It’s all the random small things

It’s all the attention to the small details that impresses me about Japan. Sometimes its just solving some kind of problem that only really exists in Japan. Other times its just pure ingenuity. For example, the subway ticketing system. When the subway and train systems started really to acheive critical mass, they introduced automated ticket […]

That dude must be bored

I guess I have to return the shout out that I got in Ramesh’s blog, though not in the most flattering context. All I have to say is, you’re just in denial dude. Anyways, he must be really bored since he posted like 6 things today when he hasn’t posted in as many months.

What

So I’m sitting here checking out the Japanese cable company to see if I can transition my grandparents to a cheaper plan. They have a JCOM Net Premium plan which offers 30Mbps down (!!) and 2 Mbps up for about 45 bucks a month. Update: Not to be out done, the Yahoo broadband service offers […]

Finding time to learn new things

Working as a software developer has one annoying side effect that, your daily work tends to sap your enthusiasm for spending lots of time to learn new technologies. Bringing in completely new technology into a product at work is a fairly rare occurence — mostly because of inertia, concern for code and product stability, etc. […]

More on Opera

It still seems pretty fast, though I haven’t been using it that much. There’s not much justification to use Opera on Linux when you have the option of using Firefox on windows. One interesting note is that it appears to run gmail just fine. This is with the configuration where the browser identifies itself as […]

Opera for Linux

Trying Opera 8.51 for Linux. It certainly seems very fast and much improved. The interface is a lot cleaner and doesn’t have all the weird MDI crap that it used to have before. Settings dialogs also seem a bit better, but it still seems hard to find common things (why are Font settings in preferences […]

How far the Blazers have fallen

I was reading an article about Ron Artest and the how he wants to be traded, and out came mention of Bonzi Wells being on Sacramento?! Since when? and so I looked up the Blazer’s page.. they’re 6-15 so far this season. I don’t think I can remember a start that was worse, in all […]

Freakonomics

Just finished reading it yesterday. Overall a fairly interesting read, though J recently tells me that Levitt’s paper which argues for the link between abortion and the crime drop in the 1990’s has been discredited due to a bug in Levitt’s analysis code. I don’t know the details there. But overall, his knack for picking […]

X Composite

Ah, the half-workingness that is Linux. I turned on KDE/Kubuntu and composite at work today. It works better than I thought it would (no crashes yet) but man is it buggy. Shadows not matching window sizes, garbage on the screen. Fun stuff. A few tips: If you’re using the nvidia driver, make sure to say […]

Hi-fi audio downloads

Found out about Music Giants off the Wired feed. It’s another itunes lookalike, but with very high bitrate downloads, at $1.29 a pop. If only iTMS would do the same thing, I’d be all over that. Music Giants is WMA lossless only.. though one might imagine a system where you record the bits as they […]