Nerds @ palmdrive

Palmdrive

This is a personal website. Don't ask too much, you won't get too much. This website is intended to become usefull, or maybe just cool one day. Unfortunately (for the website) I got twins a few years ago and am therefore busy with other more impatient stuff. Don't get me wrong, babies are a blessing. It's just that they require a little attention from time to time and have to share my free time with the various websites I am working on.

In terms of hosting, I went for the cheapest option: My garage. My DSL line is proudly offering you a 1MB upload capability. So yes, it is a bit slow, and a slashdotting will just kill it off.

On the left, you see the main menu. You can click on the various items.

  • Guestbook. Who doesn't know what a guestbook is? You can write feedback there.
  • Tools. Two tools as of today:
    • Units: Want to convert temperature, length, area, volume or mass between metric and us/imperial systems? This page has been specifically designed for you.
    • Calendar: Allow you to put alerts on a specified day and receive notifications two and one week before, the day before and the due day.
  • Video. As of today, a couple of tests of MPEG encoders (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4).
  • Shopping. A collection of my best and worst shopping experience in the SF Bay Area.
  • User-Agent. A small piece of code provided for free, to detect Browser and OS out of a User-Agent String.
  • Garbage. All the stuff I didn't know where to put. Links, mostly. And all the old pages in this site that are most likely not going to be maintained anytime soon and is not directly relevant to anything I want to do with this site.
  • Visits. This free counter is provided by Web Counter
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but
it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to
organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The
manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and
I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they
could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months,
three more than the schedule allowed.
The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they
could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating;
it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule.
Futhermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling
their thumbs for ten months.
To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control
program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time,
but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and
it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual
integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would
estimate that it added a year to debugging time.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
What's new?
01-Feb-06: One more video test!
29-Jan-06: Brand new design (Hope you like it)
07-Jul-04: Calendar Alerts
29-May-04: User Registration & stuff
29-May-04: User-Agent
29-May-04: Calendar
15-Mar-04: Units(Gas mileage)
What's next?
A currency converter, on the same model as the units.
Some more MPEG-2 encoders, some more movies tested