brain chips

I've become somewhat enamored with how technology can help people with disabilities. This sounds especially promising. Thanks to Suresh for forwarding this to me.

j2se 5.0 autoboxing

Krishna Srinivasan has an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) blog entry on Java/J2SE 5.0 autoboxing. Take a look at the section on immutable objects. The fact that equality operators function differently depending on the ranges of values compared makes my skin crawl. Yuck!

google culture

The entire IT industry is gawking at Google and for good reason. Creating a company culture that fosters creativity, collaboration, and innovation isn't that hard, unless of course you're like most companies and make it hard. Read here for yet another peek through the black box of Googledom.

the mars volta

I've been listening to a so-called "concept album" called Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta. The Mars Volta is a two-man progressive rock band. The lead vocalist reminds me of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, but in an even higher vocal register. The guitar work is just phenomenal. The album in general evokes a mix of Led Zeppelin (for the vocals, guitar, and bluesy feel), Rush (again, vocals), and Radiohead (for the way all the songs blend together as a symphonic epic). If this appeals to you, check out The Mars Volta.

Update (03-Apr-2005): Throw Carlos Santana and Parliament Funkadelic into the mix of artists that The Mars Volta remind me of. I've been listening to Frances the Mute even more lately, and I continue to be simply astounded by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's kamikaze guitar assaults and Cedric Bixler-Zavala's primal scream vocals. The Mars Volta isn't going to get much radio play, but it's clear to me that they're trying to do something truly unique in the music landscape. In my opinion, this is a success.

firefox dom inspector rocks!

I couldn't figure out why my table cells had padding around them. I hadn't specified any padding in my CSS stylesheet. Enter Firefox's DOM Inspector (see below).



DOM Inspector allows you to look at each XHTML element to see what its CSS properties are and where they're being set. It turns out that Firefox and MSIE set padding around table cells by default. This might be part of the CSS spec... I don't know for sure... but thanks to DOM Inspector, I was able to discover this quickly. It's nice to see browsers do neat things with Web standards (hint hint MSIE).

nowrap in css

I thought this was kind of hard to find in the W3C CSS 2.1 spec, so I'll share it here.

HTML allowed you to specify a 'nowrap' attribute on <td> tags so that the table cell would expand its width using the width of the text inside it. In the XHTML world, you'd do it in CSS like this:

td {
  white-space: nowrap;
}

I wouldn't have expected this to be controlled by an attribute called 'white-space'.

hst retrospectives in rolling stone

I recently subscribed to Rolling Stone, and today I'm especially glad that I did. The issue that arrived yesterday contains approximately 40 pages (minus advertisements) of retrospectives and memoirs involving Hunter S. Thompson (a.k.a. HST). Guest authors include President Jimmy Carter, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Ed Bradley, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, his widow Anita, his son Juan, his first wife Sandy, and many many more. Depp's article is great. You can tell he spent "bonding" time with the Good Doctor--especially when filming Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. At times in the article Depp almost sounds like HST.

We'd saunter out of the house to take a drive in the car like freakish twins. So, for good or ill, there we were, a pair of deviant bookends on the prowl. -Depp

If you pass by a newsstand, I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

blogging to share knowledge

People blog for many reasons. Some blog to reflect on their daily lives. Matt Payne blogs to remember things and retrieve them at a later date. I choose to blog to share information, whether it be information of a personal nature or information of a technical nature (programming, design, etc.). To me, this is the coolest part of blogging... just tossing information out into the void for anyone to view and digest.

Recently an article appeared in Wired that advocates using blogs in intelligence (INTEL) communities so that information can be indexed and tagged (in the Google sense and del.icio.us sense, respectively). It would be interesting to see how something like this could be implemented, especially with information visibility restrictions that INTEL carries with it (different security classifications and so forth). I wonder what my friends in the INTEL community would think of this.... :-)

python: the ministry of programming (and silly walks)

I have a new favorite programming language, and its name is Python. With its name inspired by the Monty Python comedy troop, the Python language has regex pattern matching, lambda functions, syntactic sugar for collections, OO-support, dynamic typing, and all sorts of dandy features. The dynamic typing is so nice, especially when you're used to writing Java code all day.

I especially like how Python delimits code blocks using indentation rather than brackets or BEGIN/END keywords. It tastes like a combination of Perl, ML, and chicken (because everything tastes like chicken).

I learned Python over the weekend because I thought it would help me solve a problem with merging two MKS Source Integrity trees. And sure enough, it did!

If you're interested in learning Python, check out my python tag over at del.icio.us for a veritable smorgasboard of helpful links.

no late fees?

I remember when I first heard about the "No Late Fees" policy introduced by Blockbuster. I remember being confused as to whether they really meant "no late fees." It turns out they don't (surprise!). Anyone been bitten by this yet?

Update (05-Mar-2005): I should note that I have not experienced this personally. I just blogged it because I found it notable.