Larry Hosken: New: 2008

• Book Report: Anathem Yesterday, I watched a co-worker give a "practice" thesis defense. My workplace has plenty of grad students who are just, uhm, taking a little break from school. He's one of them. I, on the other h...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Ch 1 Beautiful Code is a book about programming well. There are 33 chapters. In each chapter, one or two big-name programmers write about "the most beautiful piece of code they knew." As you'd expect w...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 17-21 Another Level of Indirection / Diomidis Spinellis I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to get out of this essay. "Function pointers can be useful."? OK, the point of these essays was not to in...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 2-4 (Another episode of Iron Puzzler is coming soon. And now, on to our partial book report, Beautiful Code, chapters 2-4...) Subversion's Delta Editor / Karl Fogel This essay was nice. It talks about...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 22-25 (Visiting the doctor is good for you. Today, I visited a cardiologist to make sure that my recent hospital visit was Really No Big Deal. Thus, I missed the last bus to work and worked from home tod...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 5-8 Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order) / Elliotte Rusty Harold Emerging from the previous essay, I saw that this essay was going to be about verifying correctness of XML. My yawning muscles tensed...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code: Chs 9-12 (I started learning Erlang a couple of weeks ago. Then I stopped. I'd started learning how to use the concurrency features. So I tried a simple program: it ran a "while true" loop in two threads--...
• Book Report: Chiaroscuro: Patchwork Book #1 It's a graphic novel about a whiny artist who hangs out in cafes and goes to parties. Occasionally, something strange happens. It's pretty; some of the banter is witty; I'm glad I read it. The plo...
• Book Report: The Inmates are Running the Asylum I didn't finish reading this book. It's about software usability. Well, the first few dozen pages were about the importance of software usability, with precious little advice on how to achieve same...
• Book Report: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier According to one election quiz, I should vote for John Edwards or Ron Paul. According to two election quizzes, I should vote for Bill Richardson. According to yet another, I should vote for Kucinich...
• Book Report: Mathematical Cranks My lip-bump had a name: pyogenic granuloma. You can Google that if you enjoy gross photos. Speaking of annoyances, what about those mathematical cranks, eh? Back in 2006, I reported that R.S.J. Re...
• Irony in a Library Catalog I want to check the book Ambient Findability out of the UC Berkeley library. So I looked it up in the catalog: 1. Morville, Peter. Ambient findability / Peter Morville. Sebastopol, Calif. ; Fa...
• Link: my IMDb page Darling of course I have a page in the Internet Movie Database. Some might say that it was strange that I worked on a console game for a year. But it was all worth it for that IMDb page. Darling, ...
• Link: Qwirkle I don't feel so bad about all those times Susan Ross beat me at Petaluma Game Night now that she's an award-winning game designer for her game Qwirkle.Labels: awesome, entertainment industry, link...
• Link: Race for the Galaxy When people ask me what I do at work, I clam up. Most of that stuff is confidential. Like when some of us geek gamers play-tested the geek game Race for the Galaxy some evenings, we knew it was a f...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, I Get Tired Just Reading About Them Dave Hill posted his write-up of Hot Springs Midnight Madness 2007, which sounds like it was pretty awesome. These people are outside, at night, in the snow solving puzzles, if I'm interpreting thos...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 26-29 Labor-Saving Architecture / William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt This is a fun essay, talking about issues that arise if you have a distributed network of computers and you want all of those comput...
• Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 30-33 (If you're reading these posts in reverse chronological order, be aware that this Book Report is the last one of a series. This book report is for Beautiful Code, a book of essays. Rather than try ...
• Book Report: Better You think I read this book because of my recent hospital visit, but I swear it was already on my to-do list. And it's not just about medicine. Sort of. This book, by Atul Gawande, is sort of about...
• Book Report: Making Globalization Work This book is worth reading. That's unfortunate; it has about 30 pages of interesting material scattered amongst 300 pages of verbiage. It's a book about Globalization--mostly about opening up marke...
• Book Report: Nickel and Dimed I've been having a good time this weekend, hanging out at social gatherings around various in-town out-of-towners. I guess I should report on a happy book, but instead the next book in line is Nicke...
