Going through the transitions where your parents go from “the people who’s job it is to form you”, to “fellow adults living in this world with you” is tricky. Not everyone goes through it, but my parents and I did, a few years into college. Happily, it went so well that we even progressed to being friends, which I suppose some people never do. My parents came to visit California this weekend. They are homeless right now, because they’ve sold their house, but their new one is not ready to move in to yet. So they came to the cabin, and then down to Redwood City to see my house. We had a good time at the cabin, doing the normal 50% work, 50% play. ...

I was up at Westerly this weekend, and wanted to go for an overnight camping trip while I was there. I decided to hike 4 miles up Noble Canyon to Noble Lake, then sleep under the stars and reverse the whole process Monday morning. I like summer camping trips like that, where you can keep the pack light by ditching the tent. On the drive there, I noted a fair amount of thunderstorm activity. When I got to the trailhead, there was moderate to light thunderstorm activity. The clouds were all up above the top of the canyon, and I’d be hiking in the floor, with plenty of room between me and the storm. I decided to get hiking, and make one final go/no-go decision at 2 miles in. Either it would be a 4 mile day hike, or an overnight as planned. ...

Biology is neat, and is making huge progress towards being able to explain human nature. Check out this article on security mechanisms in bee populations. Perhaps someday we’ll know how to overcome human nature. Will we choose to do so?

It occured to me that if you were trying to remove the Connection header from in the middle of a char * buffer, the absolute fastest way to do it would be to use strstr() to get a pointer to it, then do a byte swap to change the token from “Connection” to “Cneonction”. If you choose to optimize for CPU cycles and not bandwidth, that’s a valid optimization. The question is, who would be motivated to optimize like that? A content provider pays for their bandwidth. If I caught one of my developers pulling a trick like that, I’d walk over to his desk and wack him up side the head with the 2x4 Of Justice. CPU cycles (especially the 20,000 or so it would take to excise the string correcetly) are cheap compared to bandwidth. I suppose, in fairness, I’d have to make a spreadsheet proving my point before I won the right to whack the developer. But my gut instinct is so strong on this, I’d probably at least shoot them with a Nerf gun before I went to do the spreadsheet. ...

Hpaul turned me on to Mulberry when I was bitching and moaning about something stupid Outlook Express did the other day. I decided to give it a try, and I’m delighted. In addition to being much faster than Outlook Express, it also supports server-side address books via IMSP. I set up an IMSP server, which was not as easy as one would like, but not too bad either. I arranged for it to run inside of stunnel, so no passwords in the clear. ...

Last weekend I passed my BCC certification, which means that I’m allowed to charter boats up to 25 feet from anywhere in the Bay Area (and around the world, too). On Thursday, I went out on my first solo trip. Our crew worked together well, and we had a good mix of just relaxing sailing, splashing through waves, and practicing. The only problem is that the ladies didn’t get as much time on the tiller as they probably deserved. But it’s difficult to make it fair when people steadfastly claim they are “fine” and don’t want to get involved. ...

Heard at work: “I don’t listen to NPR, they are too conservative. They are National Pentagon Radio.” And in reply: “Or National Pentagram Radio, depending on your point of view.” Perhaps this wide range of viewpoints is why we can never make any progress in American politics.

Paolo makes a great observation about how accurate ad profiling can get when the advertiser is reading your weblog.

I enjoyed great music tonight at the Little Fox. The first set was Four Shillings Short, second set: Broceliande, third set: all 6 of them together. The venue was great, the bands were fun, the sound mix was awesome (that’s a big deal when the music itself is intrinsically acoustic), and the people I went with were fun. I even got up and danced a waltz at the end, and the band seemed to appreciate it. ...

I just stumbled across The String Cheese Incident via Hooping. It’s cool music. It makes me want to sit on a lawn with people I like talking to and enjoy a beer. Alas, the show coming up in the Bay Area is at the Warfield, which is not an outdoor venue.