You have new Picture Mail!

Panini grill is back!

Maladies of the information age

This will hit some of you a little too close to home.

A reminder

Don't feel bad, PayPal didn't know what it was building either. (Note the date of the article)

Scheduled Downtime

This network device is undergoing scheduled maintenance.

My mortal enemies.

In my sleep last night, I muttered "Crusty Old Dean". I've taken a lot of cold medicine lately. Also, I have watched Real Genius 3 times in 3 days.

I am so grateful for Augmentin and Nasacort. Soon I will feel human again and my narrow eustachian tubes will stop conspiring to make my head feel like an overinflated balloon. Yes friends, it is ear infection season again.

Abram Stice, RIP

My friend Abram Stice was found dead in his apartment this morning. His brother found him and Rosco sent me an email to let me know. It's not clear what happened; he's been ill recently but we thought it was just a cold. A coroners report should clarify.

BEEP blabbility BLOP

Marshall Rose, "On BEEP":

"Unfortunately, most application protocol design has not enjoyed as excellent a history as TCP. Engineers design protocols the way monkeys try to get to the moon that is, by climbing a tree, looking around, and finding another tree to climb."

I am taking a hard look at BEEP again since I have a small need for a network protocol but am too smart (read: lazy) to want to build the handshake and transport myself. Focusing on the marshalling is enough work for me. I have been following BEEP since it was called BXXP (aren't I cool?) and have been itching to use it.

SubEthaEdit uses BEEP. Read on, proles:

"For v2.0, you've moved the low-level networking to the BEEP protocol (blocks extensible exchange protocol). What led you to BEEP, and then to choose it as your networking layer over other protocols?"

"We researched a lot of options for a new network protocol. We wanted efficiency, extensibility and something that would fit our requirements without being an ugly hack. We had evaluated a few technologies and chose BEEP because it was the best fit for what we were trying to do.

BEEP provides a simple and most importantly standardized framework for everything you will have to handle when you design and implement a network protocol, that deserves the name. It's an IETF standard (RFC 3080) and as we recently found out is also used in Apple's Xgrid software.

Having our own Objective-C implementation of BEEP powering our networking layer has great advantages: If we want to add a feature like TLS encryption or authentification in the future, we should be able to do so without breaking compatibility with the current protocol.

Secondly BEEP enables us to do more stuff more efficiently than before with e.g. reduced resource load by using multiplexed channels over a single connection or better status channel capabilities. Last but not least we won't have to implement a networking stack for another application when we write one; we can just take our BEEP library and create a profile for the new application."

Tiny Roasted Crabs

This is a bag of tiny roasted crabs. It's called "Let's Party" but not in a fun, happy way. More like a bully saying "You wanna get nuts?! Let's get nuts!"

Another IE "feature"

If you don't care about browser quirks and internet brokenness then this post is not for you.

Look at this page. First in Internet Explorer. Then in Firefox. Notice the following:

"This document is a Single File Web Page, also known as a Web Archive file. If you are seeing this message, your browser or editor doesn't support Web Archive files. Please download a browser that supports Web Archive, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer."

Good lord.

And yeah, I do read a lot about football.

reAnimator

Oliver Steele wrote a great tool for visualizing regexes using OpenLaszlo: "reAnimator is a tool for visualizing how regular expression engines use finite-state automata to match regular regular expression patterns against text.". [via lemonodor]