• Book Report: Uncommon Carriers I'd read most of these John McPhee essays already, and it was nice to read them again. This collection includes the essay about riding in the hazmat truck. That essay is darned good. Look, not all...
• Milestone: 11 Million Hits (plus gratuitous Taft domain pestering) Wow, it's the site's eleven-millionth hit. 195.225.178.21 - - [20/Feb/2008:06:20:03 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/15/darcy_ian.html HTTP/1.1" 200 853 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Bless Them Traffic was bad this evening; my commute was long; I emerged from the bus nauseous. That happens when the commute goes too long: stare at the laptop screen too long while on a moving vehicle, don't ...
• Semi-Irony in some Library Mail This came in the mail: We're sorry, but your LINK+ request has been cancelled. Please contact your local branch library for more information. Reason: Not on shelf. AUTHOR: Jones, William F., 1952-...
• Site Update: Contact, more XFN than you can stand I've been marking my internet territory. That is to say, I've been federating my identity. That is to say, I added more rel="me" links to the Larry Hosken contact page. Do you remember my ramble a...
• Book Report: India (From Midnight to Millenium) Summary: India is a melting pot of cultures, except that it hasn't melted. India is a diverse mix of cultures. Groups get mad and argue. It would be better if they just got along. For the most p...
• Book Report: Infrastructure Wow, Infrastructure is a great book. You should acquire it and read it. (Here, by "read" I mean "look at the photos". But you can read it, too, if you like.) It is photographs of "infrastructure"...
• Book Report: On Food and Cooking Here is the recipe I follow for tamales: 1. remove two tamales from package. 2. place in pot with steamer rack 3. place on high heat 4. get distracted by computer stuff, lose track of time 4. when ap...
• Book Report: Seabiscuit This was a fun read about horseracing.Labels: book, entertainment industry, interspecies diplomacy...
• Book Report: The Social Life of Information It was six months when I started looking for work and it was just this last week that I got my first phone screen. There aren't many technical writing jobs in San Francisco, thus phone screens are ra...
• Embedded Reporter Seeks Team Is your team playing in the upcoming Back to Basics/Midnight Madness game on April 5? Would you let me play with your team and then write about it afterwards? If so, please get in touch with me (we...
• Not-Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but especiially at Waller and Steiner On my way back home from the library, I encountered a nicely-made suggestion box at the Northeast corner of Waller and Steiner. Signage encouraged passers-by to write suggestions on index cards and ...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Brute Force Web Quiz Crawler It's another blog post about how web programming skillz can aid in game-ish activities. A couple of years ago, Team XX-Rated hosted the Paparazzi Game. I was sorry that illness made me miss the gam...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Dim Memories of GC Summit 2008 The lovely Just Passing Through put together a fun & educational event last night: a GC Summit. Folks who had run Games and/or were considering running Games showed up to eat, talk, and watch i...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: an elegant Mastermind Crawler Last time, I wrote about a brute force web crawler. This time, I'm writing about an elegant web crawler. As you would expect from elegant code, I didn't write it. The Pirates BATH game had a pregam...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Simple Website Monitor Waiting for the bus, Jonas asked me: "Why did you start beeping during that tech talk?" People at work occasionally start beeping. We're an internet company with many servers. When servers have pro...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: The Elementarizer Yes, it's another blog post about programming & puzzle-hunts. This one isn't a web crawler. Dr Clue runs team-building puzzle hunts. Alexandra's done some puzzles for them and I've proofread a...
• Site: Gratuitous Photos of 17th Street (Am I the only one who checked the coedastronomy site in case they meant March 3 Greenwich time?) I can post an admission that I'm half-done with a handful of projects, but I don't have to like it. ...
• Book Report: Don't Make Me Think The SF Minigame was awesome. But I can't say much about that now, since other folks will still get a chance to play in that game. So... a book review about Don't Make me Think This is a book about ...
• Book Report: Giant Robot 53 In this most recent issue of Giant Robot, James Jarvis says ...it takes a lot of obsessiveness to make things minimal. If he decides to give up the art business, he could be a technical writer. ...
• Book Report: War and Peace Russian novels are long. Back in high school, my English class was supposed to read Crime and Punishment. Our teacher asked for a show of hands: how many of us had finished reading the book. Mine ...
