philisha.net

From Achewood:
Current baby status, 3/29: I have discovered that I can work at the computer while wearing the new baby in a sling. I think we may be onto something, here.
Yikes.

From Phil:
Just switched to Ubuntu and loving it. Linux really is ready for the desktop now. According to recent tests done in the Alcove, Ubuntu is at least 10x easier to install than Windows 2003 Server. It’s finally gotten to that seamless, “it just works” stage.

You may have noticed I didn’t have anything that interesting to say this time. It’s true. I just feel bad for not posting in a while. Also, it’s been bugging me (and Alisha) that I’ve left the title of my last post on the top for so long. So there. A little self-indulgence at the expense of post quality. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Also, I want to make the ‘tech’ posts stand out somehow. I’m open to ideas; please suggest.

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Speaking of eggs, I had a thought about eggs the other day. I was doing some baking, and I considered recipes. Recipes always have rather even amounts in them. It is rare that you will see something as precise as 3/4 of something; usually measurements are integers or 1/2.

Now I was thinking to myself, “What if the perfect amount of a given ingredient is something really strange? What if to make the perfect waffle, you need to put in 2.57 eggs?” I don’t think anyone would ever discover such a perfect recipe. And that, my friends, is too bad.

In closing, Banana Guard.

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Alisha and I went out to tonight to enjoy a wet Fullerton. The way it glistened in the rain was quite enchanting. I’m so glad I got married in the wettest year in recorded California history—it almost lets me forget I live in a desert.

I took a few pictures, but none of them really turned out well. One interesting thing we did see was a Building Zoo. I had never seen a Building Zoo before:

Someone once said that you learn new things every day. I’m not quite sure if I’ll grant that, but I think days like today when I learned about Building Zoos make up for days like yesterday when I didn’t learn anything.

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Welcome back, Mr. Nye. We missed you.

In high school, people would call me “Phil Nye” because I was good at science. I pretty much ruled. For instance, I knew what nematacysts are. Do you know? Huh? That’s what I thought.

In closing, “Science Rules!”

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From the Wikipedia article on The Mythical Man-Month:

The Second-System Effect: The second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since it will be disastrously overdesigned. Thus, when embarking upon a new project, a project manager should ask for a chief architect, who has at least three or more systems design experience under his belt.

With that in mind, behold my second system: Eigen.

It’s meant for Biola Students only, but you want to try it out, you can log in with the ID 1 and the password ‘eigenvalue’.

I learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and fixed most of them.

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I went into the desert with the Knights.

For details, see Jon. Although for some reason he wasn’t able to appreciate the beautiful refreshing rain, his account is accurate in most other respects.

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From a recent project I’m developing at Biola.

Update 2005-03-21:

There’s obviously a huge divide between the average reader of blogs and the average person likely to visit a given Biola web page. From the statistics quoted in the comments page (Jon, Luke, and I) IE’s average is 20%. This is not all that surprising; among tech sites IE lost its lead a long time ago. It makes sense to me that blogs should follow.

What is surprising is that its share is so low among a relatively mainstream site like Biola. Biola is still not terribly representative of the world since it has a disproportionate number of Mac users, but it’s still encouraging.

Here’s why: since IE has lost its dominance, people will test their sites in more than just IE. This will be annoying for people who don’t know much about web design and have poor methods for design, but for ‘the rest of us’ it will be a welcome change. If sites are designed according to the rules, some might not look quite right in IE, which ignores several of the rules. If there’s enough pressure from dropping market share, the next version of IE might actually implement the standards.

In the end, I could be happy even if IE regained a majority, as long as the new version of IE is standards-compliant. It’s not that I hate IE intrinsically, I just hate the fact that it mangles sites that are properly designed and makes my job a chore. It’s possible for Microsoft to do something right. (You have to look a ways into the past to find proof of this, but Word 5 for Mac was actually an excellent product.)

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I think it’s hilarious that Hagelberg is a mountain in Germany that’s really short.

(For those of you who don’t know me: I’m tall. About as tall in cm is Hagelberg mountain is in metres.)

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