cat /dev/brain

Once upon a time there was a company called D.

Recently we moved to St. George. I posted some pictures over here of our backyard. These are taken from the kitchen window right after the snowstorm last week, and will explain our sudden decision to move to St. George. It’s a bit like living in a ski chalet, except for the missing ski lifts. The…

CNN has published the list of the top 500 companies sorted by revenue. What’s very weird or scary is that 9 of the top 10 are automobile or oil companies. Walmart is the only exception, coming in at number 2. That list says a lot about how our economy runs.

Noah’s cast came off earlier this week, for the second time. The first time was during his two week appointment, due to some confusion at the fracture clinic. His arm throbbed, since it wasn’t healed properly, but the upside was that the nurses could clean his arm and put on a cast that fit a…

I spent all of last week debugging a very weird problem with a colleague, where a small service (roughly 3000 lines of code) was appending a random set of characters at the end of a message, at seemingly random times. In hindsight we were surprised the code actually ran without crashing. But just to let…

This space has been neglected for a while, due to moving my family to the bustling metropolis of St. George. It’s a little town of about 2700, roughly 10 minutes north of Brantford. Our place backs on to a park, and on the one side of the park is a corn field. It’s the best…

This is what I want for christmas: a Blackbox from Sun. It’s a 20 foot shipping container with a complete datacenter. Simply add power, water and a big internet pipe, and you’ve got a datacenter with these specs: Up to 1000 cores – 8 CPU’s on a core = 8000 CPU’s! Seven terabytes of memory…

…consisted of a dry egg salad sandwich, eaten at McMaster’s Emergency ward, accompanying Noah and his newly broken arm. He wiped out while roller-blading Sunday afternoon, seems he was trying to jump a speed bump and neglected to wear his wrist guards. He claims he did actually jump it, but botched the landing. The most…

Microsoft has recently released a ‘free’ version of Visual Studio, their developer suite. Microsoft may or may not do a good job on their other products, but their developer tools are excellent. So with the release of a ‘free’ version, there was much rejoicing in the developer community, particularly with yours truly. Shelling out $300…

This article talks about how smart dolphins actually are, and how quickly they can learn new behaviours, including some very creative problem solving. I had no idea they were that smart.

This post is brought to you by writely.com. It’s Google’s answer to Word… pretty wild. You can edit documents just like you can in Word, share them, collaborate, and post to a blog like I’m doing here! There’s options to save the document to writely’s servers, or as Word, OpenOffice or PDF versions to your…

In a complete reversal of roles, yesterday Jodie took me to see the Lord of the Rings, played in the Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto. It’s an absolutely incredible piece of theatrical work. The show goes on for 3.5 hours, which goes by incredibly quickly. The music is excellent, the props and effects are…

A quick questionaire for my handful of readers. Do you ever backup your PC’s to CD or DVD? (or floppies?) What is your strategy for recovering your pictures, music and/or documents in case your computer breaks (ie: harddrive breaks and data is lost) or is stolen? Please leave answers in the comments. I have a…

I always thought that gawking at accident scenes was primarly a human trait, but I have been proven wrong. We have a bird house attached to the back fence, which a pair of sparrows have used to raise two sets of young ones this spring. The second batch is flying, but still sleep in the…

I wondered what Google was up to when they bought ReqWireless, a small company in Waterloo, Ontario, which specialized in web browsers for mobile devices (Blackberry and others). That question was answered when they released the Google Maps for Mobile, complete with traffic updates and all sorts of goodies. Now it all makes sense.

Ever get tired of your word processor with it’s gazillion menus and buttons, overlapping windows and clutter? Try WriteRoom, an application that lets you write in full screen mode, green text on a black screen, the way computers were meant to be. 🙂 Just you and the text and a cursor. Nothing else. In all…

A few weeks ago Mikaela found this creature in our garden. It was stuck in a window well, so we captured it and released it in the garden. Current bets are that it’s either a gecko, or a common salamander. Click on the picture for the full-size images (courtesy Flickr).

Now that the World Cup 2006 is over and the best team failed to win (“Hup Holland Hup!”) we have some suggestions to FIFA on how to improve the game. Namely: Two referees on the field. One simply isn’t enough. Stop the clock on injuries. None of this adding time stuff. Every other major league…