Tech

I came across this site while looking for card tables. It made me laugh out loud.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a new side project that my wife, brother and sister and I came up with, called ShelfCentered.com. I haven’t posted about ShelfCentered.com as of yet, because honestly I suspect it might be a good enough idea to really become something good, and I want to protect us from competitors! For example, there are a couple of shareware programs out there already that do what we’re planning, and they’ve created some limited buzz, but so far no one has thought to put the idea online in a nice web site.

My friend and former coworker, Robert Miner, has written an article about MathML in the latest issue of Notices of the American Mathematics Society, which you can read online [pdf]. MathML is a standard XML representation of math notation and semantics, and has been adopted steadily ever since Robert co-created it in 1998. When I worked at Design Science with Robert, MathML was becoming a major focus for the company.

I’m blogging this from my new Clié TH-55. It has wireless networking and a full web browser, plus email. I’m still looking fo a free instant messaging client.

I’m blogging this from a Starbucks in Hollywood, near the big shopping center called Hollywood & Highland. Alison is out with a friend nearby, so I decided to try out the Starbucks hotspot system. Works pretty well, but only for 24 hours – next time I visit a Starbucks I’ll have to pay $6 for an hour, then 10 cents a minute afterwards.

I’ve made two changes to my video game family. First, I bought a GameCube and a couple games (Zelda, Viewtiful Joe). Also, a friend with a vinyl cutter made a wood-grain applique for my Xbox. Click to see the new family!

Bob Frankston, co-creator of the original spreadsheet VisiCalc, has recently written down a postmortem, 25 years later!

Not that you care, but I’m going to merge in all my work content into a category, and see how it coexists with my main category.

Boy, Bounceweb threw us for a loop. Our site went down so hard that when it came back up, various files and directories were gone! They had to restore from backups, and even so there was a lot of work to do.

So langmead.info seems relatively stable at the moment. As of now I have tried three hosting companies. This latest one strikes a good balance between price and features. They are having trouble installing PHPlib, which is needed for IMP, which is a web-based email client Alison wants. I might consider moving if they never get around to that (or upgrading to PHP 4.1, which would be just as good). The idea here is that we have a home for family pictures, personal web sites (like this blog) and email.