Posted by matijs
So, I’m reading Steve Yegge’s latest, and he drops some not so suble hints to the reader that they should apply at Google. I talk about that to my wife, how working at Google would definitely be nice, but that it would mean moving from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Zurich (Switzerland), because that’s where Google is in Europe. And then she says:
Zurich has the best zoo in Europe.
Posted by matijs
First, what the hell does Microsoft’s slogan people ready even mean? The campaign’s site seems to think it means you need people to run a business. Well, I don’t see any businesses around run by small rodents, so I guess they’re right. That’s some vision
So, what’s this about? Some bloggers got paid for writing about people ready, and people got upset. Now, some defend themselves saying they didn’t endorse anything, and some defend themselves saying of course it’s an ad box (whatever an ad box is).
Well, I don’t think this looks like an ad, and it may not be an endorsement of a Microsoft product, but it is an endorsement of a Microsoft campaign. Oh, and look at the right of the page. It says “Click here to submit your own People Ready Business story”. So, that pretty much suggests that the content on the left was also submitted the same way. But of course, it wasn’t.
Luckily, at least one of the entries seems to have been written while drunk.
People readiness is something only people that are ready for people to be ready can be ready for.
All this via Mark’s translation.
Finally, back to the meaning: “people ready” means ready for people, right? Just like HD ready means ready for HD. Well, sort of anyway. But no, it means the people are ready. See?
Campaign lame.
Posted by matijs
Today, at seven months and nineteen days of age, Sophia spontaneously performed her first song. It went like this:
Ba ba baa ba baa, ba ba baa ba baa.
(The bas are short, the baas are long). The piece was performed at a constant pitch. I’m still working on the correct rhythmic notation; it’s pretty complex.
Years from now, we will say: We were there at her first performance.
Posted by matijs
You have built a home server slash PVR that you want to hook up to your twenty-year-old television. You have gone to several shops to buy a graphics card that actually has open-source drivers for its TV output functionality (i.e., the ATI Radeon A9250). You have dodged salesmen trying to sell you something else (“No, but here is its successor the NVidia so-and-so.” “Uhm, no thanks.”). You finally succeeded by ordering it over the Interweb (and probably should have done that in the first place). Now you want to patch the driver shipped by Ubuntu to actually get TV output working.
Read more...Posted by matijs
I’ve been using svk for a while now, but I keep bumping into problems with the whole concept of tags being just copies.
The problem is this: In my mind, a tag should be a symbolic name for a particular revision on a particular branch. In subversion (and hence, svk), it’s not. To use a tag in place of a revision, you first have to do svn info to find the corresponding revision number, and then use that in your svn diff or svn merge or whatever.
Subversion should have had a smarter client from the start, one that emulates tags and branches and hides the implementation detail that they are ‘really the same thing’ from the user.
As it stands, subversion has no tagging.
It’s all very annoying.
Posted by matijs
Last week, I did some work on my website, upgrading to the latest Typo trunk and Rails 1.2, and changing from mod_fcgid to a Mongrel cluster.
Last Friday or so, I rebooted my server. Unfortunately, I had neglected to make the Mongrel cluster start at boot. So for the past weekend, all you have seen here is a Service Temporarily Unavailable message.
Sorry.
Toxic Elephant is Matijs van Zuijlen's weblog.
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