• David Hill on Hypotheses and Blurting David Hill replied to yesterday's blog post on hypotheses in puzzle-solving. He replied on Facebook, so you probably didn't see it. I'll post his reply here. I have a couple of reasons for wanting...
• Follow-up: SFZero Suggestion Box You may recall that last month, I stumbled onto a suggestion box on Waller and Steiner streets. This suggestion box, as it turned out, was part of a game. This game, SF0, is a sort of mutual-dare c...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere; but so is Problem-Solving A while back--long enough ago that I'm probably getting details wrong--someone told me how the Scoobies tackle a puzzle. They set the puzzle out where everyone in the team can look at it. They look...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Overhead This past weekend was the excellent Midnight Madness: Back to Basics Game. I'll post photos soon, a write-up eventually. Yes, yes, I'm slow. But I'll post about one thing now, because it happened ...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Midnight Madness Photos I went to the Midnight Madness: Back to Basics Game and all I got was a t-shirt, a pencil, a card announcing an upcoming Game, eight photos, and the most challenging adventure of my life.Labels: phot...
• Unread Books "Meme" via Journeywoman, a "meme" that's almost on topic with my recent whining about Russian novels: What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in,...
• Book Report: Defensive Design for the Web It's sad news that Rory Root, owner of Berkeley's Comic Relief comic book store, died today. But no-one reads this blog for news. You're here for book reports. Here is a book report for Defensive ...
• Book Report: Foundations of Security This is a introduction to computer security for programmers. It's subtitled, "What every programmer needs to know." By reading this book I learned... I learned that I'd already learned the foundatio...
• Book Report: iWoz It is Steve Wozniak's autobiography, as told to Gina Smith. It's a fun read. Keep your wits about you as you read--they didn't fact-check all of this material. So when Wozniak tells you what was g...
• Book Report: Keeping Found Things Found This book's title is misleading: it make sense. This book's preface is misleading: it makes sense, too. It took a while before I realized that the book was noodling all over the place but not actual...
• Book Report: The Middle Kingdom I didn't plan to spend today filling out an alternative minimum tax form for my friends at the IRS, but they insisted. I thought maybe I'd write something. But I didn't write anything. Except numb...
• Book Report: Myth Adventures Myth Adventures is a comic book based on the swords-and-sorcery comedy Another Fine Myth. It's a few years old, but got reprinted recently. I picked up a copy a few weeks ago at Comic Relief. You ...
• Book Report: Refactoring Here I am tending to my blog on the bus. I wasn't really planning on it. I was just checking my email. I get email, among other occasions, when someone or something posts a comment to this blog. ...
• Book Report: Wireless Nation I'm getting some writing done this weekend, finally putting together notes from the Midnight Madness: Back to Basics game. And I'm listening to some music by Dengue Fever. They perform in the style...
• Just Three Shinteki Photos I didn't take any Shinteki photos. That's not quite true. I took a photo of an easel while GC was still setting up. Then Brent put a cover over the easel, like folks weren't supposed to see it so ...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco I posted some notes on the excellent SF Minigame. There's one photo. Usually I have zero photos or many photos. This time, one. In other news, yesterday The Great Urban Race came to San Francisco...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford I enjoyed reading this write-up of a recent Stanford Game. You might, too.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...
• Puzzle Hunts aren't really Everywhere I saw a campaign poster for Obama. It read Fired Up And Ready To Go ...laid out with those line breaks. I'm so acrostically minded that I found it crudely funny. I blame the puzzle hunts. (I a...
• PuzzleHunters.com : Register or be Anti-Social Behold a lovely forum for discussing puzzle hunts, puzzle magazines, and stranger things. It's new, so there's not much there yet. Scott Blomquist set it up and seeks your frankest feedback. He wri...
• Puzzles from Down Under I don't know anything about the puzzles announced at the Google Australia Blog which is a little frustrating because I'm apparently not supposed to register to look at them.Labels: link, puzzle scene...
• Site Update: Extended Shinteki Decathlon 4 Kvetchfest The Shinteki series of games is so awesome that you can remain bitter about a van breakdown for several days afterwards if that van, you know, interfered with... Oh, I'm just going to go sit over her...
• Site Update: a Pretty Plain Code Cheatsheet I made a pretty plain code cheatsheet for puzzlehunts. It doesn't have all the codes you want, but it has the biggies and it's not too crowded. PDF is here: http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/friv...
