The Sonics are back in the playoffs. I’ve watched them on and off throughout the year and they looked good. In the first round, they were impressive against the Kings. Against the Spurs going on right now, they’ve looked second rate. I’ve thought the threat would come from Timmy Duncan but Manu Ginobili has been the rock of that team. Manu just makes the rest of his team better with his cutting, slashing, shooting and competitive spirit. A Suns-Spurs conference final will be interesting with Ginobili matching up against Steve Nash. I think if the Sonics can contain him, we have a chance. We’re 2 - 0 down right now but if we can hold serve when the series comes back to Seattle we have a chance.

Whatever happens to the Sonics though, this appears to be a good playoff year. The first tier teams (Suns, Spurs, Heat and Pistons) look to be equally matched which always makes for exciting basketball.

Link: BBC NEWS | Business | The assault on software giant Microsoft.

The next two years will be crucial for software giant Microsoft. Under attack on numerous fronts, it could falter - or fight back to become even more dominant.

Also worth reading is his Nobel Prize Lecture. A little snippet from that lecture, taken completely out of context but still a beautiful paragraph.

That was the beginning, and the idea seemed so obvious to me and so elegant that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.

Link: zaptastic: blueprint for a widget of mass destruction.

If you are using Safari on Tiger, thanks to the magic of widget autoinstall, combined with the <meta> tag, a slightly evil widget has been installed in your dashboard.

Looks like OS X has taken on some Window tendencies. I’m hoping Apple fixes this problem real soon rather than letting it linger.

I spent the day playing around with ANTLR getting a little expression grammer working and trying to remember parsing theory from a very long time ago.

I modified the expression grammer found here to evaluate expressions like:
1 + 1
[1 + 1] + [3 + 3];

I haven’t got the unary negative/positive signs working yet but it doesn’t look too hard.

The square brackets are weird but I used them instead of the regular parenthesis ‘(’ ‘)’ because that was used by the generated code to delimit the abstract syntax tree.

Here’s the grammer I came up with.

expr      : sumExpr  END! ;sumExpr   : prodExpr ( (PLUS^ | MINUS^) prodExpr)* ; prodExpr  : powExpr ( (MUL^ | DIV^ | MOD^) powExpr)* ;powExpr   : atom (POW^ atom)? ;atom      : LPAREN^ sumExpr RPAREN! | INT;

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what the lexical analysis part looked like.

Link: Wal-Mart Loves Springsteen’s Fudge Tunnel of Love : Wonkette.

Starbucks won’t stock Bruce Springsteen’s new album, because the track “Reno” contains explicit references to making more than $8 an hour.

How Lightsabers Work

Great for slicing bagels, reheating coffee, trimming hedges.

Not that great for shaving though, the razor burns are pretty bad. Remember to read the warning label before using….

Link: Dilbert.com - The Official Dilbert Website by Scott Adams - Dilbert, Dogbert and Coworkers!.

An appropriate dilbert cartoon for my current situation.