I’ve read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

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I’ve been doing some work with Linux lately, a new thing for me, and feel a bit like I’ve been thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Today I updated Python to version 2.7 on an EC2 instance.

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By the time Christmas comes around, our house is usually awash with boxes from Amazon. It gets a bit tricky at that point, because I’m never sure if the box is something I ordered to give to my family, or something someone else sent me as a gift. In the former case, I’ll want to wrap it and put it under the tree. In the latter, a lot of times my wife will wrap it on behalf of the giver so it can still be a surprise Christmas morning. The problem is telling them apart.

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It’s become fairly clear that HP is not webOS’ savior. It’s also unlikely that webOS can come back from the dead for the second time. But it makes me sad, since webOS and its devices hit a sweet spot that no one managed to exploit.

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I’ve always considered batch files as kind of ghetto. Anything too complex devolves into a morass of gotos and labels. But I recently put together some install batch scripts that I was actually pleased with, including a clean mechanism for sharing common code.

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I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that “protecting more than ever before” with a straight face or what.

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I was a bit of a masochist this year. I actually did my federal taxes twice, trying to figure out if there is a cheaper alternative to using TurboTax. But TurboTax, in spite of costing more, ended up being the cheaper option by a long shot.
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I think Visual Studio’s static analysis warning for checking parameters for null before they are used is generally a good idea, but the code to check the parameters can get really tedious.

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I’ve used both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote for several years. While there are lots of extensive comparisons of the applications around, I think the difference between them comes down to just a few broad issues.
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I’ve just spent the past few days migrating a Team Foundation Server source repository to Subversion. It took longer and was more difficult than I expected it to be.

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