Archive for May, 2008

SWEBOK indeed

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I suppose it’s entirely indicative of the software industry, but I was still saddened when I noticed that the embedded ‘title’ field of the PDF version of the IEEE Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, is “Microsoft Word - Title_page 2004.rtf”.
The meta-data shows that the file was created using version FIVE of adobe’s [...]

This is what we can do

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

The folks over at Bad Astronomy really put it best, “Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.”

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling [...]

Avalon Hill’s Advanced Civilization Is Not Quite Dead

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

It turns out there are others who are fans of the sadly out-of-print Avalon Hill title Advanced Civilization. A group calling themselves Civilization: The Expansion Project have been working on updated rules and an expanded map board to support 16 player play! Awesome.
If only it were possible to get new prints of the [...]

Great Southern California ShakeOut

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

The Great Southern California ShakeOut
November 12–16, 2008
The Great Southern California ShakeOut is a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history, organized to inspire Southern Californians to get ready for big earthquakes, and to prevent disasters from becoming catastrophes.

25-Year-Old Bug Fixed in BSD

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Marc Balmer has a wonderful writeup of a bug in the BSD directory handling code that laid dormant for 25 years. The only tragic thing was that Samba programmers encountered and worked around the bug several years ago and somehow the message never got back to the BSD folks.

The other day, I got an [...]