Scott's Blog

Proper charting on the internet has been missing for too long. Creating .PNG images for charts is far from ideal. PlotKit - Javascript Chart Plotting

This is a great site which debunks a lot of bad science in textbooks. Stuff like: Wrong: Clouds remain aloft because water droplets are tiny Correct: Clouds remain aloft because they are warm inside. Wrong: The sky is blue because of complicated physics. Correct: The sky is blue because air is blue. Wrong: Sound travels better through solids and liquids. Correct: No it doesn't. The site isn't great looking and doesn't follow Nielsen's recommendations , but full of links and interesting information. Unlearn something today.

For the first time, I feel like I'm never going to run out of disk space. I just received and installed a 400GB Western Digital SATA drive on my main machine (16MB cache!). My 120GB drive was almost full and I've been putting some stuff on my wife's computer. The prices for hard drives have gone down enough that I can easily see myself adding large hard drives whenever a machine starts getting full. In other words, I feel like I'm never going to run out of disk space again. And I don't have to delete files that are taking up space. I can download files without regards to size. In fact the only thing I have to worry about is time . Copying gigs of data takes time, scanning and indexing takes time, searching and removing duplicates takes time, downloading take time. For downloading, I figure it would take more than year to fill up 400GB dowloading files 24/7. My next step is to get Bacula up and running so I can use some of this extra space as backup.

Some useful French phrases like: "You've put on weight" - "Tu as grossi" "Your children are very attractive. Are they adopted?" - "Vos enfants sont très beaux. Ils sont adoptes?" and many others ;-)

I've been playing with FreeMind a free mind mapping program (and a cool name). It's written in Java, but don't let that dissuade you. The user interface is exceptionally well done. You can type in tags as quick as you can think. You can drag and drop links easily and it provides good feedback. You can work very well using only the keyboard or my using the mouse. I'm using it to keep track of notes. I'm thinking of using it to keep track of passwords as well since it has encryption. I'm using PasswordSafe at the moment which works very well and I can access with a Python program, but it's interface is less than ideal.

I'm not a big fan of Sony. When they started making audio players with tape that no other player had I thought they were nuts ( DAT drive). Then they started making cameras that work only with their MemoryStick s. I told people who listened to keep away from Sony cameras since their memory (which was expensive at the time) could only work inside Sony devices. Now that flash memory is cheap it's not as big a deal. Still, it appears that Sony likes to go their own way and prefers it when their customers are locked in to their products and their products only. Now they have two more problems. One is the Sony rootkit fiasco, this has started to make Sony look very evil in some consumer's eyes. Another is their PS3 game console. It looks like they practically have the company riding on this product which most likely will be late. Part of the lateness and expense of the device is their insistance of putting BlueRay into the machine. BlueRay (and HD DVD ) are evil twins...

What makes code hard to modify? Short page on some things you shouldn't do: keep unused code, have unfinished code, have no tests, etc. Programming by Coincidence . Basically this is when a developer doesn't understand a complex system and keeps plugging away until it (seems to) work. In the end it sort of works but he doesn't know why. How to Write Maintainable Code . This is writen by the Bittorrent guy, Bram Cohen. Some good stuff here: use less code, encapsulate, reduce preconditions, write in [Python], write test code, create tool, etc.