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October 31, 2001
Tonight heading up to
Tonight heading up to the city with James for a geek dinner.
I just finished reading The Predictors by Thomas Bass. He wrote a great book The Eudaemonic Pie many years ago. Both books are about the same group of young and then grown up physicists first trying to break the game of roulette, and then the game of international derivative markets. The first book was excellent, and their enterprise a failure. Sadly, the later book is disappointing. Skips over all the mathematical, economic, and trading details... and focuses on well worn points, and misses some others.
Wednesday morning I had to subject myself to more INS prompted medical interference - vacinations for mumps, measles, rubella, and chicken pox. It hadn't really registered with me that today was halloween. So, at the clinic, when this nurse wearing a tight black dress, feather scarf, and klosh called out my name I was a bit perplexed that the city of san jose would allow such a liberal dress policy.
Tuesday evening had a few drinks and a meal with some friends. James and Jim, the neighbours who run the popular meet someone cute service www.hotornot.com, and Michael who I worked with at Netscape.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 30, 2001
We just spent most
We just spent most of the afternoon jumping through some INS medical hoops. After having our bits and bobs poked by a aging russian physician we had to go for some blood tests and a chest x-ray. We got out of most of the vacination stuff, but I have to go get some shots for mumps, measles, rubella and chicken pox.
Michael Olson, the CEO of Sleepycat, where I now work, just an online interview. There's a good potted history of how Sleepycat starrted, and what it's all about. My marginal involvement was that I worked for the Netscape team that helped Sleepcat get started.
Monday was work work work.
We had a quite weekend. Bit of Yoga on Saturday. First session for a long long time. And it hurt. Later Sam cooked a lamb tagine with cous cous, which was very nice, and I might be having some of that for lunch today. We watched Mr. T and the Women, which was pretty dull. Not much going on Sunday either. Sam fitted a spedometer to her bike and we cycled up to the Prolific Oven in Palo Alto. Five miles to Palo Alto, one eclaire and a rum ball, five miles back to Mountain View. Net +200 calories. Sunday evening we watched Lost Horizon (1937). Sam didn't like it much, but there was somthing about it that I really liked. Some of the footage has been lost, but the sound trrack is intact, so the missing images are replaced with stills.
Agh, I've let a backlog build up again!
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 26, 2001
The Afghan's listen to
The Afghan's listen to the Radio 4 soap 'The Archers'. Well, actually it's only based on The Archers, but that's still pretty strange.
I went to an excellent talk today at the University of California Berkeley about XML Query given by Daniela Florescu. XML Query is the XML Query langauge based on Quilt that have been devised and is recommended by the W3C.
We're attending a birthday dinner for our friend Priscilla this evening. She used to work at Yahoo, and is a top songwriter and singer.
[Photo by Marty Gabel]
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 25, 2001
Mother has natural and
Mother has natural and test-tube babies These babies had just been born when we visited baby Petit last week. Amazing.
Sun have finished getting rid of their slice of the application server business. Having run the Kiva and Network Dynamics Application Servers into the ground they can no longer charge money for it. So they've decided to bundle it into the operating system. The Register: Sun drops Bundle bombshell on BEA.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 24, 2001
I attended an SDForum
I attended an SDForum Web Services SIG meeting last night. HP were giving a presentation of their Web Services tools and UDDI public registry. Someone in the auiencee mentioned an XML Database product that I hadn't heard of before from Lazy Software.
Tonight I'm meeting up with Jim from Novell to talk about directory servers and stuff. And, Allan, a star writer for Overload, is coming along too.
We also went to the XML Edge conference to walk around the exhibition floor. There weren't that many booths, perhaps about twenty, and then there were only a couple of companies that were worth talking to.
I met Jim Gray today. Three of us Sleepycat employees went to talk with him about XML and databases. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1999 for his work on database tansactions. Microsoft opened a small office in San Francisco for him and Gordon Bell to hang out and do cool stuff. Amongst them was the terraserver, a humongous database containing satellite images of earth.
