Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

Today’s Virginia Glee Club history moment is a look at the Concert on the Lawn. The Glee Club’s entry in the collegiate tradition of “step singing,” the Concert on the Lawn was inaugurated in 1936 as a community sing with an announcement in College Topics, featuring this trenchant quotation from conductor Harry Rogers Pratt: Ability [...]

Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit – Enterprise Integration Patterns Operations research is everywhere, or how the decoupling of order processing from order fulfillment allows Starbucks to maximize coffee throughput. (tags: architecture software coffee) Scripting News: What’s the point of the magic trackpad? Dave Winer reads the tea leaves in the Magic Trackpad announcement and [...]

Wynton Marsalis’s tribute to Louis Armstrong : The New Yorker The article, about a recording session with Marsalis’s band and a visiting classical pianist, is less about Marsalis’s tribute than about the mechanics of recording a band live in the studio. Nice vignette. (tags: music) Reviving Caslon (I love typography) Brilliant analysis of what makes [...]

We call this “unclogging the pipes.” I have probably 20 mixes in various partial states of repair, and it’s high time I start publishing them so that I can make room for the real stuff. So here are two—maybe, dare I hope, my last two—80s mixes. As always, the first one is the stuff I’m [...]

Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown (WIRED) Informative takedown of the world’s most notable dysfunctional marriage, Apple and AT&T. (tags: apple iphone att mobile) Computer History Museum | MacPaint and QuickDraw source code The original MacPaint source code is available for download. Five files, 67.8K of code. Nice. (tags: apple mac software macintosh)

Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper paywalls – Boing Boing Nice bit on the unplanned network effect: why bother interviewing in a Murdoch paper since the piece will have no life online? (tags: newspapers) Deadly combo: zero day application vulnerability + OS vulnerability = attacker win Just because your application [...]

My father-in-law died late on Wednesday night. He was 90 and lived every one of those years with passion. I remember meeting him for the first time 15 years ago, and being struck initially by his age but also by his energy and drive. The man could charm anyone: I remember him deep in conversation [...]

John Oliver, founding director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, was on a great roundtable on WAMC about the chorus, memorization, Michael Tilson Thomas, his garden, and a bunch of other topics. It makes me want to head off to Tanglewood right now. In other news, I am heading to Tanglewood. Tomorrow, actually, to sing the [...]

What Have We Learned? – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com There has to be cold comfort in looking at this graph and saying you were right. (tags: economy)

I got interviewed last week for Risky Business, a podcast about application security from Australia. Had a great time chatting with Patrick Gray about security during the application development lifecycle. You can download the episode at their site or listen to it here:

I suppose it was inevitable. My last MacBook Pro was Apple’s first, the 1.83 GHz 15″ model that was the first to bear the name back in 2006. That was one in a series of upgrades that saw me getting a new machine every few years, thanks to a series of good product launches by [...]

Presbyterian Leaders OK Gay Clergy, Reject Gay Marriage I guess that means I’m half proud of the denomination in which I grew up. (tags: presbyterians gaymarriage)

New England software experts put UI/UX specialists on a pedestal – Mass High Tech Business News Interviews with a selection of user experience specialists highlight some of the changes in the market for user centered design. (tags: productmanagement userexperience)

This weekend as a bunch of Tanglewood Festival Chorus members and I recouped our strength after the July 4 concert, we got to talking. One of the women was a Wellesley College alum from the mid-1980s who, upon learning that my friend and I were both from UVA, said, “I remember UVA, especially the Glee [...]