Category: Geekery

Is that so hard?

I have an iPod. It stores 20Gb of music. I also have about 80Gb of music on my hard drive. All I want is a way to put certain select music on the iPod, and then fill the rest with random music selected from that hard drive. Ok, as an added complication, the hard drive lives on a Linux box, and is NFS mounted on the Mac that drives the iPod. That shouldn’t matter, should it? It’s a fast network link (100Mbps) and goes through a switch instead of a hub.
Continue reading “Is that so hard?”

Cause and Effect

I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
Continue reading “Cause and Effect”