Lessons on democracy learned from Civilization 3

Brad DeLong has an excellent essay on lessons his kids have learned about democracy from playing Civilization 3. Great read, truly from the mouths of babes...

Doh!

Shit, this is what happens when you work your ass off over the weekend - you make mistakes. Well, that is one way to get me to go to bed, I guess.

Have I said recetly how much embedded system programming sucks? Give me a nice big clean general purpose CPU with all the trimmings, thank you.

Looks like I'm going to add another dubious notch to my cap - "Bricked systems: 1". Sigh.

Brother, can you spare a JTAG programmer?

A day in the Country

Ah, there's nothing quite like a day out in the country. Gets all that bullshit out of your head (well at least for a reasonable interval), and the cool mountain air really is refreshing. Of course, coming back to 200+ email messages (that's after my spam filter took care of most of the spam) is still a bummer, but I'll take all the respite I can get.

Looks like Doc's been putting up some neat stuff on the AOTC site, kudos to him. Too bad that other board members (except Mary Lu!) are not putting up stuff, I guess you can lead a horse to water...

Found a new WiFi-related weblog out there via my referer logs too - go check out Cyberfrost.net, looks interesting...

Great Dave Winer quote today

There's the problem with mail lists. People say such harsh things and never want to take them back when their own words make them look stupid. At least on a weblog when you say something brain dead, you can say oops right there for all to see. Been there, still there; as RageBoy likes to say. -- Dave Winer

zRadio on the iPAQ

I'll admit it - Doc piqued my interest when he mentioned the zRadio application for the new Sharp Zaurus. Well, I've been doing a bunch of work with embedded systems lately, and I saw something interesting - A new version of the Familiar distribution for the ARM processor has come out, and this one supports OPIE, a neat embedded environment that has some nice tools already available. There are lots of applications already running on it. One of the nice aspects of this environment is that you can run all the prebuilt Zaurus applications! So, I downloaded zRadio and it is now happily streaming a number of stramcast/icecast stations, including WUNC, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, NC.