afongen

Here’s a tip. When telling one’s spouse about a story in the Onion, make sure they’re awake enough to notice that you said it’s from The Onion.

I started telling Kiara about this guy who was caught in a scented candle store during a mall shooting.

“I looked around at where I was and told myself there was no way in hell I was going to let them find me curled up behind a floor display of Midnight Jasmine Housewarmer jar candles.” …

Much of Mull’s desperate plight was captured on mall security cameras. In the grainy footage, he can be seen inching his way slowly over the blood-slicked floors and past the contorted bodies of other victims before collapsing unconscious in the entrance of The Sharper Image.

She looked at me, horrified. “Oh my god, is his wife alright?”

That’s when I realized that she had been asleep when I started talking and missed the crucial bit.

Then again, maybe it’s just safest not to share stories like this, period.

• Software Craftmanship: Apprentice to Journeyman [Software Craftsmanship]
  This book has been put up in wiki form to allow for collaborative development prior to publication.
  (tags: development ebooks)
• Deep Dive: Blu-ray Disc Java, An Interview With Bill Foote
  Bill Foote is Sun’s Blu-ray Java architect.
  (tags: java interview sun)

• VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.
  Looks like one of the better apps for video conversion.
  (tags: video apple)
• iSquint
  iPod video converter for the Mac
  (tags: video apple ipod)
• Eventually Consistent
  Werner Vogels on Eventual Consistency.
  (tags: architecture database distributed concurrency scalability amazon)
• Mozilla Messaging
  Part of me is still surprised by the activity that still surrounds Thunderbird.
  (tags: Mozilla email messaging)

• sqlmap: a SQL injection tool
  (tags: sqlinjection pentesting python webappsec owasp opensource)

• On Resume, Error.
  (tags: resume)
• Transitioning from Java Classes to JavaScript Prototypes
  (tags: javascript java)
• Five things to do to a script before handing it over to the next developer
  Chris Heilmann on a bit of JavaScript refactoring
  (tags: javascript refactoring)
• Pragmatic Architecture: Security
  Good series of architecture articles by Ted Neward
  (tags: architecture msdn security)
• Dan Ingalls and Allen Wirfs-Brock: On Smalltalk, Lively Kernel, Javascript and Programming the Internet
  (tags: channel9 smalltalk javascript)
• Patrick Dussud: Managing Garbage Collection
  (tags: .NET garbagecollection programming channel9)
• The Internet Undersea World
  Physical map of undersea cables. That’s pretty cool.
  (tags: internet)

One of the reasons I was happy to upgrade to Leopard was that I could finally use Spaces, Apple’s take on virtual workspaces. Once I started using it, though, I was mostly content. Defining and switching between spaces is easy, and now I can keep my work projects separate from my RSS reader, iTunes, Twitter, and so on. So far so good.

But two things still bothered me:

1. I could not figure out how to move an application window from one space to another, no obvious way to “send to another space.” I thought I’d done it once accidentally, but couldn’t reproduce it so must have been wrong. I knew I could pin an app to a space — I do this for Twitter and NewNewsWire — but once a window was open I couldn’t move it elsewhere.
2. I can’t set a different desktop background in each space. I would love this, because then I could immediately identify which space I’m in without having to think about it. Having to take a split-second to review the app windows or check the menu bar isn’t unbearable, but the small things add up.

Granted, I have not bothered to investigate whether these things were possible, but they weren’t obvious. I’m lazy.

I was delighted to find, then, that there are several ways to move a window to another space, including the now-obvious technique of clicking a window’s title bar while switching spaces. Excellent.

Still flummoxed by the different desktop backgrounds, but neither have I started digging. :)

I really should read Mac Tips more often.

• Security Twits
  Twitter users in the security community
  (tags: security twitter via:dcortesi)
• SAML v2 – Parleys
  Presentation by Sun’s Pat Patterson
  (tags: saml identity presentations)
• YouTube – Frozen Grand Central
  A couple hundred people posed absolutely still for 5 minutes in Grand Central Station. Watch people react. Kinda fun.
  (tags: art performance youtube)
• Navigate Leopard Spaces, in Mac Tips
  (tags: osx)
• At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee
  High-end brewers are coming into vogue. Well, “vogue” might be pushing it. Kopplin’s Coffee here in Saint Paul uses the Clover and has the best coffee in town, hands-down.
  (tags: coffee)
• Alan Cooper: An Insurgency of Quality
• The Naive Approach to Hiring People
  (tags: management hiring)

Kiara and I were snuggling on the couch watching Earth 2 last night, and I noticed she was shivering. Huh. It was a little colder than I expected. I have the thermostat set to drop to 60 after 11 p.m., figuring that if we’re not in bed by then, which we rarely are, it’s our own damn fault if we’re cold. But Kiara was really cold.

Turns out the batteries in the thermostat needed to be replaced, and the furnace wasn’t running. It was below zero last night, so yeah — we were cold. Easy enough: turn the heat off, replace the batteries, replace the batteries again because the first set didn’t work for some reason, reprogram the settings, and go to bed.

Did you notice the step I missed? Yeah, neither did I until I got up in the morning and saw that it was now 50. Brrr! It seems that it helps to turn the heat back on.

So there. A little tip, from me to you. Sleep well.

Oh sure. I went digging today through the Firefox nightly builds to find a release of the latest Firefox 3 beta, and hours later they show up on the main beta download page.Of course.

I’ve been looking forward to Firefox 3 mainly because I’ve been having trouble with Firefox 2 crashing or hanging on my Mac. Sometimes it happens all day, sometimes it might be days between crashes. Could be an extension doing it, but whatever. It’s a problem. I’m grasping at straws.

Few of the extensions I use work yet in Firefox 3, but Firebug does if you go digging. That’s the one I care about most.

• GlassFish v3 Ruby Gem – New Home on RubyForge
  (tags: ruby jruby glassfish)