Monthly Archives: October 2004

I guess I have a weakness for IBM’s full system descriptions. The z990 is the latest of these. It’s just neat to read about things all the way from instruction sets and microcode, to the way that cooling happens in … Continue reading →

Only slightly strange: There is/was a script for Emma Bull’s fantasy The War for the Oaks. Emma Bull is one of my favorite fantasy writers, but hasn’t written much that I’ve liked in the past five or six years (sigh).

‘B’ is for ‘Bicycle,’ and also ‘Butt’ and probably a bunch of other unprintable words starting with and including ‘B’. (From the Naval Safety Center stupidity archive, which I blogged a while back, but haven’t looked at recently).

Why do curling stones go the “wrong”way? We don’t really know . . . yet.

ACM Queue has a pretty good overview of RFID technology and issues.

Blizzard is looking for a credit card fraud investigator. Interesting (sadly, it’s probably necessary . . . the qualifications are interesting).

This morning’s Slashdot poll. I have not paid this much attention to baseball in quite some time. . I’m looking forward to taking our baby boy to baseball games at some point in the future (though my wife demands to … Continue reading →

Some fun papers (papers being shorter than books, which has been important lately…) Rob Pike’s Acme editor. I admire it for being lightweight and having interesting ideas rather than being usable (from reading, it looks like a user-interface train wreck). … Continue reading →

(here was part 2) He’d been at XXQ for a week, and every day things had gotten worse. The sobbing engineer in the cubical next to him had turned out to be XXQ’s Chief Software Architect. On the second day … Continue reading →

(part 1) Four days after leaving the midwestern mainframe/mini company that had employed him for so many years, Zeke found himself in the middle of a desert. He’d read that it seldom rained for six months at a time, and … Continue reading →