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Hurricane Katrina has been devastating. Slate has a thorough overview of the disaster, with news summaries and other commentary.
If you haven't already, please consider giving to the Red Cross. You can donate online, or by calling 1-800-HELP-NOW (1-800-435-7669).
My first set of piuctures from my cousin Brian and Jenny's wedding is up. Here are some highlights:
Trying to get all my cousins to pose for a picture is like herding cats.
Once again, I am attacked with heavy things that hurt.
Somehow, I wound up with lots of pictures of my cousin Jef.
I am one of seven cousins. We all grew up together around Cleveland, and we're all still very close. We are now all older than our parents were when they started having kids. Currently, we range in age from 23 to 34; our parents were all about the age of 23 when they were married and producing offspring.
Needless to say, there is some level of interest (some might say consternation) amongst the aunts and uncles in our little clan about when us "kids"--as we are still called--will start producing some grandchildren. While in Alaska, my cousins Mike and Allison and I--the eldest children in our respective families, and the most left-handed--decided to do something about this situation. Now, of course, we couldn't directly influence things, especially not in the ten days we vacationed together (no getting any funny ideas).
Instead, we settled on indirectly influencing our collective reproductive schedule with a scheme that would make Adam Smith proud: we decided to provide an economic incentive for someone in our family to have a baby. Together, we conspired to design a betting pool for guessing who will have the first three grandkids and when they will be born. The pool will run for 10 years. (We're in no hurry.)
It's official: my sister is an English teacher. Congratulations, Rach! I'm very proud of you!
I'd write more on the subject, but I'm afraid that Ms. Bork would whip out her red pen and mark me off for excessive, unnecessary, and redundant verbosity.
I've been making some changes to the site today... the visual style has changed a bit (which you won't notice if you read this in an aggregator). This was a result of upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 and converting all of my customized templates and stylesheets to the new format.
There are a few things that should be better now, since I finally got around to fixing them:
1. The site should render correctly in both IE and Firefox.
2. Printing should also work again.
3. Viewing the site in Pocket IE (e.g., on a Pocket PC or Smartphone) should work now.
I'm still working the kinks out of the new stylesheets (there are still a few places where spacing and font sizes are speficied in pixels rather than relative units, etc.), so if you find anything that looks wrong, let me know. Comments and everything should work the same as before, but if you run into problems, tell me and I'll get right on it.
[Update: I inadvertantly broke the RSS and Atom feeds. They should be fixed now. If you can't read this in an aggregator, let me know. (ha ha)]
I'm going to a family wedding this weekend, so I took the redeye flight from Seattle to Cleveland. I also took some pictures on the plane:
Much to my surprise, the ice cream I made turned out just great!
Thanks to the Monks for being brave beta testers. I can now unleash my mad ice cream making skillz upon the rest of my (non-vegetarian, non-vegan) friends.
Dear Dad,
I'm sorry, but every time I get an email from you it freaks me out a little. You'd think that I'd be used to it by now, us having the same name and all. I mean, how many years did we have to sort the mail? For a while it wasn't a problem: Bills--Dad. Highlights magazine--Me. But once I got into high school and college, it got a little stranger. But never that difficult.
Heck, we still have to put up with it. Like the time I got a call from GEICO asking me about an auto insurance claim that they said I made in Ohio? When I was living in Seattle? (By the way, they still seem to be confused about that, the poor bastards. I guess I still have some phone calls to make.)
Regardless, I still do a double-take when I get an email from you, though, because I always think it was something I had sent to myself (or CC:ed to myself or something)--because I do that kind of thing for perfectly understandable reasons of course--and I start reading it and I'm thinking to myself, "What the hell? I don't remember writing this at all!" And then I do this little mental dance to try and figure out if it's been a full moon recently or if I've been ingesting any strange potions from test tubes or sleeping in coffins and avoiding garlic. And then I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror to make sure I haven't lept into my body at some other point in time in my life because I'm here to set right something that once went wrong. Nope, no holographic womanziers around or anything.
Then about two or three sentences in, I've got it all figured out. "Ah ha!" I cry, usually just to myself in my head (but sometimes out loud...okay maybe usually out loud), "I'm not crazy!" And then I do a little yay-I'm-still-not-completely-insane dance. And then sometimes it starts raining. (I don't know why, but it might have something to do with the head dress or the voodoo effigies.)
Anyhow, I'm really glad that you're all hip to this email thing, Dad, but really--couldn't you just ring me instead?
