Massive

Pepper and Wine

Why do waiters at restaurants ask if you want ground pepper on your food before you have had a single bite? Didn't the chef put any spices in the food or check the food before it was served?

An even more stupid thing; how come when you order a bottle of wine the waiter asks you to taste the wine? It's not like you be will allowed to order something else if you don't like it ("I don't like the fruitiness of this Pino Grigio, can I please have a drier one?"). The reason is that the wine might for some reason be off. But why would I like to ruin an expensive meal by having a sip of a potentially disgusting (say corked) wine? The solution is simple. Ask the waiter to try the wine to protect yourself from any unpleasant surprises!

Scheduling Cygwin tasks in Windows

If you are one of the unfortunate souls that have ever tried to use cron in Cygwin on Windows, I can understand your pain. Getting cron to work in Windows is like rocket science plus plus - take off towards to the ISS space station while performing brain surgery, finding positive things to say about Hatfield, proving that P=NP, and all at the same time.

Personally, I have given up. This leaves me with two choices; writing my own cron (shouldn't be very hard) or use the Windows Scheduler. But how do you use the Windows Scheduler to run cygwin bash scripts? I just found this tip and it works perfectly!

Programming DNA

This is a great presentation on engineering biology: