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What good is a blog if you can't complain and vent your frustrations to the world? I have a 3rd generation iPod that I won in a raffle way back before anyone even knew what an iPod was really. The only software that worked with an iPod on Linux in those days was gtkpod , and let me tell you, using that software was an incredible exercise in patience. I had about 5 GB of music, and it took about 5 full minutes for gtkpod to display any of my music. Then if you, say, clicked a tab to have it sort by artist name, it was another 5 minutes for it to redisplay the sorted list of music, and you could do nothing else with gtkpod until it was done with that redisplay. It was so infuriating, but for some reason I stuck with it. Once I learned what things would send it off into long periods of unresponsiveness, I carefully avoided clicking on those things and was able to get some music synced up to my iPod. If I ever did accidentally click the wrong thing and send if off into one of it...

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things. I just read this entry from Joel and I laughed out loud. It's funny, but it's also incredibly insightful. In a way, it's Joel's answer to Steve's New Big Language , but much more ambitious in its predictions and prognostications. I like it a lot. Just for the record, a few of the genius observations from this essay have briefly visited my thoughts. I've pondered the various Ajax user interfaces that are all over the place. I've really been bothered that writing a web application seems to be a major step backwards in development methodologies, not to mention how slow they are. ...

At the behest of Steve Yegge , I began reading the book, Refactoring, by Martin Fowler. Click the previous link and read what he has to say about it and see if you aren't intrigued. That essay, and the fact that my manager had the book collecting dust on his bookshelf, really made me want to read this book. I finally started reading it this weekend, and even though I'm only 52 pages into it (well, I've taken some excursion into other parts of it, so I've read more like 100 pages), I completely agree with Steve. This is a good book. The writing is direct, concise, unapologetic, and still somehow very friendly. It introduces new vocabulary (new to me at least) seamlessly. There are extensive code examples (yes, you have to read code, Martin doesn't apologize for that either), but the code is fairly simple and you get to witness it becoming simpler before your eyes. Here are a couple salient quotes to whet your appetite for this book: Any fool can write code that...

As I wrote the description for my latest ebay auction , I became awash in a wave of nostalgia. I was about 12 years old when Wing Commander came out, and I felt like quite the l33t h4x0r editing my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to tweak my expanded memory settings and get the most performance out my games. So much fun. I'm actually pretty loath to sell the game, but my wife really knew how to corner me, "So it's a video game that doesn't even work on our computer? In this big old box? Do we even have a floppy disk drive anymore?" Actually, I just had a thought. There are emulators for old arcade games, Atari, Nintendo, etc. Does anyone know of a 386 emulator that will let me play old games like this? That would be radical!