Keys to the domain : Western tonal music has 24 keys: 12 major and 12 minor.

Shelley answers my meme-call with smoke, stripper, belief, confession, and intimidation.

Reset the countdown. Heck, I hope Dave stays in blogness. He certainly provides a unique POV.

13 scientific mysteries (via Mercola).

The Literature Network. Complete, searchable texts from 257 authors.

Assaf declares his site a blogstitution-free zone: no link-love for sale.

Google does no evil all the way to the patent office.

With difficulty the strange little brass lock finally clicks closed as we leave the small, dilapidated house. She walks ahead of me down into the adjoining garden, which is surrounded by a picket fence in need of paint. A glass-paneled garden house in the center reminds me of Bloom’s jakes, and I smile to myself. “His own rising smell“. To think of such a thing among all these beautiful flowers!

I catch up to her and she meets me with a wildflower, a daisy. She hands it to me, tears in her eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“I only want you to tell me that you’re sorry.”

I embrace her cowering shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

If only I really meant it.

Then I awoke.

Conversation at risk: port number 23 is commonly used for unsecured Telnet sessions. Don’t type that password!

Assaf’s license plate spells XMLHTTP. But he doesn’t like computers.

Shelley wants to overhaul computer science programs in order to humanize the tech culture. Focus on problem domains rather than the tools for solving them. Not having learned IT the traditional way myself, I’ve always valued my different perspective in the industry. And back when I was hiring people, I often observed that new CS graduates had no clue about solving real business application problems. There’s something to be said for the general purpose programmer, whose art extends across specific disciplines. But as the tools become more accessible and automated, and computing becomes more ubiquitous, the title of “developer” may one day become as obsolete as “scribe”.

According to this test for programmer personality (thanks, TDavid), I’m an ENTP (Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving). “Very freedom-oriented, they need a career which allows them to act independent and express their creativity and insight.” Sounds about right, FWIW.

Vaspers the Grate predicts that paid posting will destroy blogging if it isn’t stopped — and he intimates that he has “a plan”. Doc seems to miss the point: Vaspers is clearly discussing paid content, not advertising. IMHO, It seems to me that as long as paid content is plainly disclosed (in a way that can’t be missed), it poses no threat to authenticity. But I’m willing to hear arguments. Echoing Vaspers, “What say you?”

On this cold, damp morning my son and I were waiting outside for his school bus, which was already quite late. We were both becoming increasingly impatient.

My son remarked, “++stupid”.

At the venerable age of 8, my son has not yet learned any programming languages. So I have no idea whence he derived this succinct description of our state of affairs. But it elicited an unexpected expectoration of hot liquid refreshment from the mouth of yours truly.

I’ll have to remember this one. Prefix notation even. Should come in handy in a number of situations.

P(11): Perrin number 11 is 22 (that’s for you, apotheon).

A belated Happy Birthday to Grace Hopper, who would have turned 100 last Saturday. As much as I take issue with her vision for COBOL (that computer languages should be patterned after English), I admire her accomplishments.

“Teach a man to fish” … or loan him the money to buy his gear.

I’ve never tried to work with colors via HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness), but perhaps I should. Thanks, Assaf.

Scott Berkun: Why smart people defend bad ideas (thanks, Doug). Besides why, Scott reveals even more about how. Similarly, your own internal dialogue can also get in your way.

Tilt, Shift, and Swing, a photoblog that uses my tag cloud widget for WordPress. Thanks, allan! Nice use of shadow on this one.

Shelley Batts expounds on the latest in UGC: SpermCube. Now that’s art: a one cubic meter wet spot. They need contributors! As Scott Simmons says in a comment:

More fun math: with typical ‘output’ of 3 to 5 cubic centimeters per ‘event’, they’ll need about 250,000 vials to fill that thing. They’re going to need a lot of volunteers, or else they’ll be kept pretty busy for quite a while …

Oh, but it’s a job you can be passionate about, Scott. Honey, can you give me hand?…

It’s beautiful, it’s familiar, and it’s WordPress. Tara Hunt has made the jump from Blogger to WordPress, with some help from Adam Bouskila. Looking good, miss rogue!

