I try not to forward people spam that strikes me as funny because of its strange, autogenerated content (“Look! Andre Breton-surrealist-beatnik-acid-poetry!”) because there’s so much of it out there that there’s nothing special about any of it. (Please, no counter-examples.) When one such message got through my spam filters to appear in my inbox with a subject header of “One namespace to rule them all”, though, it certainly pushed a lot of buttons in the mind…

I needed some sample address book data for a project that I’m working on. Because of the number of people who may see it, I didn’t want to use real address book entries, so I wrote some Python scripts to generate some.

The program for a recent presentation at my daughter’s school footnoted Wikipedia for a few definitions that were supposed to provide background for whatever cultural thing the kids and we were learning about. I thought this was pretty funny, because the point of footnotes is to show that you didn’t just make something up; you got it from a source that the reader can check on to follow up on the information. A source that anyone can edit, that makes the news every week for the many…

I’ve found the recent U.S. TV ads of Groovy Mac Guy and Staid PC Suit Guy to be pretty annoying, especially considering the recent discussions by Mac people of how appealing Ubuntu has been looking to them (Dave Megginson, Tim Bray, and others they point to). It would be nice to add a Linux guy (who, to be honest, would probably look a lot like Comic Book Guy) discussing with the PC guy how much open source software they had in common, but I suppose Mac guy would then say that with OS X,…

I’ve been listening to music on the Pandora internet radio site for a while now. After creating a free account, you define a “channel” by naming one or more artists, and then they play whatever music they have by that artist and music that they judge to be similar. Similarity rankings are based on attributes they’ve assigned to different artists and judgments by their listeners who’ve clicked the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down icons available with each song. Of course,…

If you click this link, you’ll find that it leads to an Amazon web page where you can buy Abelson and Sussman’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. This link also links to an Amazon page where you can buy the classic computer science textbook, but I’d rather that you followed the first link if you’re going to buy it. The URL includes a parameter telling Amazon that you came there from a site created by someone with the Amazon affiliate ID…

In the first half of my twenty-five years of living in New York City, I played lead guitar in two serious bands and bass and miscellaneous in several fooling-around-with-friends bands. By “serious,” I mean gigs consisting of one or two forty-minute bam-bam-bam sets with over ninety per cent originals, and any covers better be obscure and cool enough that everyone who recognizes them says “ooh, nice” (e.g. “Glory” from Television’s second album. You play…