• Book Report: China: Fragile Superpower This book is about China. This book makes me want to hide my eyes and say "I hope you're wrong." It paints a discouraging picture. The Chinese government fears overthrow by popular uprising. The g...
• Book Report: Developing Technical Training Please pardon this book report: these are my notes from the book, not the usual wry and insightful commentary. "Instructional design", as near as I can tell, is a movement to apply some rigor to les...
• Book Report: Invisible Cities I am back from Los Angeles. I have seen more art museums recently than... than is perhaps healthy. The stench of artsy-fartsiness clings to me still. I'm digging out from underneath a backlog of e...
• Book Report: Thirteen Moons The Trail of Tears was a bad thing, but Thirteen Moons was a good novel.Labels: book, middle states...
• Milestone: 12 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 12 millionth hit. Let's look at the log: 66.249.73.131 - - [27/Jun/2008:00:13:43 -0400] "GET /new/archive/2005_08_01_index.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Go...
• Not exactly Puzzlehunts Tom Lester and Annie Burnham got married today. You might remember them from BANG 13... but it's been a couple of years, so you don't have to feel bad if you don't remember. But they're married now,...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Minneapolis Remember a while back, I mentioned SF0, a not-really-a-puzzle-hunt dealie, more of a mutual-dare society? Well some folks on SF0 bridged the gap to puzzlehuntdom: they hosted a puzzle hunt in Minnea...
• Puzzle Hunts were Everywhen, even 1973 Holy #$!) check it out: It's old Game invites to pre-Midnight Madness 1970s Don Luskin et. al puzzle-y Games! And newspaper articles describing those games! It seems like they were pretty heavy on ...
• Site Update: Los Angeles Photos I took some photos in Los Angeles, though they aren't exactly photos of Los Angeles. Instead... uhm, museum-goers. They're photos of museum-goers. I must have been in a weird mood that week.Labels: l...
• Site Update: The Smoking GNU: Back to Basics You are, of course, far too tactful to point out that it took me over two months to write up the wacky fun times playing in the Midnight Madness game with The Smoking GNU. It takes a while to write ...
• Book Report: the Castaway Pirates Last night, I played Modern Art with some folks. It was a high-stakes game. One of us (not me) had revealed that he was one of the top five players of Caylus (a geeky German boardgame) on Brettspie...
• Book Report: Designing Effective Instruction Notes about another Instructional Design book. Please pardon the dry nature of this book report. Again, emphasis on measuring learning. Consider making up the final exam questions before you write...
• Book Report: Noodling for Flatheads I've been watching teams' Ghost Patrol application videos. They've been fun, with a lot of variety. What does this tell us? Fun: This demonstrates that Gamers are silly Variety: This demonstrates ...
• Book Report: Old Man's War In this science-fiction novel, it's the far future and yet recognizably-human (albeit heavily-augmented) humans are somehow still relevant? Humans are better at fighting than human-controlled robots...
• Book Report: Principles of Instructional Design This is the third book on instructional design I tackled reading. It's also the wordiest. "When one begins to think about the application of learning principles to instruction, there is no better g...
• Book Report: Scratch Beginnings Adam Shepard wanted to see if he could start out in a strange city with just $25 and a bagful of clothes and become a "member of society": have an operational car, a furnished apartment, have $2500, ...
• Book Report: Singularity Sky My cousin goes to school in Washington D.C. He was talking with some Washington D.C. bloggers. Except that they don't call themselves bloggers. Why not? Because they're in Washington D.C. and "blog...
• Link: A 3-D Puzzle Chat Room Here's an attempt at creating a Lively room for the discussion of puzzles, puzzle hunts, and/or whatever. (That sentence might make more sense if I explain that "Lively" is Google's new free 3-D cha...
• Link: BANG Suddenly Looming on Horizon As one of the bureaucrats of the Bay Area Night Game wiki, I sleepily go through my chores. My feed reader monitors the "recent changes" section of the wiki. When it detects something, I go to the ...
• Link: Ghost Patrol Application from Mystic Ghosti You won't find the Mystic Ghosti application on YouTube because... it's not a video. We played to our strengths, creating a ghost-capturing cryptic crossword. Where by "we", I mean "not me". My "c...
