Category: Uncategorized

A pet peeve of mine: many people do not realize that the email you are replying to is in the email header. (Specifically the “In-Reply-To” and “References” headers) This feature makes it much easier to thread emails. It is easy for a mail client to tell that message X is in reply to message Y.…

It turns out the dryer in my apartment building has an interesting race condition: if you put more money in right when time runs out the dryer will not notice and stop, just as if you hadn’t put any additional change in the machine. It just cost me $1 to discover this interesting bug.

Apparently Endianness comes from Guilliver’s Travels. Furthermore, apparently its shocking that I did not know this. Doubly so since I read (most of) the book 15 years ago. This will make it easier for me to keep straight that big endian means big end first, which is something I had trouble remembering until recently.

My clothing was imbued by the power of Chuck! On the 4th of July, I joined a bunch of Oliners to watch the Boston fireworks from the Charles river. We brought a bunch of inflatable rafts and launched into the river. Unfortunately, I slipped out of my boat and fell into the river while boarding…

During my crazyland Boston visit this week, I am just struck by how different the pedestrian/car interaction is here from Chicago, or even Champaign. As I understand it, the point of “right of way” is to clarify who should yield to whom. Being polite is suboptimal, because that just leads to confusion when people can’t…

This is a first post; more coming soon.