James, our neighbour, pointed out this super cool website. It appears to be some kind of Finish yoghurt advert. Milko.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 23, 2001
I just finished reading
I just finished reading Bombardiers by Po Bronson, a farce about 80's bond tranders. Catch-22 meets Liars Poker it claims on the cover. A friend from Netscape, Gordon Good, lent me it last weekend. I really enjoyed it. Po Bronson also wrote the excellent The Nudist on the Late Shift. His website is pretty interesting too. He reminds me somewhat of David Eggers. If only Eggers had a weblog. Apparently he's a bit of a shit though, but always in an amusing way: Dave Eggers Screwed Me Too
Rob took some pictures of our group hike through Garland Ranch.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 22, 2001
Sunday we went for
Sunday we went for a long walk down in Carmel Valley. Olga discovered Garland Ranch Regional Park. The views were spectacular. [Photos when I get my act together.]
We watched Double Indemnity (1944) on DVD that evening too. The story was good, but the acting was pretty dodgy. The lead man was doing a bad Bogart impression all they way through. Not sure why its such a celebrated film really.
Salad and Millefeuille from the cookbook Mum sent us for our fifth anniversary present: Michael Roux Jr's Le Gavroche. And, the tart was from the Olive's Dessert book.
Salad of arugula, Parmesan, and truffles. Waltnut, Prune and Roquefort tart. Millefeuille of roast lamb with Parmesan. Chocolate Souffle (except I was too worn out so we had Walnut tart again.)
Saturday was gourmet cooking day. Here's the menu:
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 19, 2001
Cato was up at
Cato was up at the crack of dawn and endeared herself to us by streching to full length and scratching the hall cupboard whilst wailing in a particularly annoying way. D.M. Burlingtonsonson flew through the air at high speed and smacked into the door an inch above Cato's head. They both careened out of earshot and have not been seen since.
Very sleepy this morning. Couldn't get off to sleep for trying to think up a name for my new software project. Sam suggested 'KoMoDo', which is cool, but that's already been taken by ActiveState' for their Perl IDE.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 17, 2001
We visited 'Aidan Alexander
We visited 'Aidan Alexander Petitt' and his proud parents Scot and Colleen this afternoon at Stanford Hospital. He was born on Tuesday at 11:24am, weighing in at 7lbs 11oz.
Cato just came into the home office. Usually she'd be out at 9am. There was a feather hanging from the left whiskers, a feather hanging from the right whiskers, and a feather stuck to her right paw. Her claws were sticking out of her feet like a kitten when the claws are just too big for the feet. She's very pleased with herself. Cato: 6 Humming Birds: 0.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 13, 2001
Well I had it
Well I had it coming really. Cato was wailing her head off this morning and I did no more than open a sticky sleep eye and glare at her. No breakfast for her then. Except for the humming bird that she slaughtered and dragged around the house. That's four in three days. The prognosis for the California humming bird population doesn't look good.
Bob Dylan was actually pretty good. It took a few songs to get into, as his voice is pretty much shot these days. He seems to growl more than sing, so the old songs don't seem as familiar as they should.
I've been reading a book about the history of the British Isles. Sam used it as a sleeping aide for quite some time. I can understand why. The middle ages was 500 years of kings called only Henry, Edward, or Richard who did unspeakable things to each others families. Choice quote: 'Isabella, with her lover, Roger Mortimer, captured Edward II in 1326. He was deposed in favour of his son and disposed of in Berkeley Castle, probably by a red-hot poker inserted through his anus, a means of death that left few incriminating signs (1327)'. Ouch.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 12, 2001
Bob Dylan tonight at
Bob Dylan tonight at the San Jose Arena.
Another humming bird just bit the dust.
I just received a great piece of spam from China. 'Dear sir/madam, We can supply stable temperature shoes...'
Dan Ingalls gave an excellent talk last night for the computer museum history society about the development of smalltalk. Most interesting quote of the night was, 'The average software package arives dead on arival', refering to the static nature of software as it is delivered today. Dan delivered the talk using the Squeak environment. It's very cool. Donald Knuth was sitting on the front row. I've never seen him in the flesh before.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM
October 11, 2001
Thinking about going to
Thinking about going to a talk tonight. Dan Ingalls is talking at Xerox Parc about Smalltalk and Squeak.
The only notable family event of the day is that we woke to find the cat happily desmanting a humming bird at the foot of the bed. I disposed of her new toy, hoovered, and went to do my email. Sam had a shower and when she came out the cat was happily dismanting a humming bird at the foot of the bed. Sigh.
I no longer have the afore mentioned copious free time, but I'm going to have another crack at maintaining these pages. I still have a whole bunch of photos from our trip to europe a few months ago, and our recent hiking tour of lassen national park.
Posted by John at 12:00 PM