LilyPond is a music typesetting system. They take their chosen problem domain very seriously. For example, in Obsessed with putting ink on paper, they explain the challenge. One of their first examples shows two different renditions of the same music, one "good", one "bad". To my eyes, they are identical.

I don't need to typeset music, but I appreciate the complexity and passion of the LilyPond work. Even simple music is more complicated to set properly than text, and complex music is really complex.

A brief detour through some docs led me to PHP's htmlspecialchars function, where I noticed that double-quote becomes ", but apostrophe becomes '. Seemed odd, since we're all so used to ' as the apostrophe entity. A comment on the docs claimed that there's no such thing as ' in HTML. I was already three or four levels deep on the distraction stack, so I went and looked.

Sure enough, the HTML 4.0 spec defines 255 different character entities, and ' is not among them.

What does it mean? Nothing, really, since the browsers all understand the entity, but it demonstrates that sticking to a standard may be tougher than you think, since common practice so often exceeds what the standard guarantees.

I often wake up before I need to get up, and I'll look at the clock to see what time it is. For some reason, this often happens at 4:00 am. I don't mean between 3:30 and 4:30, I mean between 3:55 and 4:05. I've long wondered what could make me open my eyes at the same time so often.

When it happened this morning, I wondered again, and in my hazy dream-like state, I finally came up with an answer. I decided there is a cron job running somewhere, and it's a Python script that makes the mistake of overwriting a built-in function or type with a variable (like file="foo", or list=[1,2]), so that the next time the script runs, it fails, and that failure is what wakes me up.

The problem with this theory of course, as I realized the next time I floated up to consciousness, is that there is nothing in my bedroom running cron jobs. I forget the details, but I found a rebuttal to that objection too, so that I was pretty satisfied that I had finally found the answer.

In the clear light of morning, of course, the details elude me, though I can't shake the feeling that I should look through my code for overwritten built-ins...

Today brings a big announcement: Hewlett-Packard is acquiring Tabblo. This is really great news for a number of reasons:

• It's a vivid demonstration of the value of our work over the last eighteen months building ways to share online stories, and print them to bridge them into the physical world. Speaking of which: Have you seen our just-announced PhotoCube?
• Although we still had money in the bank, we were looking ahead to raising more in the next year, and closely tracking the health of our business plan. This deal removes all of that uncertainty from our landscape.
• HP brings enormous clout and opportunity to our efforts. They are a very large organization with a huge interest in all kinds of printing, and they believe strongly in the direction we've taken.

Of course, this also brings big changes to Tabblo as an organization. There's no way a company the size of HP (150,000 employees) can acquire a 9-person company and not change the day-to-day feel of the place. We've only just taken the first step on this journey, so there's no way to know what the future will bring. It will be exciting so see how this next phase of Tabblo unfolds.

One note about the press release itself, and I hope this doesn't sound too defensive. The press release uses the phrase "acquiring Tabblo's technology". This unfortunate wording makes it sound like Tabblo was on the rocks, and HP picked up our intellectual property at some kind of fire sale. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like all startups, we had challenges ahead of us to prove our business model, but this acquisition is not a last-ditch effort to survive. HP was excited by what we created, and are very excited about how our work can help them to become "the print engine for the web". Tabblo is my baby, and I'm proud of what we've done, so I don't want any misconceptions.

For me personally, this will be an interesting full-circle. My career started at Digital over 20 years ago. Through a couple of acquisitions, Digital is now part of HP. I've worked in big companies, and I've worked in small companies. This is my first start-up acquisition, so it's a new blended experience for me.

All told, these are exciting times. I'm looking forward to this new adventure.

I made my list of hex words four years ago, and there it has sat. Not until this morning did Larry Junk point out that the word "cafe" was missing from the list. I looked, and sure enough, no cafe, even though I mentioned cafebabe in the first sentence.

Turns out the Moby word list of 74,500 common words includes affettuoso, affenpinscher, and cafard, but not "cafe". Go figure.

So I found another word list, combined the two, and now my list of 805 hex words is a list of 1196 hex words.

There was a letter in the Miss Conduct column in the Boston Globe magazine about the use of the word "retarded". What I didn't know when I read it was that it was written by a friend.

I've had similar conversations with co-workers who use "retarded" in an off-hand way. What people don't seem to realize is that mental retardation is a very serious topic for those of us who deal with it everyday. The colloquial use of retarded is not just to describe something as bad, but as bad in a funny way. Many people object to the use of retarded to mean bad, but I also object to it meaning trivializable.

Objecting to this usage can be a tricky line to walk, since most people don't use the word intentionally to hurt people, and especially since it is used humourously, it can be awkward to make a point about it. The people who say "retarded" don't mean to trivialize the disabled, but that is what they are doing. It hurts to hear people dismiss an entire population so lightly.

If you find yourself using the word retarded to make people laugh, would you do me a favor and think twice? Thanks.

Gesundheit is a delightful game about a childlike world where monsters are vanquished by an allergic pig who uses his snot to entice the monsters into traps where they meet their doom.

Gesundheit was made with Adventure Game Studio, which I have not yet tried, but it seems like a powerful and accessible game creation platform. It could be a good option for letting kids create their own interactive games. I'd have Max and Ben give it a whirl, but they are at this very moment engaged in some Flash creation, so why bother them?

Joseph Cooney has finally codified the rigorous certification program all us software engineers have been using for a long time: It Works on My Machine. LOL. Jeff Atwood has designed some alternate badges.

Protecting a web site against cross-site scripting attacks can be a daunting challenge. Roughly speaking, you have to ensure that no executable script can be inserted into your pages by your users. But browsers are famously accepting of mis-formed HTML. Figuring out what strings of text might contain executable script requires understanding all of the variety of interpretations browser will bestow on crappy HTML. If you assume a pristine universe of correctly-formed HTML, you are opening yourself up to attacks which exploit oddball edge cases.

RSnake (Robert Hansen) has compiled a list of all sorts of strings which could be interpreted as executable script by various browsers: XSS Cheat Sheet. It's a fascinating look at the alternative representations for familiar constructs (http scheme names can have tabs in them?), and a sobering demonstration of the ingenuity and technical depth that bad guys can bring to bear on cracking your site.

The ha.ckers blog describes new exploits and vulnerabilities as they are discovered, and can also be a useful source of information.

For Max's 15th birthday, Cakehenge:

On this day five years ago: My first job ever, my first blog post ever.

Firefly Press is a letterpress firm in Boston. They use old equipment and techniques to produce beautiful printed pieces. Type has a very long and specialized history, some of which bleeds through into current technology. If you want to get a little taste of how type used to work, watch the short movie on Elsa Dorfman's page about Firefly.

Matt Hawkins sums up one of the truly cool things about paper models on the internet:

I love the idea of paper toys online. It's like a matter transporter. An artist creates a 3D object, flattens it, sends it through cyberspace, it crosses the globe as ones and zeros and then it is built back into a 3D object!

He also links to Shin Tanaka. I liked his customizable models (sorry for the deep unframed link), where you are encouraged to decorate his blanks slates as you wish.

I wrote a quick response to Jonathan LaCour's question about improving presentations, but I wanted to say more. Here's what I learned (the hard way) about giving presentations: Entertain, Educate, Practice.