While not being even remotely as sophisticated as shortindiangirl's methods, this rent v/s buy calculator from the New York Times (tip of the hat to lifehacker_rss ) is actually rather interesting.

The ability to visually see the graphs and manipulate numbers on the fly is very useful.

Unix raving ahead, you have been warned.

Some days you are wandering around and a site smacks you around the face. And then again some more. Now, I write a lot of shell based command line monsters. If you haven't been introduced to my friends tr, sed, nl, jot, paste when I've been trying to get something done, it's been an unusual day.

Of the tools, ( Read more... )

A lot of people worked rather hard on this - and it's non trivial. I've seen bits of the underlying problems involved, so congrats to the folks on getting it done!

Now, sadly, does Yahoo! have enough time for it to be material is the question.

A long time ago, I'd read Eric Flint's Mother of Demons via the Baen Free Library (very sensible anti DRM stance, recommended). I'd enjoyed it quite a bit.  In the midst of trying to look up shards for a purely database oriented search, I got distracted by a new series from him.

Starting with 1632, this is a series that follows the events when a ( Read more... )

One of the pleasant surprises of Seattle was this Vietnamese market Hau Hau that I found really close to work. There I discovered amongst other things, jackfruit, bitter gourd, various kinds of yams, green plantains and the like. After spending the princely sum of $14, we returned with two large bags of very nice veggies.

Then the lady of learning ( Read more... )

Moving from the Bay Area to Seattle was painful enough. It was made harder by the fact that my usual sources for information like yelp were rather thin on information.

The original plan was to use Uhaul and drive our stuff over, with a car attached to the UHaul truck. This was also predicated on selling one car. Selling a car is painful. Well, if ( Read more... )

When driving, I'd been used to tuning into KQED (88.5FM). I'd slowly but surely gotten used to programs (Marketplace, Talk of the Nation and LAAxmi Singh). When I moved to Seattle, the lack of a single NPR station that had all the programs was really annoying.

However, slowly but surely, I'm leaning towards KUOW. Weekday, the program I now listen ( Read more... )

A long long time ago, (i.e Nov 10, 2005) Jeremy wrote something that really resonated with me. And more proof of that showed up this week. He wrote:

When Google Calendar and Google Finance (more in a future post) finally show their faces, I suspect they'll follow the same pattern. They'll look like someone sat down and thought "I'm starting with a ( Read more... )

Singing with my nephew, I realized that internally I was having a lot of discomfort with this line: (where I was processing "you" is an instance of the Human class, i.e. Human *)

If( you->Are(Human::HAPPY) && you->Know(Human::HAPPY) )
{

you->Clap(Human::HANDS) ; } How is it possible for the first condition to be true and the second to be false ( Read more... )

Last month, I had a finance charge on my American Express card for payments for the month of June. Thanks to credit union transfer woes detailed before, I thought I understood why ( Read more... )