Joe Ganley
Writing code since 1979
I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years. I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications, compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.

I also enjoy writing, woodworking, and home improvement. Also this.

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Friday, April 30, 2004


A few childrens books that we (both us and the kids) love, and that range from slightly to very obscure:
  • Rain Makes Applesauce
  • Caps for Sale
  • Sector 7
  • Guess Who My Favorite Person Is? (sadly, appears to be out of print)
  • Red Light, Green Light; this was written pseudonymously by Margaret Wise Brown, and appears to be out of print. There is a newer edition, but with new illustrations.

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    I've been asking for a decade for a voice-controllable TV. Now apparently there is one, but they flubbed it bad: You talk into a microphone on the remote! My whole desire is to get rid of the remote! (Why? Because I can't ever find it.) There's a real opportunity here; TV navigation is a limited enough domain that you ought to be able to do it really well with voice recognition. I look forward to the day when we no longer have to worry about numeric TV channels any more than we use numeric IP addresses today.

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    I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 opening weekend. I liked it a lot, as I did Vol. 1, but when it was all over I wished for more backstory. We got a ton of backstory on O-Ren with the anime sequence in Vol. 1, but we got almost none on Budd or Elle (and, for that matter, not a lot on Bill or even Kiddo). In particular, I wanted more on Budd and what happened between him and Bill. (Aside: It was a genius piece of Tarantino-style sad humor to have a former professional assassin working as a bouncer in a strip club.) Anyway, maybe there'll be more on the DVD when it comes out.

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    Thursday, April 29, 2004


    My sister used to collect toys; now, she's slowly ridding herself of them. Periodically, she runs across some that haven't turned out to be worth anything, and gives them to my kids. The McDonald's Happy Meal Furby's from 1999 are just about Helen and Mary Kate's favorite toys ever, which just goes to show that there's no predicting what will make kids happy.

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    Derek Woolstar makes some good comments about money management. I have a similar rule: I never buy anything over about $100 without waiting overnight. This probably eliminates 30-40% of my purchases outright. I also bought the same van he did, and had a similarly weird dealer experience. We wanted a specific set of options in a specific color, which of course no-one had on the lot. One dealer was willing to generously give us a different van he had in stock for a whopping $800 off MSRP (to which I laughed out loud), but if we wanted to order the exact one we wanted, we would have to pay sticker. We walked out, and he let us go, but the very next dealer we went to happily ordered us the van we wanted for just a few hundred over invoice. I still wonder what made each of them (particularly the first) behave the way they did.

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    Wednesday, April 28, 2004


    I just finished Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. While I haven't liked much else King has written in the last decade or so, I'm quite fond of this series. As I read it, I keep thinking that if they're ever going to film any of it, they'd better do it soon before Clint Eastwood is too old to play the lead; I can't imagine anyone else in that role. For Eddie, perhaps Edward Norton. For Susannah, I always imagine Alfre Woodard, but I suspect they'd go with someone prettier; perhaps Halle Berry, if they can afford her. This site suggests Tim Burton to direct; I love Burton's work, but I don't think he's right for this project at all. Too bad Sergio Leone and John Ford are dead. In any event, I shouldn't be too eager for a Dark Tower film; my wife asked recently why I liked King's books so much, but not his movies. My answer was quite simple: Because Stephen King movies suck. (The only exceptions that come to mind are Stand By Me, and perhaps The Shining.)

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    A few years ago, I asked my wife the rhetorical question: If Bill Gates (say) decided his life's mission was to make mosquitoes extinct, would it be possible? Apparently maybe so.

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    Tuesday, April 27, 2004


    From the third part of the Washington Post series from which I posted that graphic yesterday:
    [A] boy [was] in need of help with his multiplication tables. "I said to his mother, 'You've got to practice with him.' 'Well, I work three jobs to be able to put food on the table. I don't have time for love and hugs and homework.' ..."
    Sometimes I complain about work and the kids taking all of my time, but I guess I should just be glad I have time for the kids.

