For the sake of my readers (that’s you) I have modified the themes on both Quips and Tips to display the sidebars after the content (thanks to Shelley for the suggestion). That way, if one of the third-party scripts in the sidebar takes an inordinate amount of time to load (I’m looking at you, Criteo) you can already be enjoying my breathtakingly profound wisdom, blissfully unaware of the thousands of little IP packets busily scurrying back and forth in uncomplaining silence as they construct the massive edifice that my sidebar has become.

I’ve noticed only one anomaly since this change: if the posts aren’t as long as the sidebar, the sidebar overwrites the footer. I’m using position:absolute with right:0 to slap the sidebars up on the right side, and the containing div section acts like it’s completely ignorant of how much vertical real estate the sidebars occupy. Anyone have any suggestions on how to solve that one?

If you’ve ever worked on a medium to large project (no matter how well-managed it was or what version control software you used) then you have probably experienced the Pain Of Obstructive Puts (POOP). Another developer put a change into the archives that makes your code stop working.

In case you were on the giving end of one of those transactions, just get the WOMM certification to deflect any blame. Be sure to complete all four steps.

The biggest POOP problem I regularly experience happens when someone updates a large number of files whose changes are all interdependent. Working remotely from my home with a 1.5mbps download speed means pinging remote archives over VPN takes time. On one large project I’m involved with, a full automated update of all archives takes several hours. It’s not something I want to do every day.

When I’m in mad-rush-to-the-coding-deadline mode, I try to avoid doing a full update as long as possible. I probably shouldn’t, especially at that phase, but I hate to eat up all that bandwidth and processing time while I’m in a hurry to get things done.

Nevertheless, sooner or later I’ll have to modify a file that someone else has also changed, and their revision will require a whole boatload of others — usually scattered throughout the project. So I kick off a full update, and then I try to second-guess what files might be required and go after those individually, madly trying to get a clean build without having to wait and wait and wait.

That happened to me yesterday. Then this morning as I was cooking my breakfast, I thought, “Hmm, there really should be a transaction history for the archives so I could know what files had been touched without having to scan every blessed archive.”

There is! We use PVCS Version Manager, which creates a journal file. For every modification to the archives, this file contains a comma-delimited entry with the archive filename, person who modified it, date, time, and the type and version of modification.

So, I wrote a quick and dirty clean Ruby script to scan the log for entries in which a new revision was put on or after a specified date. It weeds out duplicate entries and extracts each file from its archive if not up to date. This script takes minutes to run, rather than hours. So I’ve gained a lot of time — and lost one good excuse.

Revolution: How many of you remember 1968? Prague Spring, USS Pueblo, Tet Offensive, My Lai, MLK and RFK assassinations, Columbia protests, Hair, French May, The Catonsville Nine, DNC Chicago, Tricky Dick, the White Album, Revolution. it was a confusing year for an eight year old boy.

Seth Godin: “Monopolies work to protect something that wouldn’t belong to them if we had a chance to start over.” Hmm… could apply to extended copyrights and patents, too.

We parents worry too much. Safe at second base. Damien’s pooped .

Shelley Batts shares one aspect of her personal evolution .

I knew there was a good reason (thanks, theheadlemur ).

The return of the Commodore .

Apotheon plans to write software to use to write about writing the software for writing about writing the software for… (I hope there’s some tail recursion optimization here)

Alice (of Wonderland or Not) has added me to her blogroll. Woo hoo! Thanks, Alice! Nice new theme, BTW. And thanks for enabling full text feeds!

With all the buzz over Twitter, I decided to create an account — if for nothing more than to stake out my claim to my username.

Right off the bat my first impression is: sssssllllooooowwwww. Not something I’d want to be waiting on with bated breath in order to enter the next 140 characters. I sated that need back in the days of punch cards.

I’ve linked to it before, but there’s not much I could add to Shelley’s breathtakingly eloquent review.

I could see Twitter being useful for general announcements. Instead of sending each of my clients an email telling them I’ll be gone for a few hours or days, I could Twitter it. Presuming, of course, that they knew to check my Twitter log for the latest.

