My laptop scared the crap out of me last night. I came home to find it in a completely un­re­spon­sive state: it would not wake up. The hard disk LED was a solid green. I power cycled it and it refused to boot.

It did, however, boot from a Kubuntu Edgy CD, but it did not recognize the hard disk. In des­per­a­tion, I booted into the BIOS and played with the disk-related menus. That fixed the problem, but I don't know what went wrong, and my faith is shaken in the re­li­a­bil­i­ty of this system.

I bought the laptop just over three years ago, shortly before I quit Microsoft, as a …continue.

For the last few months, every blog post that I've made has been ac­com­pa­nied by at least one image. Sometimes I already have an ap­pro­pri­ate image. The rest of the time, I use whatever I could find after searching Google Images.

Earlier today, I came across 10 Tips for Google Image Search. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the Grease­mon­key script which allows you to view the original image by clicking on the thumbnail.

Email is addictive because of "operant con­di­tion­ing":

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its con­se­quences; how what we do depends on the rewards and pun­ish­ments of what we did last time. ... The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval re­in­force­ment schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing …continue.

I ex­per­i­ment­ed with Google's new service, Google Transit.

It suggested this route for traveling from my home to my work:

Begin by walking
1   Start at 4XXX 13th Ave S
2   Go to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way (takes about 7 mins)

Take the King County Metro 131 (Direction: NORTH)
3   7:17pm leave from Airport Way S & S Industrial Way
4   7:24pm arrive at 4th Ave S & S Jackson St

End by walking
5   Go to 315 5th Ave S (takes about 2 mins)

This fails badly in two respects.

First, four bus routes run along 15th Avenue S, two …continue.

I got an email earlier today from one of my relatives who has ties to South Africa, which read:

Last week a 3 year old girl (in South Africa ) was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man re­spon­si­ble was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on. The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that …continue.

Aerobie AeroPress home page

CoffeeGeek thread

Adler's American recipe

Luke­Seu­bert's Smooth Americano recipe

I like my Americano made with 175F water to the top of the "2" oval, with our standard ten-second stir, and press with no steep time. Then diluted 1:1 after pressing.

Mark likes his brewed with much hotter water, with a 40 second steep time and he likes to push all of the water through the press, rather than diluting aftewards. His recipe has much more edge (which I might call bitterness).

Sweet Maria's in­struc­tions

Lots of reviews

Lack of 'soul'

Negative pressure

Neutral pressure

Espresso definition

Crema

"Espresso strength"

I find that the drip-through, even with long steep or long stir times, isn't …continue.

I mentioned last week that my parents have no aptitude for computers.

My father emailed me with a list of computer woes; notably, he was getting messages about no firewall. There was no way I was going to get to the bottom of the issue just by email or talking to him on the phone. It's 5,000 miles from Seattle to Dublin, so I can't drop by to take a look at the computer in person--much as my parents would like to have me visit.

I had tried using the built-in Windows Remote Assistance to trou­bleshoot issues on their laptop a couple of years ago, while they …continue.

I remember about two years ago, before a trip across the Atlantic, trying to find websites that had street maps for London and Dublin -- and coming up nearly empty.

Now, a year after it became available, I notice that Google Maps covers Ireland and the UK. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it does a piss-poor job of finding locations: try typing anything more specific than Dublin into the search box.

Google Maps now provides a basic ability to get directions between cities.

Some other map links:

• Irish sight­see­ing
• Maps of Ireland and the UK
• Via Michelin: driving directions

I've just spent an hour working through the tutorials for Google SketchUp. It's a free 3D-modeling tool. Pretty slick and easy to use.

I worked on 3D graphics and user in­ter­ac­tion when I was a Master's student at Brown in the early 90s. What we had then wasn't bad, but the SketchUp UI is easier to use and more functional, and it runs on a regular PC instead of a high-end Unix work­sta­tion.

I can see myself using SketchUp to model wood­work­ing projects.

I'm writing some C++ code at the moment, after months of C#. I'm trying to be very Test First, writing Red tests, then making them turn Green.

I'm also using CppUnit for the first time. It's not as easy as NUnit. You can't just declare your test method with an attribute, you have to declare the test method in a header file, place it inside a macro, and then have the test im­ple­men­ta­tion in a .cpp-file. And there's no nunit-gui. I'm using a post-build step to run the tests, which makes it fairly pain free.

There was one internal method that I didn't have an explicit test for, although I had tests …continue.