Love,
--Joe
(your son Joe, not you, Joe)
My friend Nate asked me via email:
You said: "I tend to get nervous when the answer to 'How often will the user exercise this code path' is 'all the time.' If nothing else, changing an often-used code path increases the risk of causing a regression. As much as I hate shipping software with a bug, I hate shipping software with a regression even more." What is a regression?
A "regression" (really, a "regression bug") is the recurrence of a bug that was previously fixed.
Consider a product in which Bug A was fixed weeks ago. Then, in the course of fixing another Bug B (which may be completely unrelated to Bug A), the fix causes Bug A (or a very similar bug) to re-appear in the product. The recurrence of the previous bug is a regression. And we would say "fixing Bug B caused a regression of Bug A."
Sadly, these bugs (i.e., regressions) are more common than you'd think, especially as the complexity of software grows, and more especially as the dependencies between different independent software teams become more numerous. (This is somewhat analogous to the increase in communications required as you add more people to a software project, as set forth in Brooks’ Law.)
In some cases, fixing Bug B might actually introduce several bugs, one or more of which might be regressions, and the others which might be entirely new bugs. So there’s a possibility of setting off a kind of avalanche of new bugs and old regressions. This is more of a problem with fragile (some would say poorly-designed) software, but it becomes more likely for any software system as complexity increases.
The bottom line is that you want to make sure that fixing a bug results in a net improvement in the quality of the software. (For simplicity sake, define "quality" to be inversely proportional to "the number of known and unfixed bugs").
Having a regression means (simplistically) that you've at best made no net improvement in quality, and at worst you've actually reduced the quality of the product. It seems counterintuitive that fixing a bug can actually make product quality worse, but believe me--it is simply a fact of life in software engineering.
Keep in mind that the cost (in dollars, when you consider time value of money) to fix a single bug increases approximately geometrically as the age of your product increases. Roughly, you can consider the cost of fixing 1 bug during normal, pre-release development to be 1.0. The cost to fix that same bug after a "code complete" milestone becomes 10.0, the cost to fix it after a public beta release is 100.0, and the cost to fix it after RTM is 1000.0.
My latest foray into the world of cooking is ice cream. Food Network recently replayed the Good Eats episode "Churn Baby Churn, 2", which details the making of french-style ice cream. (French-style is made with eggs; it is essentially a frozen custard. Philadephia-style is made without eggs.)
Since this is my first time ever trying to make ice cream, I wound up making two batches: one of mint chip, and one of vanilla. I made two because the odds are good that I will screw up one of them.
The only wrinkle I ran into was that I couldn't find peppermint oil. I was able to get peppermint extract, but the conversion necessary to achieve equivalent potency was not clear. The vanilla recipe calls for two tablespoons of the vanilla extract flavorant, and the mint chip calls for one teaspoon of the peppermint oil flavorant. Since I at least know that oils are much more potent than extracts (owing to their lack of alcohol and higher concentration of flavor compounds), I just took a guess that 2T of extract == 1t of oil.
We'll see how things come out. The primordial ice cream batches are cooling overnight in my fridge. They smell sufficiently vanilla-y and minty, so that's a good sign I guess.
Of course, I needed to be able to differentiate between the batches, since they look exactly the same. Since the mint chip batch is flavored with peppermint, I labeled it "P". The other batch I labeled "NP".
The Gang spent yesterday--a really beautiful Sunday--downtown visiting museums and stuff. By a quirk of fate, half of us wound up at the Pacific Science Center, where we playtested video games, watched a snake eat a rat, and saw some butterflies. The other half went to the Seattle Art Museum where they saw... I dunno, art and stuff.
Then we met up at Kell's and had some beer and pasties, and finished the evening off at Palace Kitchen for some wine and delicious desserts.
I took some pictures of our weekend adventures, of course.
[Updated to fix broken images.]
Sometimes I find an interesting site that's worth linking to, but I don't have a lot to say about the entry besides "hey, check this out because it's neat." (Either that, or I'm just feeling lazy.)
I don't like to make short, boring entries just to point out something I think is neat, so I created a separate blog just for my bookmarks: Crooked Links.
The 5 most recent links will appear on the sidebar of this weblog (thanks to some Movable Type hackery), but if you want to get Crooked Links in your aggregator, it has separate RSS and Atom syndication feeds. The entries on Crooked Links will have comments enabled (although I can't imagine people really wanting to comment on them). Clicking on the sidebar link will take you directly to the linked page. If you'd prefer to visit the corresponding Crooked Links entry, click the "»" link instead.
