Dennis Ritchie has died.

"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
    -- dmr@alice.UUCP

I just finished reading book 9 of the Destroyer series on my Kindle. From inside the book, I clicked to go to the Kindle Store, and my recommendations were:

• Six Easy Pieces, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman
• Bad Astronomy, by Philip Plait
• Genius, by James Gleick
• The Faith Healers, by James Randi
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Pale Blue Dot, and Billions & Billions, Carl Sagan
• Japanese Hot Pots, by Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat
• The Destroyer volumes 7, 6, 12, 3, 11, 17, 40, 31, 36, 37, 27, 44, 35, 34, 43, 30, 42, 26, 45, 39, 33, 20, 25, 49, 48, 46, 32, 38, 29, 47, 41, 28, 55, 50, 53, 52, 51, 57, 54, 56, and five more un-numbered books related to the same series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir.

All praise for filling the list with things I’m actually interested in, but do you think maybe you overdid it a bit on the Destroyer novels, especially since the one I’m most likely to want right now isn’t on the list at all?

At a guess, the metadata simply isn’t up to the task of identifying series relationships, and I’m seeing the usual “you just bought a nice watch, so you must be interested in buying a dozen more nice watches” problem.

Also, while I’m pleased that I finally have my Kindle recommendations straightened out, I sigh in despair at the weeks of Android-app-recommendation cleanup I face after buying some apps for my Sony Tablet.

[Update: it seems book 10 is the only one in the first fifty or so that isn’t available for Kindle yet.]

1. Occupy Wall Street (read: “skip classes; someone else is paying for it anyway”).

2. Select generic slogan that would be just as meaningful applied to Congress, unions, or any local school board (“no more corruption”).

3. Use Google Translate to convert idiomatic English into ungrammatical Chinese that means something entirely different (“not corrupted any more”), and scrawl the resulting Hanzi characters onto a poster with a marker.

4. Feel proud of this dubious accomplishment.

Sick of nitwits playing with a TV-B-Gone, or maybe you don’t think it goes far enough? Jam the IR spectrum to disable all remotes.

For the past several releases, Mail.app has had a problem where it creates multiple offline drafts of a message that stick around after the message is sent successfully. Usually, I just clean them out when I spot them, no big deal.

Today it happened with a message that contained a number of rather large binary attachments (~30 megabytes), which I was sending to my Sony Tablet as a test. The test went fine at the office, but when I got home and plugged my computer in, the Internet went away.

Mail.app was frantically trying to upload four copies of the huge draft message to my IMAP server, and completely saturating my uplink. The only way to fix it was to force-quit Mail and empty out the contents of the .OfflineCache directory for that account. This was, of course, not the first solution I tried. Grrr.

I never actually made any money off of being an affiliate, but I know that a lot of people depended on it, and now that California has backed down on their tortured redefinition of “nexus” (pending federal clarification on how sales tax collection should work), they’re back in business.

Ahem. Idol All-star Swimsuit Tournament, 2009.

Nikkan Sports has quite a few photo galleries that may be of interest. Some of them may even feature sports. They “protect” the pictures with the usual stupid disable-right-click Javascript, which will keep them from being downloaded for a fraction of a second.

I must say, I’m enjoying playing a Massively Zero-Player RPG; the best part is that I reliably outgear all of my friends.