Seem to be a series of articles on a design patterns and anti-patterns in historical Unix, by Neil Brown, called "Ghosts of Unix Past":

But someone put all of James Burke's TV programs on the web so I've been watching television instead of blogging.

An old chestnut that I am fond of digging up from the vax 4.3bsd sys/vmparam.h:

 * Just for fun: current memory prices are 4600$ a megabyte on VAX (4/22/81),
 * so we loan each swapped in process memory worth 100$, or just admit
 * that we don't consider it worthwhile and swap it out to disk which costs
 * $30/mb or about $0.75.

Memory for a Mac Pro ("expensive" ECC, registered) cost $.04/MB last month.

A cheap WD 1TB disk cost $.00006/MB two weeks later.

Old memory-to-disk cost ratio: 153:1; currently 724:1 for admittedly somewhat expensive memory.

Popular Mechanics noticed that data loggers and accelerometers and batteries were all cheap enough that evaluating shipping companies was totally something that was a practical thing to do. I've been telling people that this would be an interesting project for a while, and I'm happy to see that someone else had the idea. The result, apparently is that FedEx is hardest on packages, which I thought actually was really surprising. Certainly their customer service is better.

The only interesting non-work related reportable is really that I painted a room in my apartment this weekend. This is a flash applet that will let you type in a color name: "spooky" which will then show you something that probably looks nothing like my wall, which is a nice dark green. In real-life conversation, I have said "It will be nice to have a proper Karl-colored room again."

Oh, and I got a good deal on a MovieSac which will hopefully solve the problem of there being nowhere good in my apartment to curl up and read other than my bed, at least once I have shoveled out an area near a window.

In other news, I am becoming increasingly certain that I am allergic to soy, which kind of fails to interact well with my fondness for Chinese food.

I recorded two minuets that tend to occur early in most piano teaching curricula, often attributed to J.S. Bach. It turns out that they're by a guy named Christian Petzold.

A while back, I posted about the Nord Modular. Well, I saw a good price for one on ebay, so:

This is cool. I'm a little dubious about pure data being better than something described by text, but on the other hand, I've done some small things with pure data and have never gotten around to learning anything like csound.

I can't afford one of these, and I want one. I am told that they don't make a huge profit on them, either.

The Cairo Composite Manager is an X compositing manager in the same space as xcompmgr (so not inextricably integrated into a windowmanager that I don't want to use), but using modern, accelerated display mechanisms. I'm still not convinced it's good for anything, but it's nice to have the option (why would I want to make my windows harder to read?).

A History of the Karmann Ghia (which seems to be worth relatively more now than they were when I first considering buying one... oops.)

I'm in North Carolina this weekend. I'll post some pictures of food tomorrow.

Are you sitting comfortably? Have you checked under your seat for the license agreement? Did you bring your coat?