clanMcGraw.com

Amazing. This is the 2000th post on clanMcGraw.com. You’ll also notice that with this milestone comes a new look.

*If* you’re keeping track, this is the 5th ‘re-design’ of the site. Originally it was a link page on Mindspring, which evolved to a family page once Brandon and Caleb came along. In fact, if you look closely at the Internet Wayback machine site from May 2002, you’ll see a link for ‘God, My Boys, and Me.’ That blogger tool hosted what would eventually become clanMcGraw.com.

Iteration 3 of clanMcGraw.com started using Movable Type as the blog engine, and took us away from hand-coded HTML, although I do still do some of that, even today. It’s just good to know how to do that kind of thing. Version 3 had a rocky start on a hosting service known as Cyberwings, as it disappeared about 2 weeks after I’d started hosting on it. Those posts are gone for good. Also, after switching to a new host, my 2nd post was a sad one. It was when my Grandfather passed away. Just 2 months later, I’d be blogging about the loss of my Father-In-Law, Jim.

Iteration 4 of clanMcGraw.com abandoned Movable Type for WordPress. I chose the theme that it used, because it was so similar to my old high school colors. I also liked it because fonts just seemed to have the right look and feel.

So here we are today, on Version 5. Still on WordPress, but with a different theme, necessitated by a back-end upgrade. The back-end upgrade will hopefully make the Facebook / Blog integration much tighter. These days, that’s where a lot of people do their interaction with others. I still like the idea of posting all my original content here, but don’t want to have to post to multiple places to accomplish that. I’m also not really thrilled with the colors or fonts, but I’ll be playing with the style sheets to change that. But the picture feature on top is pretty cool. I thought it would be neat to throw an old Christmas picture of the boys up there for now.

I also took the occasion to clean up my blogroll, and add some new entries. Hope you take a few minutes to poke around. Please let me know if something just doesn’t look right!

And thanks to all of you who visit clanMcGraw.com.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Actually, I think it’s spot-on, especially this part about Perl:

1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

(HT: Oracle_Ace, via Twitter).

Engadget summarizes it perfectly:

Advertisers have finally picked up on what we’ve known all along: nerds are the modern day rock stars.

Hi. I’m Brian, and I’m a Twitter addict.

(HT: Neal Boortz – or @Talkmaster for you fellow Tweeters)

We’re back in Birmingham, from our family vacation. For those of you who weren’t in the know, we spent the week in Orlando at Disney. I put a geek spin on it by trying to update Twitter (and Facebook) as often as possible, with a few pictures thrown in for good measure. You can review the tweet-by-tweet action, if you so desire.

Lots of pictures, video, and commentary to follow. But for now… I’ve got to get some sleep.

I hit my message number 1000 on Twitter last night.

If you use twitter, let me know!!

Interesting. Imagine you’re a software company. A big one. You have a program that is used by millions of people worldwide. It has, overall, a positive acceptance in the market. You spend lots of time designing an even better program to replace one that is used by millions of people worldwide. However, when you roll it out, it’s general feedback is negative, due to defects and software incompatibility.

People choose not to upgrade to your new program. You then cancel support on your old program, thereby forcing people to either migrate to your new program or – *gasp* – be unsupported. People still refuse to migrate.

So do you spend time and effort on correcting the issues that gave your program a negative spin? Re-enable support to the broad user base that you’ve isolated, until you can work out a stop-gap solution? Or why not start a PR campaign to convince people that everything they’ve heard about your program is wrong?

Ladies and Gentlemen… The Mojave Experiment.

Almost makes me want to buy a Mac.

(HT: Co-Worker “Rock-a-little-Harder” Mike)

If you don’t subscribe to The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web email, you’re missing out on some of the best conservative snark and kerfluffle commentary on the Internet.

Today’s example revolves around Apple’s new… well, whatever it is that they supposedly released on Friday. I think I saw one or two news blurbs about it.

Mystery Solved
Freud famously asked: What do women want? The Associated Press reports that one young man believes he has discovered the answer:

Nick Epperson, a 24-year-old grad student, spent the night outside an AT&T store in Atlanta, keeping his cheer up with bags of Doritos, three games of Scrabble and two packs of cigarettes. Asked why he was waiting in line, he responded simply “Chicks dig the iPhone.”

James Taranto’s comment?

The jury is still out as to whether chicks dig Dorito-munching, chain-smoking, Scrabble-playing grad students.

Great stuff. Go subscribe now.