I just sent out the following press release.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle will perform a staged reading of Circe, chapter 15 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on Saturday, June 13th, 2009, 1:30-4pm at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Donations towards costs of posters and props are welcome.

It is late on the night of June 16th, 1904, and Leopold Bloom has followed Stephen Dedalus into Dublin’s red-light district. Bloom has a paternal concern for Stephen’s welfare and knows that Stephen is now very drunk. In the Circe chapter of Homer’s Odyssey, the witch-goddess Circe transforms Odysseus’ crew into swine. In Joyce’s version, Bloom will have hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry encounters with the denizens …continue.

Emma turned 50 today. She was a mere (late) thirty-something when I met her.

We had dinner at The Georgian in the classic Fairmont Olympic hotel. Until a few years ago, it was the Four Seasons. The Georgian is in an old-fashioned dining room with soaring ceilings that mutes the con­ver­sa­tion. The waiters were attentive and made us feel welcome.

The food is not out­ra­geous­ly ex­pen­sive—we both chose to have the prix fixe dinner at $49. I had the wine for an additional $20. The pre­sen­ta­tion was superb and we both enjoyed the food. An asparagus salad, followed by chicken wrapped in apple-smoked bacon, and the black-and-white soufflé. Scallops were an al­ter­na­tive to the …continue.

I mentioned last month that we were re­fi­nanc­ing our house. We signed the escrow papers today. Aside from the snafu over which Eastside Starbucks to meet in, it went without a hitch.

The new mortgage kicks in on June 1st.

In the late 90s when I worked on the classic Active Server Pages dev team, I tried to convince one of the Program Managers that we should make regular updates to browscap.ini, the file that described browser ca­pa­bil­i­ties. He wanted no part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn via Hanselmin­utes that Microsoft has stepped up to its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and is now shipping the Mobile Device Browser File on CodePlex. Over 400 mobile devices are defined, with 67 distinct ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

The Hanselmin­utes podcast is an in­ter­est­ing discussion of the Mobile Web and designing a different experience for mobile browsers. There’s more to it than the small screen. You want to think about …continue.

A few decades hence, Britain has devolved into balkanized ministates. A Trotskyite, space-loving mercenary in­ad­ver­tent­ly awakens an AI and sparks the revolution. The plot is un­sum­ma­riz­able, but it’s en­ter­tain­ing and complex, mixing action, political theory, cyberpunk, and romance.

Scrum and Agile revolve around sprints. At my previous employer, I spent two years working in one-week sprints. At my current job, I’ve spent another two years working in four-week sprints.

Each has their own rhythm. We ran the one-week sprint from Wednesday to the following Tuesday. Wednesday morning, we’d demo the previous week’s work and we’d plan, drawing up a series of task cards, measured in hours. With a one-week horizon, you couldn’t go very far off track. You can’t get a huge amount done in a week either. You need to have a bigger picture in mind that transcends several weeks. We released every couple of months.

On the first Monday of …continue.

I spent much of today playing around with the brand-new Jaunty/9.04 release of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Eee 1000H netbook. Previously I had run the Hardy/8.04 version of Ubuntu Eee on this system. I had never bothered to update to Intrepid/8.10, but now that UNR is fully supported by Canonical, I thought it was time to try it out.

I downloaded the UNR image last night onto my Mac, and trans­ferred the image to a 1GB USB stick this morning. (The Mac in­struc­tions required a little tweaking.)

I spent some time running the Live Image first, before clean installing. Everything worked seamlessly except the microphone. WiFi worked, the webcam worked, sound playback …continue.

Python has long had a string in­ter­po­la­tion operator, %.

Python 2.6 and 3.0 introduced a new, richer set of string formatting operations. See PEP 3101 for the rationale.

One trick that I liked with the old way of formatting was to put the locals() dictionary or self.__dict__ on the right-hand side

>>> def stuff(a, b):
...  c = a+b; d = a-b
...  return "%(a)s, %(b)s, %(c)s, %(d)s" % locals()
...
>>> stuff(3, 17)
'3, 17, 20, -14'

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do the equivalent with string.format: use the ** syntax to unpack the dict into kwargs.

>>> class Person(object):
...  def __init__(self, name, age):
...   

Many of the screen­shots that show up on my blog were captured with ImageWell, a little Mac app with resizing, uploading, and rudi­men­ta­ry image editing func­tion­al­i­ty. It used to be freeware. Now it costs $20 after the trial period runs out.

In­stantShot! is a menu bar app that does a good job of taking screen­shots, but that’s all it does.

ChocoFlop, which I’ve only just discovered, seems like the best of the free image editors for the Mac. The rest are pretty bad. Nothing as good as Paint.NET on Windows.

GIMP on OS X has finally become more or less usable, but that’s heavy­weight.

I took today off and headed north to the Skagit Valley with Emma and Lyndol to see the tulips. It was a glorious spring day, sunny, not too warm, a light breeze. The tulip fields were busy for a weekday; they’re completely overrun at the weekends.

We wandered around Tulip Town for an hour, had lunch in La Conner, and headed back to Seattle via Camano Island.

We had intended to take Chuckanut Drive up to Fairhaven, but Emma wasn’t feeling well. Some other time. Chuckanut Drive is pretty year round; the tulips are good only for another couple of weeks.

More photos at Flickr.