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    Mike Pope writes about his-and-hers dueling Netflix queues. We have a more complex problem with Netflix: Each of us likes to bring Netflix DVDs with us when we travel. We can watch them on our laptops, and just drop them in the mail when from wherever we are when we're done. However, in the couple of weeks leading up to a trip, there's a very delicate timing issue: You want to try to have three fresh movies of the traveler's choosing in hand before, but not too far before, they travel. And you want to avoid having to send back the previous movies unwatched in order to get the timing right.

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    Monday, April 26, 2004


    Homicide: Life on the Street, my favorite TV show ever, released its fourth season on DVD last month. If you missed this when it was on TV, check it out. BTW, the book (nonfiction) on which the series was based is also excellent. Be warned, the first season or two of the show is pretty faithful to the book, so one will spoil the other for you.

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    A while back I mentioned the phenomenon of too many choices making people unhappy. John Shirley makes some insightful comments about this. [via BoingBoing.] As a related aside, while I like the magazine Real Simple quite a lot, it's really not about simplification at all.

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    I thought this graphic from The Washington Post was interesting, from a visual display of information perspective (each square represents one electoral vote). The article itself, about the very strong (and increasing) correlation between geography and party voting, is interesting too.

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    A lot of recent study has examined so-called Small World networks, such as the 'Kevin Bacon' network of actors, linked by appearing in movies together. I suspect it has already been (or is being) done, but it would be interesting to consider the difference between the networks stored in online social networking services such as Orkut and Friendster and the absolute networks they attempt to represent; in this case, networks of who knows whom. I believe that a couple of key phenomena would make these networks very different from one another. The first is that the online networks are unlikely to contain people who aren't particularly technical; that is, such people are unlikely to be interested in joining such an online service, and their friends, knowing this, are less likely to invite them. The second is that in graph-theoretical terms, the degree of people-as-vertices is limited. If you join a service, and you know ten people, chances are you would invite all of them to join. But if you know 10,000 people, presumably you'd only invite your closest friends and those most likely to be interested in such things; typically, perhaps, a few dozen people. This greatly limits the power of people to act as 'bridges' between otherwise disconnected portions of the graph (e.g. Rod Steiger is widely cited as the strongest bridge in the Kevin Bacon network), and I expect this network consists much more of large but disconnected cliques of people than does the 'real' who-knows-whom network. I've never been invited to join one of these services; if we can stipulate that I have friends, and I hope that we can, then I think we see these phenomena in action. Most of my friends are relatively nontechnical, and among those friends who are more technical, we probably aren't close enough friends for me to be one of those few dozen people they think of when they sit down to send their invitations. If it could be done in a statistically valid way, it would be interesting to have people rank their friends in order of closeness, and then to form a graph connecting each person only with their N closest friends, and then to see how the topology of the network varies as you change N. (Related humorous aside, via Bob Congdon.)

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    Sunday, April 25, 2004


    My wish for Windows and every other computer application or OS that I ever use: Do not change window focus unless I tell you to. Ever. On the other hand, if you put up a dialog, please let me know that you did somehow; if the dialog belongs to an application in the taskbar, usually its taskbar icon will blink, but if not, it's a mystery. For example, I just typed "Start -> Run -> \\servername". The only way I knew it had failed was when I wondered, many minutes later, what had happened, and minimized all of my windows to find a dialog that had quietly appeared in the background telling me that the server wasn't found.

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    Friday, April 23, 2004


    Every time I go down to the Mall (the one between the Washington Monument and the Capitol) amid the throngs of picture-taking tourists, I think a moment about how many strangers' photos (and video) we might be in, and whether we're doing anything amusing/embarassing in any of them.

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    Almost simultaneously, an excellent post at The Old New Thing about programming in the presence of exceptions, and a post at the DNA Lounge about how banks' credit-card authorization scheme gets this very thing exactly wrong.

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    Thursday, April 22, 2004


    This rotary-dial web browser has an incredible, Terry Gilliam retro-coolness that I just love. By the way, you use it by dialing the IP address. (Confession: I have a thing for rotary-dial phones.) [via jwz.]

