This would be me pimping tcmalloc
Uber cool Google written malloc implementation saves day at Wikipedia. Rusty objects to the 6mb memory overhead. I guess the overhead is a big deal if you run lots of binaries, which isn't always the case.
Open Source document management from Alfresco
An Alfresco employee (Alfrescoer?) posts about some of the interesting things they've learnt about being an open source company along the way. The comments about PR being more effective the cold sales calls is especially interesting. I argued for years at TOWER that we should be paying more attention to people searching for our product, instead of paying pretty boys to drive sports cars to sales presentations that everyone secretly hates. If your product has a good reputation and people can find it online, surely the customers will come to you?
Craigslist personal ad styled on the Yahoo reorg
Yahoo announced this week that they're going to reorg into three operating units. Some folks felt that they should reorg their dating in a similar manner to align synergies. From the Craigslist post: In order to maximize effectiveness for the upcoming holiday party, we have decided to restructure our organization into three major operating groups, each working together to secure dates for this important event. These three groups, Mission Girl, Marina Girl and SoMa Girl, will each target a specific audience segment More here.
Windows Vista, now with nagging
Thank $DEITY that we have people like Gordon who will enter their password into any old dialog box! MacOs has a similar feature, but at least it's smart.
Oh no! Revenge of the nerds remake cancelled!
Revenge of the nerds remake cancelled because the College it was being shot at didn't want to be associated with the project any more. Who would have thought that a College would have problems being associated with a movie about putting hidden video cameras in the women's bathroom?
Solar panel reflection effects in satellite imagery
Google Blogoscoped has an interesting pointer to a star effect on a Google Earth satellite image. Apparently the consensus is that its the sun reflecting off a solar panel, but it's still nice.
We’re 80% complete. If only we could get the code to compile we would be done!
The progress reports on an old Microsoft project indicated near completion, if only they could get the code to compile.
Book status
I was thinking about the delivery status of the MythTV book as I was going off to sleep last night, and it occurred to me that the book is pretty much done. It's a good feeling. Stewart needs to finish poking a chapter on cut lists and so forth, with should be minimal effort, then he needs to work on chapters on MythWeb and VoIP (the VoIP one is half done). I need to write an updated introduction (the contents of the book have deviated from plan, although that always happens) as well as a short conclusion chapter, and help Stewart write a chapter about running the latest and greatest version of the code (and how to interact with the development community). Then we're done for the writing. That description can be summarised as "Stewart and I appear to both be about one and a half chapters away from finishing authoring". We of course still need to get through technical review, editorial review, replying to things those reviewers need changed, copy editing, page layout, and standing on one leg. We're getting towards the end of the project though. When I think about it that way, I guess I read the…
Please report to the municipal hall of justice
Catherine rang me while I was at work yesterday to let me know that I had a letter from the courthouse in Santa Clara country demanding (it doesn't make it sound all that optional) that I attend at the "Municipal Hall of Justice" for jury duty. Yes, they really called it that. Yes, I thought it sounded like something from a bad 1980's film too. So, I apparently can get out of the jury duty by proving to them that I am not a citizen. In fact, it's much more onerous to show that you're not a citizen than it is for many of the other escape clauses. They want a copy of my passport for example. The letter also doesn't make it particularly clear if being a non-citizen excludes me from jury duty or not. Oh, and the only contact details on the letter are a web site, and a 24 hour recorded message line. I don't know if I would serve or not if given the option -- I probably would. So, am I able to serve? Should I? Will the Demolition Man be at the municipal hall of justice? What about Judge Dredd?
MySQL Camp
Kynan and I came along to the MySQL camp, and thru a quirk of fate pretty much ended up running it (the person who was meant to be running it got injured on the first day and had to go off to hospital). In return we wrote the Google Code blog post about the event. Pretty cool, huh?