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2007
Sequence Converter- Widgetless
- Visa Swap
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- Quake
- Prefix Matching
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- Waves to Wine
- Sphere Builder
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- 420
- COMP2405
- H-1B Visa
- Mandelbrot Scroll
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- Vet Tax
- Boredom and Frustration
- Crescent Moon
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- Social Security
- SketchUp
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- Traffic Bugs
- 2006
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San Francisco
13 January 2007
When I arrived in California a month ago, there was a certain element of urgency that I get started. To avoid delay, I was provided with free housing in Santa Clara. Very nice place (patio, pool, etc). I could get spoiled here. But it is not a permanent home. It is also in an awkward location that is not served very well by public transportation; getting to work involves a one hour walk and a half hour on the LRT each way.
So they arranged a whirlwind tour of San Francisco, conveniently timed on the day the office was powered down because of solar panel installation (it is public knowledge). The first apartment they showed me was perfect, so I snapped it up. Being half way up a rather steep hill, the deck has got gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge in one direction and Alcatraz in the other. One potential snag was the "no pets" policy. But I got that waived for Widget. With that detail resolved, the two of us will be moving in on Monday.
The next issue will be furniture. I arrived in the US literally with a suitcase, a backpack and a mouse. Maybe I'll take lessons from Widget, she seems pretty good at nest building.
Update: Once again Widget provided travel complications. The Caltrain conductor saw her carrier and kicked me off the train half way to San Francisco.
![[1400 Greenwich]](/news/2007/Greenwich1400.jpg)
![[Golden Gate Bridge]](/news/2007/GoldenGate.jpg)
![[Alcatraz]](/news/2007/Alcatraz.jpg)
Cross-browser security bug of the day: the JavaScript alert(), confirm() and prompt() functions in Firefox, Opera and MSIE (but not Safari) will truncate the message after any null character. So an unsuspecting programmer who inserts user-provided text into one of these dialog boxes opens up an opportunity for the user to rewrite the bottom of the dialog box. Just something I stumbled across a couple of days ago. I've reported it to Mozilla and to Opera. Mozilla had known about it for over a year (bug 310037), but they didn't realise that it had (limited) security implications. One never knows when a 'cosmetic' bug will turn bad.
Hmm, I seem to have been reporting a lot of bugs lately. It always feels good when one gets a quick "Cool, thanks!" back from the developer. It's a great indication that they care about the quality of their work.
