As pointed out by a friend at work
Trends for "return gift": . Who would have thought that people only return gifts at Christmas?
Bloomberg: How to handle those annoyingly poor relatives at Christmas
Resist the urge to impress family members with your purchasing power and instead give them only what they can afford to give you. Avoid luxury goods, for example, or other items redolent of leisure. Choose, instead, gifts that encourage productive labour. Hand tools, say, or cookbooks. Obviously your gift needs to say, ``I love you,'' but it also needs to say, ``The income gap within the family isn't going to be shrinking from my end.'' A funny look at how to handle poor relatives at Christmas. Or at least I hope it's meant as humour.
SQL Server is incompatible with Windows Vista?
From Slashdot, apparently Vista and SQL Server don't love each other. That's pretty funny, if true. It seems sad to me that Microsoft worked for so many years on vista, and seems to have missed the mark so much.
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.