and they said it couldn't be done.

I don't normally get excited by RSS or syndication but I thought this article was just fantastic: Turning OmniGraffle into an RSS Reader

a double dose of semi-daily steve.

My blog's so nice they syndicated it twice: I'm syndic8 feed #10501 and #11491. (thanks aaronsw. ;-)

I only work for the very best.. or the very worst.

This week's ABCnews.com money section has a list of the week ranking the 5 worst dot bombs. I'm proud to say I worked for one of them. And it's probably not the one you're thinking of.

xvid vs. Sigma vs. the world.

Yesterday, Sigma was accused of stealing GPL'd code for it's product, and today they're opening up the source for the alleged product. This is very interesting, it's the first time I can remember where somebody put thier code under the GPL after violating it. Now, the only thing that disappoints me is that I would like to see how the GPL fares in court, I think the legal scrutiny would provide for some fascinating, as yet undiscovered, insights into copyright.

viva Brasil!

Well, I suppose I can talk about what we've been working on for the past while that's been keeping me so busy. We teamed up with Brazilian media megacompany Globo to give Brazil their very own Blogger: blogger.com.br.

It was an.. interesting experience. Maybe one day I'll go to Brazil. I hear the government subsidises cosmetic surgery there.

Cometbus and Imhotep's cuisine.

I completely forgot that Aaron Cometbus was putting out his Cometbus Omnibus this year until I ran into it yesterday at a local bookstore.

Sometimes when you wander aimlessly around town, you just end up bored and tired or maybe a bird shits on your head. Other times you find the best restaurant in the whole damn city. Al-Masri is seriously buried in the outer richmond, on 41st avenue and Balboa and if you've never had Egyptian food (which is kind of a distant cousin to Iraqi cuisine, which you might've had under the guises of Persian food, if that helps), then you have to eat here. If you're too embarrassed to eat by yourself, give me a ring, We'll go with you.

And to think this place has been two blocks away from Stacy's place for the past couple of months and we never had any idea! What small lives we were leading.

Help us Java 3.0, you're our only hope.

In reading "10 Reasons we need Java 3.0" <via LtU>, it seems pretty obvious that we'll never have these in Java. not ever. Besides, if you want these features then just move to Smalltalk. You'll get that and a lot more. and a little less.

I'm down with RTP, yeah you know me.

We saw Road to Perdition last night. I think it's definitely worth seeing in the theater. It has the sort of atmosphere that may be hard to produce in a familiar place like your living room.

Perl defaults considered har.. ahh, I'm sick of that already.

A recent message on LL1 about Perl providing "sensible" default values like returning undef (which acts like an emtpy string or the number 0 in the appropriate context) when requesting the value for a hash key that doesn't exist reminds me of a passage from Lisp in Small Pieces:

Even if it were practical for implementers [of a language -smj] never to provoke an error and thus provide an idyllic world from which error had been banished, that design would still have a major drawback because the goal of a program is not so much to avoid committing errors but rather to fulfil its duty. In that sense, an error is a kind of crude guard rail: when we encounter it, it shows us that the program is not going as we intended. Errors and erroneous contexts need to be pointed out as early as possible so that their source can be corrected as soon as possible.

This is apropos to my rant the other day about not writing in my blog:

"I don't want to write about climbing; I don't want talk about it; I don't want to photograph it; I don't want to think about it; all I want to do is do it." -Chuck Pratt <via reginald brainwaite-lee>

goto-less pioneer passes on

It looks like Edsger Dijkstra has passed away.

MCL and the chocolate factory

Well, I'm about to purchase my first commercial Common Lisp environment. MCL's price has dropped to 95$, pending a new release that is Carbonized so I've decided to help my fellow independant software developer and buy MCL even though I can't run it native. Part of my motivation is selfish, I'm hoping when the next version comes out, which will be Carbonized, I'll get a decent upgrade price. Who am I kidding, all of my motivation here is selfish, this looks like fun!

I've mucked a little with Portable AllegroServe lately, and am trying to get the hang of LSP but I'm starting to see why wiseman considers it mostly a failure. Honestly, it's no less failure than JSP, PHP, etc. They're all kind of ugly in their own way, LSP is just ugly in it's own special way.

MOP: the meta object partytime.

So given a theoretical language, if it's first-order constructs were closures that could send and receive messages and then shuffle received messages to other closures, how is that different from an object, really?

Howdy from beautiful lake tahoe. That was one long ass drive.

Vacation revisited.

Even though I'm in mid-vacation and still have one last stop to make, I think now is as good a time as any to recoup.

Saturday through Friday morning found us in sunny, sunny (way too sunny) Eastern Oregon, where I grew up. People are unsurprisingly apologetic about the place, even though Stacy found it delightful and quaint. We spent a day up at Lake Penland with my friends Jason and Rosco at Jason's cabin, two days at my aunt's place in nearby watermelon capital Hermiston for a pleasant family event, then I took Stacy on a tour of downtown Pendleton (all 4 blocks of it). To finish it off, my dad decided that 7am was a good time to wake up and take us on a 200 mile trip to Wallowa Lake. It's much more developed than I remember it being last time I visited (about a decade ago). We took a tram ride up one of the mountains there to about 8150'. Yikes! We had some burgers, came back down, and drove home.

On Friday, we flew up to mega-small-town Spokane, Washington, who's main strip is about 180 blocks longs and there's virtually no mass transit in this town of nearly a half-million. The local bookstore had two shelves of Bibles to make up for all the fast food joints. We had dinner at a place called Top o' China, which boasted "the largest international buffet in the region". I guess mussels covered in colby cheese could be considered "international" cuisine, after all, who would claim that as their own food?! blech.

My good friend Ray and his delightful fiance Kellie were married on Saturday at a lake-side resort, with ducks and speedboats in full force. Stacy and I were so worn out from the previous week's running around that we really didn't get to spend any time with people, we just went back to the hotel after the reception and got some rest.

Next up was Seattle, where we toured downtown eating Piroshki's at Pike's Place and later gelato that was nearly as good as the real Italian deal (so says Stacy, who's the only one between us who would know). We wandered the University of Washington at Seattle campus where I scrounged the university bookstore for books I'd never heard of before. Score! I nearly had to throw some clothes away to get the books back home. Kate was really nice to drive us to the airport at 6am on Tuesday for us to get back to SF.

Now that I'm back in SF, I've built a (mostly) new machine to replace the one that crapped out on me as soon as I left (of course). Now I can shuffle some services onto it from the soon-to-be-defunct machine (the one hosting this blog) before it craps out. Judging from the kernel panics and crazy console messages that will be any day now. hip hip hooray.

I did have the chance to see Goldmember, which was fun but stretching it a bit, and we finally saw Waking Life, which was too gimmicky and a bit heavy handed. Of course, we all knew it had a gimmick but apart from that gimmick, I don't think the movie doesn't stands out.

I had the chance to read "The School of Niklaus Wirth", which I enjoyed even through it's hero worshipping. Essentials of Programming Languages is definitely worth it's weight in platinum (I'd say gold but it's a small book). It seems to accomplish in it's small form what several other, larger books combined have a hard time doing; Walking you through writing a real interpreter for a real language and not leaving you confused at the end.

Now it's off to Lake Tahoe. I haven't had the time to get any of the stuff I wanted to get done this vacation (hacking on my language and working on a paper) but perhaps this weekend will be different. Yeah, right.