http://www.red-mercury.com/blog Scott Corley's blog about what's going on in and out of the labs Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:23:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The following question was sent in by Robert from Arlington Heights, IL: Hey Scott: What is your opinion on DLP TVs and 1080p Hi Def, if you have one? I know that the only way to get 1080p today is via HD-DVD or BlueRay, as nobody is currently broadcasting at that ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/consuming-electronics/should-i-buy-that-new-hd-tv/ This should be categorized as "Stating the Obvious." At Costco today, I was struck by two things. The first was how cheap the huge, flat-panel HD TVs have become (a gigantic Mitsubishi LCD was $2000). The second was how horrible the picture quality was. The incumbent video delivery industries are focused on ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/eclectic-tech/the-future-triumph-of-video-over-ip/ This is the second in a series of draft chapters from the forthcoming book "Software Development is Sometimes Sorta Like... - 25 Things Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Your Next Software Project". This book does not yet have a publisher and so is not yet available for pre-order. Software Development ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/software-development-is-sometimes-sorta-like/software-development-is-sometimes-sorta-like-driving-to-the-airport/ This is the first in a series. Software development is software development, it has its own unique challenges and it is not exactly like building a house or any of the other things that I will be comparing it to. But there are analogies that can be drawn, and I ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/software-development-is-sometimes-sorta-like/software-development-is-sometimes-sorta-like-building-a-house/ I don't know the secret to accurate software schedule estimation, but I have a pretty good technique that is simple enough for anybody to do. With this technique, you will be able to estimate your software project schedules with the same accuracy as major software development houses, large corporations, and ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/eclectic-tech/software-schedule-estimation-via-bullet-points/ I couldn't sleep, so I broke out my laptop to work on some code that is rattling around in my brain. I had to cold boot Windows XP, since I had shut it completely down earlier to install some Windows updates. It's dark, it's quiet, the black Windows XP loading screen ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/eclectic-tech/the-true-meaning-of-windows-xp/ On occassion, I will run a perl script and be shocked when I get an "Out of memory!" error back from perl. The shock is always a result of the fact that I'm doing something relatively benign, running a small script that generates some data but certainly not enough to ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/eclectic-tech/perl-out-of-memory-with-solution/ City Lights, a 1931 Charlie Chaplin silent film, is pretty boring. Some of the visual and slapstick gags are amusing, but they are drawn out way past the funny point. By this point in Chaplain's career, he was focusing more on character development, and though you get to know the ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/movie-reviews/city-lights/ Yesterday, the Chicago City Council passed the so-called "Big Box" wage law by a vote of 35 to 14, enough votes to prevent a veto by Mayor Richard Daley. The law requires that employees at large retailers be paid a minimum of $9.25 an hour, with an additional $1.50 per ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/economics/big-box-economics-my-plan-to-milk-wal-mart/ Proposal for Local Commit in Subversion I propose a "local commit", such as "svn commit --local". Performing a local commit would save the current modified version in the local .svn directory, along with a local revision number, without needing to connect to the repository. I could do this as many times ... http://www.red-mercury.com/blog/eclectic-tech/proposal-for-local-commit-in-subversion/