Steve's personal weblog

Japan.com - Technology - Magnetic Fan in Japan - Japanese Magnetic Fan: "When we first got the call from an excited colleague that he'd just seen the most amazing invention -- a magnetic motor that consumed almost no electricity -- we were so skeptical that we declined an invitation to go see it. If the technology was so good, we thought, how come they didn't have any customers yet? "

He has customers now. Hard to believe, but he claims effeciency of 330%. I'm going to buy a few, plus a few generators, and run my whole house for the cost of a single lightbulb. 100 watts in - 330 watts out - 330 watts in - 1089 watts out - 1089 watts in - 3593 watts out...

distcc optimizations: "If you don't already know about distcc I recommend that you check it out. Distcc is a tool that sits between make and gcc sending compile jobs to other computers when free, thus distributing compiles and dramatically decreasing build times. Best of all it is very easy to set up. "

Kasei: The Importance of Fudgability: "Part of the problem was how arrogant we were. We believed that we could spend a couple of days watching trained lawyers perform a highly-skilled job, talk briefly to them, and then make their jobs completely obsolete.
Worse, we made the job completely non-fudgable. In any human process there's always a degree to which the outcome can be fudged by the person performing the task. Even when the rules are simple or well-understood, there are always cases when someone will have a compelling reason to do things differently. In this case we didn't even know all the rules, and discovered to our horror that there were many more edge-cases than we'd imagined. "

Simon Willison: Pydoc: "Pydoc
Pydoc is awesome; I don't know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
pydoc -p 8888
Then point a browser at http://localhost:8888/ to browse interactive documentation for every Python module available on your system. This includes moduldes installed in your site-packages directory. If you keep code you've written yourself in site-packages you'll be able to browse the documentation for that too. If you're even remotely consistent about writing docstrings you'll be amazed at how useful the resulting documentation is. I can't believe I only just discovered this!"

cvs2cl.pl: "Here's an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Joseph Walton (joe at kafsemo dot org) that generates RSS output from changelogs in XML mode (requires 2.51 for the isoDate patch)."

distcc: a fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler: "distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is often two or more times faster than a local compile. "

Martin Fowler's Bliki: BuildLanguage: "Since I do a fair bit of programming in Ruby, I've naturally started to play with Rake, a ruby make. The interesting thing about the rakefiles is that they are regular ruby programs with a few conventions and support to allow you to declare tasks and dependencies. I only have small tasks to work with it, and so far I find it very comfortable. Since it is a full blown programming language I would expect it to work well for larger builds, I already have found it handy to do things like loops, subroutines and list collection in my build files."

One Thousand Reasons: "One Thousand Reasons to Dump George Bush"

That's a few more than I had before...

Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide: MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (HLN) - A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod.

If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny. Apparently she was upset that he erased her iPod. According to the article, he did so because the songs were illegally downloaded over a 3 month period.

The Register: "Protecting bodily waste in the public domain"

Too funny.
BOFH = Bast&rd Operator From Hell
PFY = Pimply Faced Youth

FinalBuilder - An Overview of FinalBuilder: "FinalBuilder is designed to automate tasks that you routinely do as part of your software development cycle. It allows you to quickly define a repeatable list of actions that can be executed in the same manner time after time."

Yet another build tool I ran across. Winodws only, and surprising that it has a GUI, since it is designed for automation. Somewhat ant-like in its approach to tasks, etc. Supports some tasks that Ant currently does not, and is much more squarely aimed at Windows - includes tasks for .net, delphi, VB, RoboHelp, InstallShield, etc.

Defining Enterprise Continuous Integration: "Enterprise Continuous Integration (ECI) is an extension of Continuous Integration (CI) to multiple projects. This short article gives you a brief overview of ECI, its characteristics, benefit and current limitations. As we progress in developing this practice, I will continue to provide additional links and information."

CIA Bot - CIA: "CIA is a system for tracking open-source projects in real-time. People all over the world are constantly collaborating and creating software, creating a constant flow of new code and new ideas. CIA provides an easy way for people to observe this flow. Developers can see the latest changes to their code immediately, users can subscribe to see the latest bugfixes in their favorite programs. Everyone can take a chance to step back and look at open source development as a whole."

Sounds cool. I like the description of where the name came from:
"CIA started out as a simple bot hacked together by Micah Dowty in an afternoon to monitor commit messages for the PicoGUI project. Lalo Martins came up with the name "CIA" to refer to this IRC bot: PicoGUI is hosted in Subversion, and the bot was a brainless entity designed to keep an eye on subversion :)"

HoustonChronicle.com - Help Line: "For those readers who are a bit more technically proficient and want to disable the automatic creation of Network shortcuts in My Network Places, there is a registry edit."