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    A couple of days ago the company I work for joined the ranks of those who forgot to renew their domain registration. People have ridiculed Verisign's new $1000, 100-year domain registration option, but I predict it will be very popular in the corporate world. Just within my group, I'd guess my fellow remote co-workers and I have wasted $1000 of each other's time trying to figure out the IP address of our VPN server so we could work.

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    We just brought A Child's Celebration of Folk Music back into rotation, and I highly recommend it. Note, however, that it's not quite as sanitized as some childrens music; for example, "There Ain't No Bugs on Me" contains the word 'hell,' and "Grandfather's Clock" (my favorite song in the collection) is about dying. Oh, and for the curious, "Colon Man" is a Jamaican migrant song about working on the Panama Canal.

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    Kevin's RandomPixel is finally showing signs of life! He released a bunch of disposable cameras into the wild, with instructions to take a picture or two and pass it on, then to mail it back when it's exhausted; the pics from the first camera are finally posted.

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    For the geek who has it all, an $18,000 Swarovski crystal chandelier that displays text messages. [via Engadget.]

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    Wednesday, April 21, 2004


    I recently had the need to write a really good random number generator, and in the process ran across a hardware RNG for PCs. It's big, though; when it said "USB connectivity," I figured it would be a little token like a thumb-drive.

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    Wow, these really are the best portraits ever. [via 50 cups of coffee]

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    Via Ned Batchelder, the How grammatically sound are you? quiz. Ned's post complains a bit about arcane rules of grammar that don't match the way people really speak. The heart of this argument is the age-old battle between the prescriptivists, who believe that the rules of grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary strictly define the "correct" use of a language, and descriptivists, who believe that the "correct" language is that which is actually spoken, and any rules should simply codify real usage. (Some refer to these as judgmental and nonjudgmental, respectively.) I am more on the side of prescriptivism, and my wife (an English professor) even moreso; Ned, apparently, is more of a descriptivist. I could go on, but Mark Halpern's Atlantic essay says it much better than I would. (BTW, according to that quiz I'm a 'Grammar God,' as I would expect.)

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    A reader of my Man-Bag Buying Guide pointed out a product called (go figure) the Man-n-Bag, which purports to be the only bag specifically designed to function as a purse, but for men (and, um, don't call it a purse!). They sent me one for review, and on first examination I like it pretty well; I'm going to switch to using it and see how it goes. Read my review or go straight to their site to buy one or investigate further.

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    Tuesday, April 20, 2004


    The Spurs NBA playoff beard-o-meter.

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    Toyota and marketing firm Cunning are having people roam Times Square with ads for the Scion tattooed on their forehead. I was disappointed when I read that they're very temporary, and only in use for the few hours the people are hawking, rather like having a sandwich board tattooed on your forehead. Previously I had assumed that the tattoos would be henna or something similar, and that the people would carry the ad with them everywhere they went for a few weeks. Now that would raise brand awareness. Heck, people have sported real Harley-Davidson tattoos forever, though I haven't ever seen one on anyone's forehead. (As an aside, I totally love the bulldog-cute Scion xB, especially in that ridiculous orange color.) [via Darren Barefoot]

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    Today I received a piece of spam disguised as another piece of spam. That is, the subject line was something like "enlarge your member," but the contents were about mortgages. I find this especially strange since mortgages are surely more legit-sounding than member enlargement. (Why anyone would trust their home mortgage to a spammer, or put something their mouth that they purchased from a spammer, is beyond me, but that's beside the point.) (Update: Perhaps I encountered an adaptive spam generator.)

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    Friday, April 16, 2004


  • Algorithms are my bag, baby, so I was surprised to discover one that is cool, useful, practical, and that I've never heard of: the Bloom filter.
  • The Art of [Windows] Noise.
  • Home of the Underdogs is all about old, abandonware PC games. They even had my old favorite, Jumpman!

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    Wednesday, April 14, 2004


    Finally, a site that lists free wi-fi access points. My favorite one is on there, the Panera up the street; I stopped by there on Christmas morning last year, and with everything closed, the entire parking lot of this huge strip mall was empty... except for one car parked at the curb in front of Panera, with a guy sitting in it with his laptop.

