Conway's Law

Software is doomed to reflect structure of the organization that produces it.

When was the last time you changed your mind?

I realized during my honeymoon that I actually like caper berries, something that I have avoided for the last 12 years.

Decent size waves

Life, but how to live it?

A few months ago I wanted to write a script that would run top in batch-mode every minute or so to write stats about a server to a log file. The script worked fine when I tested it on the command line, but when run from cron it truncated all lines at 80 characters. This meant that some important information was lost and then I gave up and moved on to something else. After recent events at work I again decided that this script would be useful. Again as I was stumped about the truncating problem until I got help on the bbs.linux.se forums. The solution is to set the COLUMNS environment variable for the top call, e.g

COLUMNS=150 top -bc -n 1 | grep bla >> $LOG_FILE

Apart from finally fixing the truncating problem one highlight this week was to finally find some video footage of Norway's finest, the classic hardcore band Life! But how to live it?. Watching this video it almost feels like Oslo is a suburb of Washington DC:


(Recorded 1991 in Stavanger)

Cooking with sound

Wow

BMX Bandits

One cool thing about the 80s were the films based on a cool new sport or dance. Films like Breakdance the Movie, Beat Streat, and of course BMX Bandits. I never knew until this morning that BMX Bandits was actually filmed in Manly. In the first scene you can see the cool guys biking from Shelly beach to Manly beach along the road I run almost every morning.



One extra little piece of trivia is that when Nicole Kidman got married to her Country and Western singing husband a few years ago, they got married about 100 meters from this path up in the local castle like building (can't remember what it's called).

This morning while running up to the head land by Shelly beach we saw big whales playing a few hundred meters out in the big surf. Surely beats the one-legged pigeons I used to have to jump over when running in Clapham...

Look ma, no socks!

This looks interesting, but I haven't had time to read it yet.

World's biggest snake in captivity?

I'm now in Manly, Sydney, Australia. What a wonderful place, I haven't worn socks since I got off the plane!