The Marina Shores Village site has been removed. I haven’t done enough math yet to even speculate, so I’ll merely point it out.

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The semi-official election results for San Mateo Country have been posted. For the two elections we were watching at blueslugs.com:

In the county, Ira Ruskin (D) [37,877] defeated Steve Poizner (R) [29,833]. This margin is substantially narrower than other state or national elections in San Mateo County. These results need to be added [...]

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There is also apparently questionable telemarketing behaviour associated with the pro-Q side. And jra links to another no-on-Q blog, which describes a reaction to the “real pictures” mailing similar to my own.

(I’m a little puzzled why none of these blogs are popping up on Google yet.)

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The other day, I noted some interesting politics in Redwood City/San Mateo County. The Economist isn’t covering this race, but is covering the U. S. Senate race in Oklahoma, and that the total spending there has been 3.8 M$. So the Poizner–Ruskin state assembly race in California and a Senate race in Oklahoma [...]

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Although the major political news stories surround the U. S. Presidential Election, we’re having an exciting time in Redwood City, with the Poizner–Ruskin race for Assembly and the contest over Measure Q, which would approve the proposed Marina Shores Village along San Francisco Bay. Not being a citizen, I can’t vote. Moreover, I’m probably [...]

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I had built an early version of libxosd for my Solaris SPARC systems a year or two ago, since it provides a very tidy way to have a ubiquitous onscreen clock with a wide variety of window managers. libxosd went, when I was distracted, through a substantial rewrite, culminating in a 2.2.x series release. [...]

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Our trip to Chicago was wonderful and on Tuesday we rushed to the airport trying not to blame each other in front of the kids for why we were late. It turned out that we were able to meet the 45 minute baggage deadline for our flight, although we both promised to do things differently [...]

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Every so often we have a summer so bad all we can do is try to ride it out until things start to change. This has been one of those summers. In addition to the death of my father, three days before the birth of our son, we have also had what we thought [...]

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Muskoka is a vacation region two or three hours’ drive north of Toronto in Canada. I was lucky enough to be able to spend a week or two each summer there, growing up in the late Seventies, at my maternal grandfather’s cottage on Lake Rosseau. My parents now share in a small [...]

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Stephen and Benjamin left on Thursday for Stephen’s family’s cottage in Northern Ontario. They drove to Oakland, flew Jet Blue to JFK and then Buffalo, spent the night in a hotel, and then drove across the border and towards the Artic Circle. Stephen sent a brief email using the Jet Blue hot zone at JFK. [...]

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Based on the construction and openings going on, I suspect Redwood City must have crossed some critical threshold in terms of average income or population. We’ve gone from one Starbucks and one Starbucks counter (at Safeway) to three standalone stores and two counters (one in Target). (I suspect that there’s a law of [...]

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I’m often manipulating over 100 files when I’m making modifications to various software components. Generally, the buffers menu in Vim (X11/Motif) handles this okay, unless all of the files are named with the same letters. In a recent batch of changes, 90 of my files were named “Makefile”, “prototype_com”, or “pkginfo.tmpl”; this results [...]

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(I suppose I glossed over this in the flat tire story.) Here’s a shot of Benjamin inspecting his new younger brother the afternoon of his birth:

We’re sleeping occassionally, in case you’re wondering.

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I figured I should mention that I’m going to make most of my Solaris-specific comments on my blog at blogs.sun.com. We’ll see if I can keep the topics meaningful and interesting on both, without halving my posting rate on each.

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Had a brief moment of suburban excitement: Dina, Nathaniel, and I were on our way to an afternoon appointment when our driver’s side rear tire blew out. On the soon-to-be-five-lanes-wide U.S. 101 South, in East Palo Alto. Busy.

Nathaniel will turn a week old soon, so he wasn’t much going to be much [...]

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It is with great sadness and honor that I announce the death of my father, Richard Lawrence Venezky, on June 11th, 2004. My father was an amazing man who excelled in so many ways and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to not only write updates on his condition but also to receive many [...]

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I use ion as my window manager, but have recently switched my home desktop from a G4 Cube to a PC running Solaris. I’m a regular full-screen VNC user, and getting vncviewer and ion to cooperate is pretty key. Fullscreen mode can be achieved using vncviewer and ion (from blastwave, or build them [...]

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A peculiar quotation from an interview with Red Hat’s Matthew Szulik:

The issue of Intel versus AMD ultimately goes back to the distribution partner; if companies like Hewlett-Packard, for example, can be successful with the AMD parts, then AMD will benefit. Another issue for AMD will be dealing with Darth Vader in Redmond and Jabba the [...]

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I was happy to see that the Ontario Ministry of Education has selected StarOffice as its standard office suite. As someone who grew up a test subject under the Ministry, by learning computing on such systems as

Commodore PET, with Waterloo Structured Basic as an alternate environment, IBM PCs with Waterloo Ports as the network applications [...]

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Dina passed the U. S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Information Systems Security Awareness Online Course. Huzzah.

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We recently uprooted our home office, transplanting it from a bedroom in the front house to the room attached to our garage. With the garage building at the back of the lot, I now have a clear view of the yard. Tonight the sensor lights tripped and I had a good staring exchange [...]

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Here’s an interesting survey: Sun wants to know how secure the default install for Solaris 10 should be. If you listened to the NetTalk on Wednesday, then you might be able to guess that your input here probably means more work for my team and me.

(I suppose I should really split work blogging from [...]

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Stephen’s one of the so-called “rocket scientists” in the Solaris 10 Technical Discussion being offered as a NetTalk tomorrow. (It’s at 1pm PDT.) You can register for the live session (or for details about hearing a replay later).

(You would think folks would rather hear from computer scientists or software engineers or operating systems [...]

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I had an enjoyable half hour assembling a piece of furniture from IKEA, before returning for some late night text composition. It goes much faster with a power screwdriver and a good set of bits. (Also, a 16oz hammer makes tapping in dowels directly satisfying.) But if you want to grab hold [...]

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