Firefox 3.0 in alpha (thanks, Kiltak) I think I’ll try this one out on Linux. Anyone else download it yet?

The problem with Moore’s Law is that it lacks an enforcement clause. Jeff Atwood gives us the real performance history data.

Doc puzzles over the “Oyez” in Wikia’s announcement.

Randy Charles Morin tagged me, and provided five little-known facts about himself. Ballroom dancing? Who would have guessed? So now I’m supposed to reveal five facts about myself and tag five more bloggers.

Let’s see, what five facts about myself have I not shamelessly paraded before the blogosphere already?

1. I got my first job with computers because I couldn’t type. OK, I have already blogged that, but that post was way back when I was an obscure blogger. Now I’m a semi-obscure blogger.
2. Like Randy, I have a wonderful wife. She doesn’t lay out my clothes for me or anything cute like that, but she’s an intelligent, fun, and loving woman. Which complements my stupid, boring, and grouchy ways. She made a great career for herself before we got together, then I ruined all that by impregnating her (twice). Seriously, her decision to stay home with the kids has made all the difference for them.
3. I work from my home. That means that I’m around the kids a lot too, but they seem to be doing well in spite of it. Oh, and please don’t beat me up about my business site. I know it needs help. Think 1997. Just as soon as I find the time …
4. I have at various times played the piano, trumpet, bass horn, bass guitar, pipe organ, clavichord, and acoustic guitar. None of them well. I’ve written music that I cannot play.
5. I used to do a bit of stage acting at a community theater. I really enjoyed it, but I had to quit because I found myself becoming too immersed in my roles. It would take me weeks of effort afterwards to find my own personality again. Not too much of a problem if you’re playing someone heroic and noble, but not if you’re an irritable fop, a nervous cuckold, or an old braggart. I’ve been on stage in my underwear. And in drag. Therapy, please! (for the audience)

Now for five bloggers to tag. Let’s see, I’d like to hear from Shelley, Assaf, apotheon, Chris, and Vaspers the Grate. If I left you out, it’s just because I figured you wouldn’t have time for this nonsense. Actually, I’d be glad to hear from any of you. Especially Yvonne and Tracy, who seem to have fallen off the edge of the blogosphere. If you post on this topic, leave a comment and I’ll add a link to you.

Duration of double 5′s: the U.S. national 55 mph speed limit was imposed in 1974 and repealed 21 years later in 1995.

Put this one on my reading list: Algorithms, written by three professors at UC’s Berkeley and San Diego. Covers everything from simple factoring up to quantum computing (thanks, Doug).

Gender differences in grammar caused by estrogen to the brain (thanks, Armchair Anarchist). The way I read this article, the researchers got the opposite result of what they were expecting, then devised an interpretation of those results in terms of their theory.

Also from AA: 20 Lines That Could Have Dramatically Changed The Lord of the Rings.

Technorati search is confusing me:

“No posts link to that URL yet”, so apparently the 264 links from 31 blogs are all in the future.

UPDATE: as I expected, it was a temporary glitch.

Recently I finished a large project. No, “large” isn’t the word. Mammoth.

As far as the number of lines of new code written goes, it wasn’t that big. I only added three new source files. But the impact of the new features required subtly re-engineering hundreds of small sections of code in 45 source files in four languages. Some of this code is over 15 years old, and has been evolving fairly steadily for that whole interval. The changes were so pervasive that there was no way we could release it in phases. I don’t think that anybody would have been able to pull it off without the kind of intimate knowledge of the code in question that I possess. Still I worry that any one of those hundreds of modifications might turn into a bug factory.

Why would my client and I agree to plunge into that kind of project? Why consume a ton of hours to risk the stability of a thriving product?

Customers wanted the central feature so badly that they were already hacking it in, with limited success. The resulting unanticipated software interactions increased the number of support calls. One of the chief hackers was none other than yours truly, which brings me to my next point.