Okay, enough of that crap. See? This is why I don't like to write entries about links. Whatever.
How much sugar should you put into an 8-ounce serving of tea?
Well, it depends on what your goal is. Of course, it also depends on which specific kind of tea you're drinking, so as an example let's consider Honest Tea's Green Dragon Tea.
If you want to maximize the flavor of the tea (that is, to get the best flavor without making it too sweet), then about 3 teaspoons.
But if you're calorie-conscious, your goal is probably to maximize the tradeoff between flavor and calories (roughly, to make the most efficient use of sugar so as to get the most "flavor for your buck" for each additional calorie of sugar you add). In that case, the sweet spot (ahem) is 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving.
(Note that both of these goals are different than trying to minimize for calories. Since the least amount of sugar you can use is none, and no sugar contains zero calories, minimizing for calories would simply mean that you don't use any sugar.)
How do I know this? Because the answer is printed on the label.
[via Marginal Revolution]
My friend Maya is getting ready for a six-month trip to Asia. She just started a blog about her travels. Oh, and she keeps a pretty awesome notebook as well.
I suppose that the saying "the Internet never forgets" has some truth to it. (Maybe a more accurate version would be "Google never forgets" but I suppose the nice folks at MSN Search wouldn't like that one as much.)
As I posted a while back, I made the decision to remove all of my old entries when I gave this site its most recent makeover. This wasn't an attempt at hiding or erasing anything I had written, it was just a personal decision. Anyhow, Google (or more appropriately, Google's cache) never forgets. I still see a bunch of 404s in my logs from people following old broken links (Mark Pilgrim would not approve, but that's just tough).
Much to my surprise, I've actually gotten an emailed request asking about one entry I wrote in particular, called "The anatomy of a bug".
Someone was nice nice enough to ask for it, so I've re-instated the entry: The anatomy of a bug
I've never been one to ignore the (reasonable) demands of my readership, so there you go. Enjoy.
One of the nice things about Flickr is that along with nice tools to organize photos, you can explore the collections of other people. You can even mark certain photos as favorites, and you automatically get a gallery of all your favorite photos, independent of who posted them.
Along with the ability to pick favorite pictures and leave comments, Flickr lets you see who has left comments on your own photos, or who has picked one of your pictures as a favorite. I noticed the other day that someone had "favorited" these three pictures from Steve's bachelor party weekend:
Now, these are all decent pictures, but I didn't recognize the person who picked them, and there are certainly better pictures from that weekend.
But of course, Flickr lets you look at other peoples' Favorites galleries... and once I looked at the favorite pictures of my mysterious Flickr user, it all became clear.
Visiting D.C. was a blast! Rach and I had a really great time. You can see all the sordid pictures here:
Here are a few favorites:
Rach and her friend Suzanne at the Improv (we went to see Kathy Griffin and she was fantastic)
We visited some monuments and stuff
We toured the National Zoo
And I met the family that Rach babysits for
It was one hell of a trip. Thanks, Rach!
[Updated with better version of the laughing collage.]
Tomorrow marks the start of my five-day trip to Washington, D.C. My sister lives there, so I assume it will be neigh on impossible to avoid seeing her. Ah, well...
With any luck, I won't have another encounter with the Secret Service this time around.
Expect more pictures, unless my camera is confiscated.
The rest of the Alaska pictures are up: Alaska trip
This weekend was a reunion of sorts for me and several of my friends from high school. We were celebrating our friend Steve's impending marriage (and therefore the loss of his cherished bachelorhood). Rather than go in for any standard kind of bachelor party, Nate organized a "bachelor weekend" around the four-game baseball series between the Mariners and our beloved Indians. Thus a one-day event ballooned into four days of bumming around downtown Seattle, punctuated by a few hours of baseball (and then a few hours of drinking).
I'm happy to say that the Indians took the Mariners in the series, three games to one. Everyone is now safely on their way home (except for Nate who is wathing Family Guy while checking his email before his flight in four hours). No serious injuries were sustained, and the only casualty was the loss of Roger's mobile phone (which he left at Safeco field and which was never recovered).
Anyhow... many pictures were taken. Nate and I have already compiled and edited our share, although the rest of the Gang will have more pictures to contribute in the short term. But for now I am tired, so you'll have to be content with the photos we've got:
Steve's bachelor party weekend
[Update: I should give credit where it is due, and mention that many of the photos this weekend weren't taken by me. Nate contributed quite a few (and almost all of the close-ups), and some came from Dave and from Steve.]