Tim Danner

del.icio.us is a great source of funny stuff, like these E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone.

Reading Raymond Chen today, you get the impression that the Windows API is just one big minefield where if you take anything at face value, your program will be full of bugs and holes. Is there any way out of this mess? Or will it always be the case that unlimited backwards compatibility leads to an unlimited number of gotchas in the API? It seems like the only hope is to use the newest Microsoft-written API wrapper available and pray that CRegKey or Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey understands that just because REG_SZ implies that the string will be null-terminated doesn’t mean that it actually will be.

Today, we have pictures of monkeys, Hummer cologne, and a funny picture of a sign on a gas pump (via Boing Boing, Autoblog, and Gordon Weakliem).

A few months ago I linked to a Flash animation of some of the stuff in the Book of Revelation. Lore “Brunching Shuttlecocks” Sjoberg has written a new set of ratings about the various orders of angels, as seen in the Book. Part I, concerning the more exotic types with extra wings and so on, and Part II, concerning the angels with a somewhat more mundane appearance.

“The Morning News” this… um, morning, featured a collection of pairs of photos of rooms. The first photo in each pair shows a room in its “natural” state. (I put quotes around “natural” because the rooms all look to me a bit too sparse to be real, though the photographer claims in the brief interview that they are all actual rooms he found in Berlin.) For the companion photo, the artist has taken all the stuff in the room and made it into a nice, neat stack in the center of the room. It’s a cool effect! I think I’m going to try it at home.

Houston is currently experiencing a freak spell of nice weather. Temperatures are in the low 70s in the evenings, and the humidity is quite moderate. Of course, no weather pattern can change the fact that Houston is located around 30° N latitude, so the sun still beats down during the afternoon.

But even so, record lows this year mean that this is a rare August when outdoor theater is feasible in Houston. This works out perfectly for the Houston Shakespeare Festival’s 30th anniversary. Last night we saw the Taming of the Shrew, re-set in the Wild Wild West, complete with the jingle from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It was hilarious. I would say “highly recommended,” but that was closing night.

Maybe if the Olympic security detail in Athens spent more time investigating actual threats and less time policing the labels on bottled water, they would have noticed the “giant wooden horse that had been wheeled to within meters of the Olympic stadium.”

Note: in case you were confused about what was satire and what was actually happening, the “giant wooden horse” part was a joke, but the “required to wear their T-shirts inside out” part is the real deal.

Yesterday we brought home a kitten. We named her Kiwi because she is small and furry. We’re getting along quite well, despite what this picture implies.

“Both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal:” The Apple Product Cycle (via Stanton).

An awesome music video Flash thing for an acoustic recording of Radiohead’s Creep and the Fool’s World Map, which should not be relied upon for navigation (via Boing Boing).

Too late for The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms: The First Term, in His Own Special Words, the president let fly with another probably-not-what-he-meant-to-say: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” (via The Daily Kos)

Paul Graham recently posted an essay describing the qualities of a class of programmers he calls “great hackers.” Eric Sink wrote a response about why such great hackers might not make such great employees. Both essays are worth reading for software types.

One funny coincidence—as an example of an important but uninteresting task at SourceGear, Eric says he is procrastinating on “some enhancements to our online store website.” I wonder if Eric is aware that Paul made his name as the architect of Viaweb? Yahoo acquired Viaweb in 1998 and turned it into store.yahoo.com. Incidentally, Viaweb may most successful Lisp application ever - it certainly has more users today than Emacs.

Will Ferrell as the president in a funny, over-the-top SNL-style, anti-Bush ad (via Miguel de Icaza).

On a more serious political note, the much-linked Electoral Vote Predictor is probably a better way to track the changes in the political fortunes of Bush and Kerry than national polls. The Electoral College Graph shows (some) important political events to help you guess at what might have contributed to poll swings.