Rui CarmoWent to work under the distracting effects of a moderate cold, which made for a rather dull work day.
Since most non-geeks are away on holiday, the main topics of debate during breaks were the Southeast Asia tsunami (the enormity of which is finally starting to sink in through my clogged sinuses) and the fault lines near the portuguese coast, complete with wave dynamics diagrams and a couple of improvised seismic charts.
In case you weren't paying attention, we had a mild earthquake here a few days ago, which coupled with the office's proximity to the river bank (plus the omnipresent phantom of the 1755 earthquake) does little to curb idle speculation:
National news is awash with tsunami-related stuff, fortunately not much of it related to missing Portuguese (there are some, of course, and one can but hope).
The usual amount of flak is being aimed at both our diplomatic missions (which can't seem to be able to do much) and our virtually non-existent national disaster response facilities (I expect to hear a lot about that during the coming week, as commentators start asking "what if it happened here?").
Not much of interest in the tech front today, only a few snippets here and there:
- Ten Hints for Microsoft.
- A few more reasons that keep me from actually finding Series 60 Python useful. That, the lack of a decent packaging and deployment mechanism and the fact that I loathe the Nokia/6630. It's a great hobbyist tool, but I'd rather have better Java bindings. I will nevertheless be trawling their Wiki for decent resources and figure out if my dinky little SIP client will run on it.
- Still more on JavaScript's XMLHTTPRequest, at a bit higher level than the stuff I've been gathering. Might be just the right thing to explain to your Web designer friends why it's useful.
Finally, the moment of Zen is back with a vengeance: Check out these amazing sneakers, part of a larger offensive (via Engadget):
