Older blog entries for blizzard (starting at number 7)

LinuxPower ran my interview today. Then slashdot picked up on it and the site was unavailable for a while. It's a reasonable interview. The questions were well clued.

There was at one question at the bottom of the article that someone posted:

More and more pages can be read only if you have Internet Explorer, Netscape won't read them, because the page uses proprietary Microsoft technology. Will Mozilla read these pages?

The people building Mozilla are attempting to build a 100% standards complaint browser. If you build pages that are standards complaint then Mozilla should be able to read them. I don't think that there are any plans to add compatibility for those technologies. I think that it only encourages people to use them and that's what we want to get away from.

I'm pretty sure we would accept those compatibility layers if people felt like writing them, though.

I should have had the pork. And I'm vegetarian.

The night started out innocently enough. Zab, Jennifer, Shaver and I wanted to see a movie. We wanted something without substance. Without a plot. Without and purpose whatsoever. Something that was strictly for entertainment value. Brain candy. What we found was something far, far more sinister.

Reindeer Games.

Don't go see it. You don't get that two hours of your life back.

Read a lot of email today. Didn't get a lot of coding done but spent time trying to get a really nasty bug fixed.

Dave has been making a lot of noise about the amazon patent and probably has more links to other pages that cover the topic than anywhere else that I've seen. The only problem with Dave's site is, well, Dave. He's kind of self-rightous but he makes me laugh a lot of the time and the site usually has interesting links on it. It's the first place where I saw the Wu-Name site mentioned.

Hi, I'm the Sweaty Butcher. These are some of my friends:

• Tha Visible Choirboy

• Lesbian Pimp

• Eight-Legged DJ

• Vangelic Surgeon

...and so forth.

I went and picked up my truck today, since it was in the shop. The battery had been dying overnight because of some drain on it that was always on, even when the engine wasn't running.

It turns out that the rear window was always running, trying to put the window up and that was draining the battery. The comments from the tech on the work order are pretty amusing:

DId you get that?

FOUND REAR DOOR LOCK CYLINDER HAS BEEN REMOVED & HOLE WELDED UP.

I've always complained that the rear window was a pain to use because the only way to lower it was from the driver's seat with the engine on. Apparently, you're supposed to be able to open it from the outside of the vehicle ( which makes sense ) but someone removed it and welded over the hole. Why?

That's what I get for buying a used car, I guess.

Today was a pretty quiet day. I got to work late and got some time to hack on bugs. Drag and drop is still being kind of painful. It's getting better, though.

I checked in a fix for 29578 which I had sitting on my drive since yesterday. After checked it in I realized that the drop operation had the same problem so had to cook up another fix for that. Of course, the real problem that I was chasing doesn't seem to be solved by either of these checkins. I'm still trying to figure out why drag and drop isn't working in mail/news. It's probably something in the unix code because the windows and mac people claim that it works for them. We'll see, though.

Ahh, the fun of working on a project based on XP code.

A great quote that someone passed to me about last night's X-files off of slashdot:

What I learned:

The best reason to have an IPO is so that you can afford a $300 backup solution. Or a CVS repository. Or a hard drive to go along with your ramdisk, so that if the power accidentally goes out, you don't lose all of your work.

Gosh, you'd think William Gibson wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter or something.

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that Gibson did write it on a typewriter. I could be wrong, though.

Milk in a bag scares me, no matter how much people think it makes sense. It reminds me of Rumble in the Bronx.

Sometimes, the phrase portable computer has a different meaning.

Today was a pretty good day. I went out and spent some money and got a little to to get some coding done.

My wife, zab, and a couple of friends went out to Ikea to buy some funiture and things for the home. We got some "authentic" Swedish bagels and sandwiches and started our inpulse driven shopping. Amazingly enough, my wife and I agreed on almost everything we wanted to buy. The couch that we wanted wasn't in stock so we ended up putting one on reserve. Hopefully they should have that in sometime in the beginning of March. Once we get a couch we'll be able to watch our one channel of tv in style. They play a lot of hockey on tv here. I watched two hours last night.

We did end up buying a chair that we really both liked for the living room. We also bought a real dining room table and four chairs to go with it. I've never owned real dining room funiture before. I've always had that college student furniture where the table legs have been chewed on by three different dogs and where the chairs have been used as cat scratching posts.

I also got some time to work on a couple of bugs. Pav checked in a work around for 28216 but didn't really fix the problem. After getting a little timeshare on Owen's brain we managed to figure out the real problem and I cooked up a fix. I also fixed another bug that's been sitting on my plate for a while. I also fixed some misspellings that were causing problems.

I'm finally moved.

Today was my first real day in Toronto. I've got a place to live and all of the things that I own are there, even though it's all still in boxes. I got to ride around on the subway and a couple of buses. My first experience with the public transportation was a success.

I applied for an SIN number. That was my major accomplishment for the day.

At the end of the day my wife and tried to go to the store to buy some food in my truck and found the battery was dead. If I had used it instead of the public transit it probably wouldn't have had a dead battery. I was amused at the irony.

I managed to show up at the office in Toronto today to get acquainted with the people there and to try to start getting settled in. Zab and Ben managed to snag a corner office, resulting in insane jealousy on my part. I took a cube in the middle of the building somewhere. It's big. I don't have anyone around me. Maybe it means that I'll actually get some work done for a change.

I've got a dialup account now so I can try to start updating my trees. My Mozilla tree has been updating for over an hour. That's what I get for not updating my tree for a month.

This weekend I'll try to work on a couple of Mozilla bugs. The bug that people are bothering me the most about is 28216 since when they bump into it they suddenly can't get anything done. I'll fix that one first.