andy's blog

I'm finally getting around to putting Ubuntu Hardy Heron on my new T61 laptop. The experience so far has been superb.

A man named Stan Romanek has come forward in Denver, CO claiming that he has captured video of an extraterrestrial being. Specifically, he thought he had a peeping tom, so he just whipped out his camera, set it up, and walked away. Imagine his surprise when he came back and found an alien peeking in his window. You can see the Larry King Live video here.

Cam-Trax is program that claims to offer Wii-like controls to any PC game. Cam-Trax uses a webcam to interpolate the motion of your chosen control object -- morocca, sprite bottle, whatever -- in 3 dimensions and presumably acts as a USB HID to generate the appropriate application-level input events for that user input.

Eisenhorn (A Warhammer 40,000 Omnibus) is an ominbus of three books -- Xenos (The Eisenhorn Trilogy, Book 1), Malleus (The Eisenhorn Trilogy, Book 2), and Hereticus (The Eisenhorn Trilogy, Book 3) -- from Black Library author Dan Abnett. Dan began his scifi career at Marvel Comics in the early 1990s and is one of the very few comic book writers to make the transition to writing novels successfully. He puts the literary tools he picked up as a comic book author -- in-depth character development, ambiguous morality, tragic heroes, and cliffhangers -- to great use in Eisenhorn.

Currently Reading: 

Eisenhorn (A Warhammer 40,000 Omnibus)

Dan Abnett

$8.79 (Paperback)

After trolling on Reddit for a year, I finally signed up. (My user name is aboothe726, look me up and say "Hi.") I've submitted my first link and it did really well. I think I'm addicted.

I was setting up my SIGPWNED emails to forward to my GMail accounts. I thought I had the forwards configured properly, but my test emails never came through, so I thought that GMail might be flagging my SIGPWNED messages as spam. To rule out that possibility, I thought I'd install a "not spam" filter to make sure the emails got through the spam filter and into my inbox. Imagine my surprise when I found that GMail defines no such filter type:

Drupal is the content management system that SIGPWNED is built on top of. My experience so far, in 10 words or less? "Really, really good."

Currently Reading: 

Pro Drupal Development

John K. VanDyk, Matt Westgate

$29.69 (Paperback)

While I was in Dallas visiting Arpit, we discussed McCain's recent Mission Accomplished by 2013 speech. I've already made my decision for 2008, so I've kind of stopped listening. (However, I'm not deaf, so I've still had to shake my head at the candidates from time to time.)

One of my responsibilities as a Software Performance Analyst for WebSphere Business Monitor is to create prototypes for medium to large code changes that will improve the performance of the WebSphere Monitor software stack. In developing a recent prototype, I was having trouble making heads or tails of why a particular XML parsing toolkit wasn't working right, so at work on Wednesday my team lead, Kean, and I walked through some of the code together. As we thought about how the parser was behaving in certain circumstances, Kean always seemed to know the next thing to try to figure out how to make the parser work, and as I thought about why I had an epiphany: software development is not software testing.

One of the things Henry Chesbrough discusses in his book Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape is how early adopters of a technology often get "marooned," or trapped on a particular application or platform. This is a well-known issue in the software industry where it's called "vendor lock-in." Vendor lock-in is a powerful force, and I don't think Chesbrough spends enough time talking about just how effective -- and evil -- a practice it really is.

Currently Reading: 

Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape

Henry Chesbrough

$23.10 (Hardcover)