Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
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The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein.
A rather dry, factual account of Soviet espionage in the US around the Second World War.
Many interesting stories, presented in a workmanlike style. Spying as a not very exciting vocation. Non-judgemental, though. The Soviet operatives were just doing their jobs, so to speak. But the price paid by the agents was sometimes very heavy.
Posted on Monday, 2005-03-07,
in the books category.
The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein.
A rather dry, factual account of Soviet espionage in the US around the Second World War.
Many thrilling stories, presented in a workmanlike style. Spying as a not very exciting vocation. Non-judgemental, though. The Soviet operatives were just doing their jobs, so to speak.
Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-06,
in the books » read category.
(The weekend was far from lost, but I can’t say the word “weekend” without associating to the Lloyd Cole song. That’s how far gone I am — Lloyd Cole overdose, indeed.)
Taking a break from the stress of daily life, we left the kid at his aunt and his two cousins and took a room at Torpa Pensionat in Södertälje. Heartily recommended. Our room was the one on the bottom right of this page. Respect four-poster beds, baby!
After a good dinner at Glashyttans Wärdshus we vegged out in front of late night TV. Breakfast was in a large, sunny room with a view of the frozen sound outside, brilliantly light by the morning sun. Stockholm is beautiful in this weather, strong March sunlight shining on snow-covered ground.
Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-06,
in the alt category.
I took The Commonly Confused Words Test (after a tip from Michael’s blog), and received the following score:
English Genius
You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 87% Advanced, and 88% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!
There’s only one thing an English genius can say after getting this score: w00t!!!
Posted on Friday, 2005-03-04,
in the alt category.
I feel a need to keep an eye on what the hell I’m doing at work, and
how long time I spend doing it. I know that there are lots of apps
around which help you track time spent on projects, but most of them
are graphical apps. I wanted a console app that could live in my
screen session so that I could work from home and still have a
totalitarian view of what I was doing at any given point in time.
A quick trawl through Freshmeat didn’t turn up anything other than the aforementioned graphical apps, so I happily sat down and started work on my own, using my recently acquired knowledge of Perl’s terminal capabilities. I wanted a full-screen app that I would just press a button in and switch tasks.
While writing this, I needed a trivial time conversion that I had
forgotten. While googling for it, I discovered a time tracking app
written in Perl that used it for its own purposes:
tt. Ironic, huh? The app
isn’t exactly what I envisioned, but it’s more full-featured than
mine, so I’ll give it a try. Otherwise I’ll develop my own app
further.
Posted on Sunday, 2005-02-27,
in the comp category.
This list is here so that I can check out hardware in stores via the phone.
(G): Drivers for hardware marked with (G) are only included in the GENERIC kernels, but are not included on the various distribution floppies (including the cd-rom boot image).
(Source: OpenBSD i386 hardware list.)
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-03-08.
Posted on Sunday, 2005-02-27,
in the comp category.
I’ve tried learning Python through Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into Python, but I’ve discovered that I haven’t enough time to really get into it. Perl is the language I use most days, both in work and personally, and it’s hard for me to break out of the Perlish mindset. Any “serious” Python coding would be sysadmin and report stuff, and I’d just try to remake Python in Perl’s image.
I’ve finally grokked Perl references, and I’m reading the second
edition of the Perl Cookbook with real pleasure. Some of the
quirkier passages from the first edition are gone (and Randal Schwartz
seems to be persona non grata in this edition), but that’s
outweighed by the treatment of Perl’s Unicode support (crufty and
gnarly though it may be — the price of backward compatibility) and
the new switch statement. Perl must be the only language older than
10 years where switch is an experimental feature.
Jim has apparently volunteered to become
the Perl expert at his salt mine, for which he deserves equal praise
for foolhardiness and pity. I think that he’ll find enough cool stuff
in Perl to satisfy his C++ roots, what with all the esoterica
available in the dark corners of CPAN
(Acme::Bleach,
anyone? Or how about
Acme::Apache::Werewolf,
by a hardcore Warren Zevon fan?)
I’ll never be a Perl guru, but I do think I can become a competent Perlist.
Posted on Friday, 2005-02-25,
in the comp category.
Jeff: Why is forever. Programming has become a right-brain activity while left-brain work is outsourced.
Link posted on Thursday, 2005-02-24.
