Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 233)

pphaneuf - Re: VSS, whether they use it internally or not - I've read that it is often shunned - isn't it rather shocking that they try and sell it to customers? Of course, we could see it as a problem of education or marketing, that greatly superior free alternatives such as Subversion exist...

One of the rare gems of common sense on the 'cartoons' issue was Haroon Siddiqui's editorial in the Toronto Star.

(update) Another sensible column: Michael Coren. Three (more) cheers for Canada.

bi, Most of what I know about significance arithmetic is in those Usenet threads (not the web page -- I only found that yesterday). Yes, it would take patience to read them, but I found Steve's arguments compelling - IMHO he has some good ideas that improve upon accepted wisdom in this area. Ymmv.

rmathew, Significance arithmetic, as outlined by Steve Richfield in numerous threads on comp.arch.arithmetic, is an interesting alternative to interval arithmetic.

Googleplex: A "swim-in-place" pool?! How ridiculously American and cheap for a multibillion dollar company. I went to a small high school with swimming facilities 1000 times as pleasant as that. What on Earth is wrong with a standard, 50m pool, with 8-odd lanes? If Google can't afford that, they might as well all sell up and start flipping burgers. What a mediocre, depressing world you guys build.

Re: Xgl, I just watched the demo video. The only thing I saw there that adds to OS X's capabilities was the "rubber sheet" window movement, and for all I know OS X can do that too :).

I saw Apple demo the OpenGL-on-the-desktop capability at 10.2 release (July/August 2002), but oddly they never did anything with the capability. Everything else in the Xgl demo is already familiar to OS X users.

It's what the Movement's all about, right?

Hypersensitive environmental nanny-statists, you can get anything you want, at Natalie's restaurant.

cinamod, lately I've stumbled across gloox (C++) and Smack (Java).

fzort, the knot rendering is very nice! Please post more as you create them :-)

Venting

If you want to install the trial version of Veritas' BackupExec Linux agent. Be warned. It includes: its very own complete Perl installation. And a Perl module that is 25,000 lines long. To install a trivial bit of software. Whatever happened to 'tar -xzf'?

They really expect me to run that script on my system and to hell with the consequences? I'll be running it on a sacrificial system, thanks very much.