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{ Author Archives } Simon

Happy Birthday to me, I am forty three. I have four sweet children And a wife who loves me.

2002 06 19 My Life and Opinions Comments (0)

Dang. Matthew Thomas has beaten me to it, and posted a blog saying exactly what I was going to say about Mozillazine’s comments on CNET’s review of Netscape’s newly pre-released browser. He even links to the same article by Joel God-comes-to-me-for-advice-on-software Spolsky that I was going to link to. So I will have to either […]

2002 05 26 General Comments (0)

Tonight we experienced our first California earthquake. It was magnitude 5.2 on the Richter scale, which is classified as “moderate”; the amount of energy released is equivalent to a 32 kiloton explosion, which seems like a lot to me, but is only about one thousandth as powerful as the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. It’s […]

2002 05 14 General Comments (0)

I’m sorry that I returned Antoine de Saint-Exupery’sThe Wisdom of the Sands to the library without having read much of it. I found it difficult to get into, I don’t know whether because of something in the book itself or because of defects in the translation. Chiefly though, it isn’t really a book to take […]

2002 05 10 Books Comments (0)

Reading Netscape Time by Jim Clark, I was struck by the following passage After all, it’s monkish work to write line after line of instructions in arcane computer languages day after day, month after month. The task must be something like translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to English (or rather, the other way […]

2002 05 06 My Life and Opinions Comments (0)

I am having an ambivalent reaction to fixing a bug that has been resisting me for the last nine months. Of course it’s immensely satisfying to have a result from the many hours that I’ve spent in the debugger chasing it down. Debugging is like a scientific research product (not that I’ve ever done one […]

2002 05 02 Mozilla Comments (0)

I don’t know if I am more relieved or frightened to discover that astronomers have even less clue than software engineers on how to describe their subject to beginners. I borrowed The Moden Amateur Astronomer, ed. Patrick Moore, from the library. It’s one of a series with the general title Practical Astronomy, and according to […]

2002 04 29 General Comments (0)

I have now completely redone the blog template and CSS, and although it frightened me at first after I republished by claiming to be unable to access the site, things now seem to be working OK, more or less. The layout problems I was experiencing were largely due to incompatible expectations by the template and […]

2002 04 26 Bloggery Comments (0)

OK, what’s going on here? In my naïveté I understood that “blogging tools” were supposed to make web publishing easier. I have just spent far longer in a cycle of editing, publishing, re-editing and re-publishing the previous entry than it would have taken me to write the whole bloody thing out in HTML source in […]

2002 04 25 Bloggery Comments (0)

It was interesting to discover that Mozilla has had a severe Bidi bug in print headers just about for ever. Print headers didn’t exist when we designed Bidi; we never noticed the bug when they sneaked in a few months before we started checking code in to the tree; and nobody has ever noticed it […]

2002 04 25 Bloggery Comments (0)

The latest edition of the usually excellent LangaList recommends me to go to ContentAudit for a good laugh, but as I enter the site my (admittely paranoid) alarm triggers are going off one after the other. Why does the site want my email address? Why does it redirect me to a page saying “Attention Netscape […]

2002 04 16 General Comments (0)

Everyone else seems to be doing it, so why not me? The title, if you were wondering, is “על הא ודא”, which is Aramaic for “On This And That”.

2002 04 14 Bloggery Comments (0)