That would also alleviate the need to post similar notices on my blog. Does that mean that traditional blogging (oxymoron?) could become more formal — limited to posts of general or enduring interest, instead of the “here’s what I’m doing now” posts that could easily move to Twitter? Is that even desirable? Will Twitter take the life out of blogging by removing the mundane?

What a commotion they’re making! All twittering and screeching…

–Aristophanes, The Birds, trans. David Barrett

Clohesy and Thomas visited every house in Earlsdon that was a number 67 and chronicled their journey here.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian – with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan (thanks, Paul). The other futurist videos on this site are also quite interesting.

Also via Paul: who would have thought that black holes are bright?

God’s sick sense of humor: “ES&D , little bunnies!”

Edward Hotchkiss has added me to his blogroll on iamdeadnow. Turn me on, dead man!

Widget watch

The Gadget Panel uses my tag cloud widget.

Shelley Batts added me to her blogroll (after I begged and pleaded). Thanks, Shelley!

Shelley also reminds us that today is Pi Day. Don’t forget to eat your pie at 1:59.

UPDATE: Recite Stu’s poem between bites.

“Get your kicks on Route 66“

This video is amazing, encouraging, and frightening all at the same time (Thanks, Mom (we do live in interesting times)).

LET us do somemetametaprogramming in Ruby.

Ever since learning Ruby and Lisp, I’ve known that functional programming makes traditional object-oriented programming look clumsy and inelegant, but I couldn’t quite put the why into words (thanks, Assaf).

Hrafn has seen the light and enabled full-text feeds for inkblot earth.

Jake Vinson and Scott Adams share funny stories of annoyingly self-important people.

The unlucky 13th began haunting me early this morning. My wife had asked me to scan something for her, and my HP Director software wouldn’t talk to the scanner. This has happened to me with this HP7310 in network mode several times in the past. Try resetting everything from power-up, and still no joy. I’ll probably have to reinstall the software to get it working again. Later.

Then I started up FeedDemon, and it wouldn’t update any of my feeds. It just sat there like it was trying, but never found anything or indicated that it was done. I went to Newsgator online, and that was working OK. Oh great, maybe I’ll switch to Google Reader. Not happy.

I went into BlogDesk to open a post-in-progress. The “Open” dialog wouldn’t come up. BlogDesk just kept churning away at about 87% CPU without ever responding. My system is possessed, thinks I. Maybe it’s a *gasp* virus. I take a look through my recent downloads, and there aren’t any. I haven’t opened any unexpected attachments on emails. I’ve been a good little webboy, really.

While I was puzzling over this behavior, Kiltak (of [Geeks are Sexy] Technology News fame) sent me an email to let me know that my sidebar was ugly (I mean, uglier than usual) in IE7. So I try to bring up IE7 and it just hangs trying to get to my site. I’ve been on the site all day in Firefox, and sure enough I can still get to it that way. So I tried navigating IE7 to an intranet site here on my network. Can’t do it. I go to another workstation, and IE7 connects anywhere just fine.

Hmm, thinks I. FeedDemon uses IE’s WebBrowser control, so there’s one common thread, at least. What could be shutting down network access for IE, but not for Firefox, POP3, or SMTP?

Let’s try another reboot.

Then go right into IE7. It works.

Bring up FeedDemon. It works.

Open a post in BlogDesk. No problem.

Try HP Director. Still doesn’t work. Can you guess what happens next?

IE7, FeedDemon, and BlogDesk quit working. It’s that damned HP software. The executable isn’t in Task Manager any more, but somehow it’s still got a stranglehold on some aspects of Windows, especially networking.

So, I need to try the HP in non-networked mode, or maybe just get a new All-in-One. Or just drop Windows for good.

But certainly I can stop being triskaidekaphobic.

Probably not. Not because I don’t like what I’m doing — I do. But choices are conditioned as much or more on opportunity as on desire, and the opportunities would be different from that point forward than the ones that led me here.

But I could only hope for a life as good as the one I’m living.

How would you answer Max’s question?

For more than a year now I’ve been thinking about how private blogs could be a better medium than email for communications within companies or between business partners. But that’s about where I left it.

Stowe Boyd has similar ideas, but he goes further and thinks outside the blox. Something like what he proposes could carry us a long way. Shall we ever see..?

I’d be happy to help make it happen.