that target .NET.

Iron Python is my favorite, as Python is an imminently nice language and the implementation is very well done. More interesting, though, is something I saw on The Larkware News today: L Sharp .NET.

L Sharp .NET is a Lisp implementation (based on Arc) for .NET. According to the docs, the early implementation has all the good stuff that you’d expect from Lisp — functions, lexical closures, macros, etc. It’s currently only an interpreter, but they claim to be working on generating .NET executable files.

Unlike most of the other .NET languages (Iron Python excluded, of course), Lisp is a fun language. It’s seems less like work to code in Lisp, and that can’t be a bad thing. So yay for the L Sharp .NET folks.

Hello, Dollar! has a thing or two to say about bringing your lunch to work. Long story short, bringing your lunch saves big dollars if done over time. Their back of the envelope analysis has bringing lunch four days a week savings $1,000 a year and all of that adding up to over $500,000 over 40 or so years.

When I look at those numbers for myself it’s absolutely frightening. Hello, Dollar! estimates $7/day for lunch out. In Old Towne Pasadena it’s more like $10-$15/day and then another $5-10 for pints on Chippy Friday. If you assume an average of $12/day and the same $2/day home lunch figure (we’ll keep the pints as Chippy Friday really is one of the highlights of the week), the figure is $2,000/year that I could be saving. The only thing I spend more on is my house.

Damn.

(via Lifehacker)

William Gibson quotes Tom Waits:

When people ask Tom Waits where he’s been ’til recently, he tells ‘em “stuck in traffic”. And, boy, do I ever know what he means. But then again it’s all part of the pro-cess.

Now, I’m not nearly in the same league as Waits and Gibson in terms of the projects I work on, but “stuck in traffic” strikes even me as a great way of explaining the way things go. I’ve got a million and one projects that I’d like to work on, but silly little things keep coming up and make it hard to get traction on any of them.

I guess I’m glad that I’m not the only one.