I had already created a pretty good prototype. It was about an 80% solution. More importantly, it identified areas that would need to be addressed in a full implementation, because a lot of users adopted it. The prototype only took me a day or so to whip up, but it revealed to-do’s that would consume months of development. Thus,

We knew the scope of the project going in. OK, even so we underestimated the time requirements. But that underestimation would have been an order of magnitude off without doing the research and laying out the requirements up front.

Users were involved from the start. We asked them to help us develop and review the requirements. We looked at their use of my prototype and other existing hacks to make sure we could answer the problems they were trying to solve.

We have a strong set of tests for existing features. We felt confident that we could avoid introducing bugs into users’ applications when we released the product, even if the schedule might have to expand to fix them first. Naturally, we also developed new tests for the new features, based on the requirements. Most of those tests were developed just ahead of the implementation, so my new code was being tested before the ink was dry. That allowed me to fix problems while the design was still fresh in my head.

Documentation was authored simultaneously with development. That raised a number of questions along the way that helped us identify inconsistencies and potential problems.

Long beta test, with quick updates to the beta testers as needed. No matter how many and varied your QA tests may be, your users will find their own unique ways of using the product. And Murphy says that if you break something, it will be the one thing they use every day. So you want to find that out long before release date.

That’s where it sits now, in beta. So far, I’m not being flooded with bug reports, and my client seems happy with the result. A mammoth project isn’t necessarily doomed to extinction.

Knock on wool.

When you roll double 5′s in backgammon, you move a total of 20 points.

Shelley provides the most concise yet comprehensive review to date on the new social media app Twitter. Word for the day: laconic.

In other online news news, John Koetsier announces the pre-alpha for fatboynews. Add another link to the disambiguation page. It will be interesting to see what’s new with news reading come January.

Also via Mercola: an Esheresque moving picture that takes PiP to strange new depths (requires shockwave).

Damn Near Anything: Researchers create logic circuits using DNA (thanks, Armchair Anarchist). Sounds like the beginning of a scifi novel. “…and then something went horribly wrong.”

Looks like Vista may need iron supplements to avoid anemic performance.

Today’s the big day. Congratulations, Ponzi and Chris!

Thanks for adding me to your blogroll, Vaspers the Grate! You’re in mine, too. OK, I understand “the Grate“, but what does “Vaspers” mean?

As if I wasn’t getting enough email already, recently I joined the wp-hackers mailing list. This list covers WordPress development, and gets quite a few messages every day. My first thought was, “Why don’t they offer this as a feed?” The answer, of course, is that you couldn’t then reply to a message.

But I still don’t want these messages gumming up my Inbox. I’d rather read them from a feed, and if I have to go to a little more trouble to respond to one, fine. So what I’d like to do is set up a rule in Outlook to forward them to an RSS feed and move them to a folder so I can look them up later should I want to reply.

A Google for “Email to RSS” led me to MailBucket. Any email sent to whatever@mailbucket.org can be consumed as a feed using a URL of http://mailbucket.org/whatever.xml. Replace whatever with a name you choose, after you make sure that it isn’t already taken. So, I chose to use “wp-hackers”.

Next, I setup my rule in Outlook:

Next, I subscribed to http://mailbucket.org/wp-hackers.xml in FeedDemon.

Then I went and changed my wp-hackers mailing list password, because I had applied the rule to a message that contained it (doh!), and you or anyone else can subscribe to that feed just as easily as I can. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any way to delete an item or a feed once you have created it.

I’m also having a problem with FeedDemon here. It isn’t updating the display of the feed, even though new items have come in. I can even view the feed source (within FeedDemon) and see the new items, in valid RSS, but they aren’t being displayed. Subscribing to the feed in Bloglines does show the new items, so I’m left thinking that somehow FeedDemon is caching the display and not recognizing the fresh content, even though each item has a unique guid. Maybe it will sort itself out by tomorrow. I even tried unsubbing/resubbing to no effect. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here?

UPDATE: FeedDemon finally updated. So this is going to work after all.