March « 2007 « Luis Villa

March, 2007

two saturday nights

For once, I get to be the family food blogger- I made dinner last night. (Krissa sat on the couch and/or played sous chef from time to time.)

Salmon cakes and corn salsa from the Foster’s Market Cookbook; pumpkin and sweet potato soup from the New World Kitchen.

Was just great to out of the house, go down to Union Square, and get fresh food straight from the farms on what felt like the very first day of spring. Not quite there yet, but you could smell it in the air.

Last weekend I went to my grandmother’s; we did a 1,000 piece puzzle on Saturday night with my mom and aunt.

misc. / software — 8 Comments
11
Mar 07

gmplayer blows, and a not-so-lazyweb request re: wireless keyboards

For the record, gmplayer is a gigantic pile of shit. Like something from GNOME 0.1. None of this fancy ‘keyboard navigability’ (even once I found the keyboard docs on the web, most of them didn’t work, I’m sure I wasn’t in some mode or something) or ‘just working’ (failed to figure out a working video driver, or notice that I had a DVD in the drive) or ‘settings that remember themselves’ (select the video driver, crash 45 minutes later, oops, have to select the video driver again) or ‘stability’ (aforementioned crash). Of course, it actually plays the subtitles on the movie Krissa rented last night, which is more than I can say for totem, and the audio, which is more than I can say for my good old-fashioned HW DVD player. ARGGGH.

(No, I’m not quite ready to give up on DVDs altogether. I know I suck.)

At one point, generally frustrated, I chucked my wireless keyboard across the room. So… anyone have recommendations for a small wireless keyboard/integrated mouse combo? Not the gigantic MS wireless keyboards. Something basically similar to this, except mechanically reliable, or this but with a nipple/trackpad. I have a nagging feeling it doesn’t exist, unfortunately, but I’d love to be wrong

gnome / misc. — 1 Comment
10
Mar 07

GNOME wine

Clare: I had a bottle of Barefoot Wine the night of the GNOME 2.0 release. Their foot isn’t quite right, but it was close enough for my purposes. :)

forfacebook / law — 3 Comments
6
Mar 07

‘the great associate salary spike’

Long but interesting article on the economics of law firms, why first-year associates in the top firms now make $160K per year, and what might be broken about this. (For comparison, once you count bonuses, this is more than the salary of Supreme Court Justices.) (See also.)

gnome / law / licensing / misc. / personal / QA / software — 12 Comments
6
Mar 07

misc. post-weekend bits

Diebold is considering selling their voting machine unit. RH, this is your chance.
Actually used a Wii for the first time this weekend. What fun. This is real thinking outside the box. (I’ve never owned a game machine, and never previously been particularly tempted. But I am now, esp. since I didn’t buy myself anything for my birthday last week. :)
Saw the first iPhone ad (unfree media, but at least unfree with an official player on Linux) on TV yesterday. Hope that Nokia will take the hint from Apple and put a cell chip in the N800′s successor- this is a market that Nokia should have owned a year ago, had they been willing to think a bit more outside their own boxes. I’m still glad they are doing all they are doing, and it is a unique and interesting little box, but it is frustrating to see that all the pieces are in place- except one- for the iPhone to have been a year earlier, and Free.
Hopefully I’ll score an openmoko at the end of the month so I can replace the one proprietary component in my personal digital stack, even if it does look to be clearly suboptimal to an N800 with a cell chip. Openmoko folks, if you see this, you really, really need some free QA experts testing and helping you refine this thing :)
Three bits of awesome news for GNOME distribution and testing- rpath-based images, a buildbot with integrated testing, and wider distribution of unstable builds .
I miss Miami.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that wordpress upgrades mar an otherwise excellent experience. Comments indicate fixes may be in the pipeline, yay.
Interesting post on property rights and how they explode over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Look forward to the rest of the posts in the series, though I wish the citations provided links, or at least enough information to be googleable. (I’d link to SSRN, but SSRN is considered harmful.)
Speaking of citations, am about to launch into a pile of bluebooking. Expect fun, law-school/data-organization related ranting to follow!

forfacebook / misc. / New York — 5 Comments
1
Mar 07

winner: most gratuitous use of quotation marks

From Donald Trump, via my junk mail today:

Please be my personal guest to hear my real story… and also be trained by “4″ self-made multi-millionare experts.

Yes. He puts quotes around “4″. (He also puts quotes around “0″ later, though relatively speaking that use almost makes sense.) Kudos to Mr. Trump for a new low in the sport of quotation mark abuse.

[If any Flickr users want to put this into the awesome quotation mark abuse pool, feel free; the picture is here.]

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.