Satya's blog - 2004/01/

Our[0] workflow engine Sluice[1] has a new version, yay! It's based partly on jabber[2] (which the IETF[3] likes[4]) it's ultra-cool, and I contributed. Yay!
It's fun to be elbows-deep in the guts of a project like this, fix bugs, make new functions, *create*! It's a little detective mystery: *what* is causing this bug?? And then it's fixed, and everyone goes YAY! Or I say "Wow, that was stupid!" or "I'm a dip!".

[0] http://www.thetofu.com/
[1] http://www.jabberstudio.org/projects/sluice/project/view.php
[2] http://www.jabber.org/
[3] http://www.ietf.org/
[4] http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/30/1346237.shtml?tid=126&tid=95

What the fuck is it with Windows XP and disk checking?? It says to skip check, press a key within 9 seconds and then it WAITS 9 SECONDS FOR A KEY PRESS but there's no way to make it GET ON WITH IT so I have to sit there and wait 9 seconds, after which it goes into fucking la la land for the next 20 years.

I'm reading a book, and I wanted to look back at what I've read for the occurence of a certain word or phrase and the situation in which they were used. If this was a text file, I could have grepped. Too bad you can't grep dead trees.

It's been said that a certain department at ork, which we will call FooBar for now, messes up at least once a month.

We were sitting at coffee the other day, and I came up with this: Imagine a rather large bull in a china shop. But this bull is quite docile and calm. Only, every now and then it kinda shifts a little, and *plink* knocks something over. Something expensive. FooBar is that bull.

"Witness the power of the internet and ssh!" (Said to my boss, who's pretty cool.)

So I'm watching Animatrix, and number 7 is weird Japanese anime form, number 8 is weird _Brazil_ form. _Brazil_, the movie. Look it up on IMDB. Same weird typewriter-computers. Oh yeah, film noir form, too. The guy starts with a typical film noir parody joke: his fridge is empty, just like his bank balance.

Jakob Nielsen says: "Homepage links on the homepage typically result from using a universal navigation bar that includes "home" as an option. Fine. But when users are on a page that's featured in the navbar, you should turn off that option's link and highlight it in such as way that indicates that it's the current location."

The problem there is that most such pages are generated from templates or scripts, so it's not straightforward to just mark the link. The script could check the name of the page it's generating against the link name, but that doesn't strike me as elegant.

But what role is played by the "active link"? perhaps browsers should use that to render any link that evaluates as poiting to the same location that's open in the window.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html

Of the two checks I've written so far this year, I've correctly written the year 2004 on both. Amazing.

|Lord Vetinari says: |

|"So ... we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in." |

|Except the public, sir," said William, trying to keep up.

Lord Vetinari pulls a Sir Humphrey.

I switched to vi from nano. Even changed my alias to point at vi instead of nano. After using vi all day, I find myself using the same keystrokes in nano... but the mode thing is still biting me.