Eightface

The blog has moved

This is mostly to catch any stragglers that might still be subscribed to eightface somewhere. I’ve moved the blog over to davekellam.com. There’s no email subscription yet, but if you were one of the few subscriber to that and are still interested, drop me an email.

On Smoak as the Jays’ next slugger

From an article on Justin Smoak’s transformation into Jays’ next-gen Jose Bautista: His final at-bat of the series against Yankees’ David Robertson was a minor-note master class. To hear Robertson – one of the most cunning relievers in baseball – tell it, he ran out of ideas after eight pitches. Smoak put the ninth one over the centre-field wall. It was a grand slam and the game winner. When…

Apparently, cyclists riding fixed-gear bicycles confuse Google’s self-driving cars. The car got to the stop line a fraction of a second before I did, so it had the [right of way]. I did a track-stand and waited for it to continue on through. It apparently detected my presence … and stayed stationary for several seconds. it finally began to proceed, but as it did, I rolled forward an inch while…

A fun bug story about crashes that only happened on Wednesdays: After several weeks of frustration, where entire days devoted to experimentation had produced no results, I ended up basically adding printf statements to every single line between receiving the event from the serial port and writing it in the database… and in the process, as I revisited every line of that code, a sinking realization…

A Toast to Your Health Toasting, or ‘drinking healths,’ was a longstanding tradition in English culture. The act of honoring another and drinking to their health was a way for English drinkers to combine a display of respect with the consumption of alcohol – certainly a win-win situation for those who favored the practice. The act itself, while popular among the English, didn’t always gain favor…

I went to the first HybridConf in Cardiff two years ago, and will definitely in Dublin for the third and final iteration this year (couldn’t make it last year due to family commitments). The first one was awesome; the speakers were great, the events were awesome, and I met a lot of incredible people. If you need convincing, here’s an excerpt from the convince your boss guide (relevant even if…

Daniel Norris, a rookie pitcher with the Toronto Blue Jays, lives in a van during the off season.

This is where Norris has chosen to live while he tries to win a job in the Blue Jays’ rotation: in a broken-down van parked under the blue fluorescent lights of a Wal-Mart in the Florida suburbs. There, every morning, is one of baseball’s top-ranked prospects, doing pull-ups and resistance exercises…

Lou Montulli, a former engineer with Netscape, writes about the origins of the blink tag. It seems that it was a lament for the lack of features in text-based browsers.

Back in 1994 I was a founding engineer at Netscape, prior to that I had written the Lynx browser, which predated all of the other popular browsers at that time. Lynx had been and still is a text only browser and is commonly used…

The Wire in HD

David Simon wrote a piece about The Wire’s conversion to high-definition and a 16:9 aspect ratio. I remember watching the series while it was airing and reading about the intentional preservation of the 4:3 ratio. I just figured we’d never see a widescreen release.

At the last, I’m satisfied what while this new version of The Wire is not, in some specific ways, the film we first made, it has…

Gangnam Style broke YouTube

PSY’s Gangnam Style video broke YouTube’s view-counter:

We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. “Gangnam Style” has been viewed so many times we have to upgrade!

Hover over the counter in PSY’s video to see a little math magic and stay tuned for bigger and bigger numbers on YouTube.

Earlier this year, Google’s Gmail service fixed itself before the engineers did. From the post-mortem blog post:

Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new…

Apparently, most of the chickens that we eat today are derived from the winners of A&P’s 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow contest. They worked with the USDA to increase the growth of the poultry industry.

It was an alliance with a specific goal: The “development of superior meat-type chickens.” The winning chicken would have broader-breasts, bigger drumsticks, plumper thighs, and above all, more white…

I recently heard about Lou Reed’s take on Kanye West’s Yeezus album and I’ve gone back to the album with a renewed sense of interest. Worth reading and re-listening to the album, if you haven’t already.

He knows about all kinds of music and popular culture. The guy has a real wide palette to play with. That’s all over Yeezus. There are moments of supreme beauty and greatness on this record, and…

The video game tie-in for E.T. was an epic failure. Atari sent hundreds of thousands of unsold copies to the dump. Joshua Wheeler reports on their excavation in The Glitch in the Video-Game Graveyard

In Alamogordo, New Mexico, a documentary crew has descended on my hometown to dig up our old dump in hopes of resurrecting hundreds of thousands of copies of E.T. the Extraterrestrial video-game…