YOU should write blogs. Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It's become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you're thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.
From http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs.
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs to a dog.
(Steve Taylor).
When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb.
(Unknown author).
I guess somebody got pretty fustrated with good ole C++ :-)
It is a sad news - Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of the great sci-fi writers, died at the age of 84.
Thanks for all the great hours spent reading many of great books he wrote over last 55 years. I guess that best way how to show respect is re-read something he wrote - like this one.
I have decided to take weekend off. No catching up, no work, no stress. And it will be a proper weekend - 4 days long in total because both Friday and Monday are statutory holidays in Thinknostic. Great opportunity to relax, decompress, catch up on some reading and audio books and do something fun. And maybe gettogether with friends and celebrate Vlad's birthday. After all, the 28H is not every year :-)
Often, scientific "failure" teaches you more than success ... An experiment which gives you a clear answer is not a failure; it can surprise you, though. Failure comes only when an experiment answers no question -- usually because it's been done with ignorance or sloppiness. The true trick in science is to know what question your experiment is truly asking.
Gregory Benford
Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
Actually, maybe not really new, but I have noticed it just two days ago while trying to to clean up the clips collected from the Web.
It is sort of hidden feature, but very useful one: In Actions you can find 'Export in Google Docs & Spreadsheet'. It takes the current notebook and makes it a new document in you Google Docs. All texts, including pictures are transferred. It does very good job in keeping meaningful structure of the newly created document: every note will become an URL heading in document, pointing to the original.
It happened few times in past few months: using Google to find out what is the time in Bombay or New Delhi, I used the search phrase "India time zone" and got two types of results. One was referring to the India Time zone as UTC+9hrs and the other was giving the correct answer - UTC+5:30. I know that whole India is in single time zone and this time zone is 5.5 hours before GMT. What did the UTC+9 mean ?
As I found out, the India in India time zone is not the India as a country, but military spelling of the time zone for letter I. The military uses letters to label time zone, starting with GMT or UTC being the Zero Meridian or Z time zone - spelled as Zulu time. Then going East, the zones go A, B, C - spelled as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta - up to the letter I which is spelled as India. West from Zulu you start with N, O, P - or November, Oscar, Papa ... Up to March 11 we were living in Romeo time zone, now we moved to Quebec time zone (again, nothing to do with La belle province, just spelling of Q)
Time to clean up the link cache again. I did not surfed much during last two weekends, so there is less to clean than usual :-).
If your computers are still confused about the DST change, here are some links that may be useful dealing with the issues - for Windows as well as for Mac. Speaking of which, I just checked that my Fedora Core 6 Linux-based NAS did recognized the DST without any issues at all as well.
This year unusually early, we switched the Daylight Saving Time. The clocks did spring ahead one hour on Sunday morning. Btw, this is a good mnemonic how to remember which direction does the clock go: it Springs ahead and it Falls back ... Technically, it was decision of the US legislative to start DST early but because of the integration of the two economies, Canada had not much choice, just to follow. So, for next three weeks or so, we are one hour closer to Europe.
Same as last few weeks, I have spent most of the weekend reading. Unlike the weekends before, this time I was actually reading a book, not source code. It was nice change ...
I have picked this small book with title Computers Ltd in Ottawa Public Library last Friday, while returning some books on CD. Written by David Harel of Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, the book is trying to explain what computers cannot do. It speaks about complexity, P / NP problem and other fundamental limitations of what we can and cannot do with our favorite toys. This book is nice proof that even on such complex and abstract problems it is possible to find very nice and readable presentation - without sacrificing the precision. It reads as novel and thanks to very short format, it is an excellent complement to quiet Sunday afternoon. Recommended.