Skuunk Works

jPod is the latest Douglas Coupland novel about programmers since Microserfs . It centers around a group of mildly autistic programmers in a video game company in Vancouver who all sit in the same area of the company because their last names begin with the letter "J" and in particular the lead character's life, Ethan Jarlewski. While there are some interesting and thoughtful moments in the book, it unfortunately comes nowhere near the calibre of Microserfs due to the following reasons. 1) Wildly outrageous plot lines: I won't go into too much detail about these, but suffice to say where Microserfs was at least plausible (if slightly unrealistic), Coupland relies on ridiculous events to keep the story going in this case. Not only that, the characters are able to navigate these plot points virtually unscathed and unscarred (where as in real life these kind of things would require months of therapy). 2) Too many non-story devices: There is one part of the book where th...

Hi All, I just got myself a new domain ( http://www.skuunk.com ). The reason is that Blogspot.com is offering cheap domain via GoDaddy.com and I thought after having this nickname for nigh on 10 years it was time to buy the domain before someone else did (also I read somewhere that using blogspot.com in your domain is the equivalent of an aol.com or hotmail.com email address...shudder...). Of course I forgot that I would have to re-register my blog everywhere (which is taking ages) not to mention set up all my stats stuff again. *sigh*. It's a blogger's life... In any case, don't forget to bookmark the new address and to vote me up on Technorati !

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx Yay, the "geniuses" (genii?) at Microsoft are finally doing something right! IE8 will now render in standards mode by default (and if you want to make it run on IE7 mode you have to put in some meta tag thingy). If by standards mode they mean it will render pages like Firefox then I am happy. Now all they have to do is put some Windows update code out there which will permanently destroy all copies of IE6 so no one will even think of using it anymore. In all reality and sadness, I know we should be encouraging everyone to use Firefox, but unfortunately most people just use their system's default browser... I am not even really happy about Safari for that matter...

Are you old enough to remember when the Internet when it seemed to have a finite amount of information? Do remember the Darwin Awards? Can you remember the last time you actually saw an original joke online or in your inbox? If so, then maybe you sometimes have a hankering for old days when rather than searching for things on the Net, you would just browse around just click on random things and occasionally come across sites like " The End of the Internet ". These were the days when you had directories, not search engines, and you just had to take what you could get. In any case, recently a couple of new(ish) sites like StumbleUpon , Digg and Reddit have brought the browsing back to the browser. These are sites on which other people post stories of interest and rather than searching for interesting content, the user simply browses through. Stories are ranked by other users and secret sauce algorithms are in place to try and keep out spammers and general exhibitionists so th...

http://leakedtech.blogspot.com/2008/03/internet-explorer-8-beta-1-sneak-peak.html So it looks like IE 8 Beta 1 is out. Even using VM with Parallels I am not prepared to try it out for myself. It doesn't look like there are an JS changes but mainly CSS ones. Now if they could just hurry up and kill IE6 then that would make my life much easier...