• Link: Ghost Patrol Forums, Sort of Meat Machine (well, the Bay Area team by that name) set up a "Ghost Capturing" part of their Ghost Patrol application: a social network for ghosts (and ghost sympathizers. I joined, but have encount...
• Link: We Told Stories Do you remember a few months back, there was a web-sensation around a novel told through the medium of Google Maps? I read that novel. What I didn't know is that this project was part of the effort...
• Site: New Photos for the Lyon St Page Last week, a few folks headed over to Pete's place to watch the movie "Appleseed Ex Machina", which was pretty good. Pete lives in the Marina district. Thus, this was a chance for me to once again ...
• Book Report: The Air We Breathe This was a fun novel. As with other Andrea Barrett novels, the heroes are scientists, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. This novel is narrated in the first person plural, by a community of people....
• Book Report: Ambient Findability This was not the right book for me. Rather, I was not the right person to read this book. Ambient Findability is a high-level overview, a survey of the surge of information that's coming at us, and...
• Book Report: The Atrocity Archives British Intelligence vs Secrets Man was Not Meant to Know. This was a fun read. Not Charles Stross' best work--so if you don't like his other stuff, I'd skip this one. But I liked his other stuff ...
• Book Report: Essays in Computing Science (Hoare) It's a collection of essays on Computer Science by Tony Hoare, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s. This isn't what you'd expect to find on my reading list, but the essay on Communicating Sequen...
• Book Report: My Country Versus Me A scientist suspected of mailing out Anthrax commits suicide. Which brought up a newslet, a reminder of a recent lawsuit: Hatfill, another scientist sued the FBI after they leaked footage to the med...
• Book Report: The Next Catastrophe I'm going to Jury Duty today. Oh, gee. What if I get picked for a trial that goes on for three years? What if I'm sequestered? Does that mean no internet? What a catastrophe that would be. Oh h...
• Book Report: TCP/IP Illustrated Network programming today... gee, I just call into some standard library, say, "I want the webpage at http://slashdot.org/" and it's there. It's almost that easy. You kids today, you don't know how...
• Book Report: You Can't Win Jury duty continues. Jury selection continues. Maybe this is an appropriate time to post this book report which I typed up a while ago... You Can't Win is the autobiography of Jack Black. Here, b...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: a web-crawling puzzle-hunt robot that didn't work When the applications for the Ghost Patrol game started appearing, it was pretty humbling. New videos kept showing up on YouTube. The videos... the videos made me glad that my team (Mystic Ghosti) ...
• Site: Library Cart Graffiti Photos Yesterday was a good day for a few reasons, few of which will make it into the permanent record. But one good thing was a visit to Doe Library. While there, I snapped photos of a few decorated book...
• Site: Yet More Library Book Cart Graffiti Photos I went to Doe Library again yesterday and I had my camera with me--with some juice in the batteries this time. I snapped photos of the re-shelving carts, the ones which have been decorated. I guess...
• Book Report: Cosmonaut Keep There's a parallel story; humanity's learning the secret of a light-speed interstellar starship drive; humanity's rediscovery of same, hundreds of years later. There is politics, humor, ... I dunno,...
• Book Report: Eleanor Rigby I have so many of these book reports written up. I should post them more often. I don't post them because lately I'm working long hours. (Which sounds impressive until you find out the reason I'm w...
• Book Report: A Far Country Scouting game locations for a puzzle hunt, e.g. BANG 19, is time-consuming but fun. It's a good excuse to go out on a tour of not-in-front-of-your-computer. Plus, since you're trying to find places...
• Book Report: Giant Robot 55 I don't know if anyone mailed an announcement to the Bay Area Night Game list about the upcoming BANG 19, a.k.a. a "simulcast" of Seattle's SNAP 4. I don't want to think about it. I'm too sleepy to...
• Book Report: The Lindbergh Child It's rough being famous. You just want to go about your life, but there are jerks out there watching you. It's creepy. And some of those jerks do worse than just watch. The comic book The Lindber...
