Random musings
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Goodbye to Seattle
On March 10th, the day after my last day at Microsoft, I threw a party to celebrate all the good times I’ve had and people I’ve met over five great years in Seattle. I’ve still got a lot more to say about Seattle, Microsoft, the last 5 years and the next 25 but for now…
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Big Changes
Today, I did something crazy. I announced that I’m leaving my job, a job that I really like and that others would kill to have, a job with a great team on a project I enjoy and helped start, a job for which I am well compensated and at a company that is probably unmatched…
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Computing distances with Lat/Lon
Have you ever wanted to compute distances with latitude and longitude? At first it seems so simple. We all learned the pythagorean theorem in elementary school: d=sqrt((x2 – x1)^2 + (y2 – y1)^2) So if we have our two points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) then we should be able to find (x2-x1,y2-y1) and find the distance…
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KML in Google Maps and the challenge of standards
91 N. MAIN ST., WARSAW NY 14569200geocode91 N Main St, Warsaw, NY 14569, USAUSNYWyomingWarsaw91 N Main St14569-78.132576,42.741659,0
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The world needs only five computers
C|Net hosts an interesting interview with Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun, where he articulates the Sun argument that there will only be a small number of companies in the world that can achieve the scale and efficiency of data center operations to compete and that everybody else will get squeezed out. I think this basic…
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Google Maps style UX comes to Leopard
At the WWDC last summer, Steve Jobs made a big deal about how he was keeping a few features in the next release of OS X (Leopard) secret because he didn’t want the folks in Redmond (ahem) to “start their photocopiers too early”. Although the whole photocopiers angle is an obvious jab (and not even plausibly realistic) I do think there are…
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The Dilbert Blog: Atheists: The New Gays
The always insightful Scott Adams has a hillarious new blog post: Atheists: The New Gays While I think many Atheists have an unfortunate tendency to be evangelical about their non-belief, I do think that recent events have made atheism more publicly acceptable in America than ever, even if it’s unfortunate that it’s at the expense…
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Election Hangover
It’s 6am the morning after the election and the democrats have done it. They’ve taken control of the house and the Senate is still up for grabs. Montana and Virginia are too close to call. If the democrats take both of those, they’ll have control of the Senate too, 51:49. While I’m very pleased with…
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The joys of screenscraping
A while back, I ran across a great HackDiary entry extolling the virtues of using TagSoup and XPATH to do screenscraping from the web. TagSoup is a library that coerces all the ugly nasty HTML you find out in the wild into well-formed (although not necessarily valid) XML. While there’s no guarantee that the results…
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Postfix
My rimu host hosts a number of domains, including oroup.com, openrelay.com, cadabraco.com and drugmaps.com. I want to be able to send and receive email to those domains, but (at least for now) I don’t really want to set up dovecot locally and actually deal with mail. So the ideal thing is just to forward your…
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