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    Monday, April 12, 2004


  • If you haven't already seen the image War President, do so.
  • The Memespread Project. Because everybody's doin' it.
  • An interesting design magazine (online and in print) called Before and After.

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    In response to my link about anticompetitive trade secrets in the auto industry, a reader who worked in that industry for several years sent me an interesting email going into some depth about that segment of the auto industry. The upshot is that the codes aren't kept secret for trade-secret reasons, but rather because the manufacturers are afraid of liability if someone hacks their car's computer module and something bad happens (like, say, the car explodes).

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    Fog Creek Software's CityDesk is an excellent web-content management application that would be perfectly suited for maintaining a weblog, especially for those of us who don't have full control over our web server (which rules out MovableType). However, its price of $299 is much too steep (for me, at least) to use for maintaining a personal site, especially when the main competition is Blogger (free) or MovableType (free, but would require an $8/month upgrade to my hosting service). FogCreek would argue that their application is superior to those, and this is certainly true; however, I would think that the price point for personal use is in the $90-$100 range. Perhaps FogCreek has made a deliberate decision not to go after that market. BTW, they do offer a free starter edition that only works on sites of up to 50 files (far too few for my use), and once you download it, they give you a 25% discount on the full version. The discount is weird, though: It's only good for 72 hours, which is hardly enough time to look at the starter edition, and certainly not enough time to get invested in it. (Update 4-15-02004: I just noticed that they once did have a Home edition, but axed it, so presumably I shouldn't hold my breath for its return. So sad; I love the product, but at that price, I'll have to go with one of the alternatives.)

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    Saturday, April 10, 2004


    Many countries have a very clear brand with respect to the products they produce. Japan, Sweden, Germany, China, Taiwan---we have a very clear idea of what to expect out of products from those countries. I wonder if people overseas have a strong idea of the U.S. brand, and if so, what is it like? (Bear in mind I'm talking only about a brand for U.S. products; it's clear that the U.S. brand overall is weak and mostly negative overseas.)

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    Friday, April 09, 2004


    One of those "you know you're getting older" moments: I had a younger coworker in the car, and was listening to a CD by the excellent 80's band Missing Persons. She asked who it was, and I said, "A band called Missing Persons who you've probably never heard of." She replied, "Oh, I've heard of them. They were my fourth-grade teacher's favorite band."

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    Monday, April 05, 2004


    It's funny when a recommendations engine such as Amazon's makes a phase change. I just added Bester's The Stars My Destination--a classic that somehow I've never read--to my wish list, and suddenly the recommendations Amazon gives me, previously devoid of 'classic' SF, are teeming with Roger Zelazny, Theodore Sturgeon, P. K. Dick, and Ursula LeGuin. It's as if it said, A-ha! You're one of those!

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  • Newsmap presents the news in a very information-rich 2-D format. I know I'm way behind the curve on this, but it's really damned cool.
  • The ACM programming contest finals results. Virginia Tech places 59th?!? We placed 3rd and 8th the two years I was on the team.
  • Coffee really isn't much of a diuretic after all. I'm not dehydrated because I drink too much coffee, it's because I don't drink enough coffee!
  • The Paradox of Choice examines the phenomenon where having more choices actually makes you less happy. I experienced this recently when I bought a new Toyota Sienna; between different trim levels, different option packages, and different colors, there were many hundreds of distinct van configurations. Contrast with the Honda Odyssey where, exclusive of color, there are exactly four different models.
  • Get some plush microbes for the kids who have tired of their bag of plagues.
  • Michael McDonough's 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School. I'm particularly trying to decide whether I agree with #2. Certainly the principle is correct, but I don't think it's as bad as 95%.
  • A fully mechanized parking garage.
  • 10socks is a good idea; we just bought some similar socks for our kids that have one, two, or three stripes across the toes. However, $7.80/pair is pretty steep for socks.

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    Sunday, April 04, 2004


    I wonder how obvious something has to be before it is deemed unnecessary to provide instructions with it? On the other hand, I guess the incremental cost of printing these instructions is pretty close to zero.

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    Copyright (c) 1988-2004 by Joseph L. Ganley. All rights reserved except where otherwise noted.