• Book Report: The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah (Cometbus #51) This is a 'zine, the latest issue of Cometbus. This is a history of Berkeley's Telegraph avenue--mostly of the shops which arose out of a place called Rambam, which predates my Berkeley days. But t...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including a State of Inebriation Rich Bragg of Blood and Bones sent me some mail about turning BANG 18 into a drinking game, vis a vis a strategy to avoid being obliged to run a future BANG. ...By the way, re: your blog post, whil...
• Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Iron Puzzler BANG BANG 18, the Iron Puzzler BANG was last weekend and it was awesome. The excellent organizers--the Burninators, Coed Astronomy, BootyVicious, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow, Platonic Solids, and...
• Book Report: Daemon (If you posted a guess about the secret message in the jack-o-lanterns photo, then you were right! Especially considering that was an unplaytested "I have no idea if this is possible" puzzle, I am su...
• Book Report: Deliver the Vote Deliver the Vote is a history of crooked elections in the U.S. of A. It doesn't try to describe all crooked elections. Just some good stories, just enough to fill up a few hundred pages. George Wa...
• Book Report: Gaming the Vote I know what I can say about BANG 19 preparations. It's necessarily vague, in the name of seekricy, but it's heartfelt. Thank you you past Game Control folks who have shared advice, "war stories", a...
• Book Report: Ghost Train to the Eastern Star It's a recent railway travelogue by Paul Theroux. It was difficult to read in places, perhaps because it is so recent. His trip was in 2005-2006-ish. He sees stirrings of trouble around Ossetia--s...
• Book Report: How to Rig an Election This morning, I'm munching my breakfast, reading Slashdot's feed and I see a name I recognize. The strange part: the name is that of a politico, not a computer programmer. The Slashdot post is point...
• Book Report: Nothing Nice to Say Work is busy. BANG 19 is less busy, but fills up the waking hours that are not devoted to work. Lately, most of my reading has taken place only because bus breakdowns have prevented me from working. ...
• Book Report: Punching In I guess I can't think of anything to say about how BANG 19 is going that wouldn't give away seekrit stuff. So here's a book report for Punching In. To research this book, the author worked a few we...
• Book Report: Spook Country This novel is a lot of fun. There is GIS. There is spycraft. There are references to volapuk, to... I guess William Gibson is showing us that he doesn't need to go quite so far into the future in...
• Jack O' Lantern Hidden Message Pumpkins? This year, I can't deal with pumpkins. This year, I'm leting Hallowe'en slide. My free time goes into BANG 19. Puzzles and logistics, logistics and puzzles. That's plenty to think about....
• BANG 19 (aka SNAP 4 simulcast): Photos, Scoring Data, Puzzles On game day, I mostly watched over the Zombie Chess Clue. Most of the time there was nobody there. Some of the time, there were plenty of people there and they kept me pretty busy. But a couple of t...
• Book Report: Code Reading I am getting ready for a The Game, and am thus hyper-aware of white cargo vans. This is tricky; while team-mate Wesley is in town, he's staying close to Delancey Street. As in Delancey Street Mover...
• Book Report: Information Development Last week, I hung out with a lot of technical writers. It was fun. They were from around the world, and they came with some interesting points of view. And with some interesting foreign microbes. ...
• Book Report: The Man Who Loved China Back in 2002, I went to the British Museum where an old illustration maybe showed a punch-card controlled loom from ancient China--long before such were invented in the West. Bookish fellow that I a...
• Book Report: Matter It's a novel of The Culture. If you didn't like other novels of The Culture, you probably won't like this one. If you like other novels of The Culture, you probably will like this one. If you have...
• Book Report: Pirate Freedom If you travel through time, are you free? Or are you hemmed in by predestination? (Postdestination? What do you call destiny when time travel is involved?) That's a complicated question, and fort...
• Book Report: Sources of Power This book came out ten years ago. It discusses how people make decisions. Not necessarily how people ought to make decisions--but how they do. It does have some advice on how people can make bette...
• Ghost Patrol: It was awesome, yes The Ghost Patrol Game was awesome. You just want to lock the creators up in a basement somewhere and force them to crank out more of these things. Uhm, but that would be wrong. Anyhow, there's a wr...
• Glossing my Twits: 2HB Seth Godin recently blogged "If you've got 140 characters to make your point, the odds are you are going to be misunderstood (a lot)." I'm not really surprised that I get questions about my twitter i...
• Link: Google Reader Hooked up to Automatic Translation A couple of weeks ago, the Google Reader folks announced that I (or you, for that matter) could use Google Reader to subscribe to foreign-language feeds, automatically translated. I thought I'd like...
• Link: Muppet Movie Game Blog I was was avoiding linking to the Muppet Movie Game Site, but have since figured out that was dumb of me. You might say I avoided linking them due to philisophical differences... but really it was m...
• Book Report: Code Complete Computers are hard. This afternoon, I was trying to figure out why some people couldn't view my web site. It sounded like a DNS problem; one guy reported it was affecting him on Comcast in Boston. ...
• Book Report: Competing on Internet Time, Breaking Windows Competing on Internet Time This book is about the rise of Netscape including competing with Microsoft, contrasting Netscape's nimble pace to Microsoft's slow release cycles. I didn't finish the book...
• Book Report: The Craftsman In a passing reference to this book, The Craftsman, I got the impression that it was a book that studied how people think when they're working. But it isn't that at all. I wish instead people had p...
• Book Report: DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC This is a book about DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, a start up that grew big. The author argues that some of the things that made it a great start-up, a great place to work... these things also...
• Book Report: Going Postal Skott raises an excellent point: The diskworld novels also have golems. E.g., I read Going Postal. I read this Diskworld novel because it's where the puzzler team "The Smoking GNU" got their name. ...
• Book Report: Googleを支える技術 I'm a technical writer. Technical writers write tersely. This promotes quick comprehension. If your writing is translated, there is another benefit. The translator does not need to work so hard. ...
• Book Report: He, She, and It During BANG 18, I found out that plenty of local goyim puzzlists don't know what a "golem" is. A puzzle required players to recognize monsters by looking at pictures. I thought that was pretty tough...
• Book Report: The Ipcress File I came up with an idea for a board-game like computer game. The board was going to be a map of the city. And there were these bits of secret info to move across the city. You control some agents t...
• Book Report: Spin State I liked Spin State, a science fiction novel by Chris Moriarty. It's science fiction but with a story in which the characters make mistakes. That's a good thing. I actually found myself thinking li...
• Book Report: Too Cool To Be Forgotten In this comic book, our hero goes under hypnosis and dreams he's back in high school. He gets a chance to get things right. It's nice enough.Labels: comic, drama, when's nap time?...
• Book Report: Working Effectively with Legacy Code This book is a classic amongst computer programmers. Well, it's a four-year old classic. It captures the, uhm, zeitg^W movement towards unit testing and refactoring. It shares a problem with other...
• Dear Lazyweb: Texas Travel? Any advice on things to see in Texas? Specifically, things in the east-ish Dallas-Houston-ish parts that might not make it into a guidebook? Maybe engineering-geekish things? If you're a friend of...
• Ghost Patrol Links, including Photos Yeah, yeah, you were waiting for the Ghost Patrol results, but me, I was waiting for Wesley's photos. And he posted them: Wes Chan's Ghost Patrol photos. Mostly photos of puzzles and of our team (M...
• Link: Arising like a Phoenix from a Bathtub Further evidence of Darcy's ongoing awesomeness: she rescued the contents of the team Taft on a Raft web site. It's back! Including the material from the The Apprentice Zorg game! If you sadly too...
• Link: Caja's HTML sanitizer for Javascript [Edited to add: If you have questions or concerns about Caja, the Google Caja Discuss group is a good place to ask them.] When you write a program that's supposed to be secure, you have to plan on ...
• Link: USA Census Tract Data I want to travel somewhere, but where? I like the places that I've been. I could keep going back to them. Then again, one reason to travel is to see new things. How do I keep from falling into a ...
• Misapplying Google Friend Connect I put a couple of "Google Friend Connect" gadgets on the site. These are little web gadgets that allow you to register your interest in the site and to leave comments on a wall. (That's "wall" in th...
• Site Update: It's like Web2.0, but three years too late to be considered cool You know how I had separate lists of Twitter updates and Blog updates? Like, on my home page, I listed each of those, but they were in separate areas? That was kind of silly. And unnecessary: Frie...
• Zine Report: Giant Robot #57 The Obama posters say "HOPE", but when Obama himself picks people... well, he undercuts hope. It's like he scraped my old book reports, looking for books about USA politics with villains and chose th...