dropload is a very cool concept...
posted by Will Ross at 21:43

garden log
in the eighties in the okanogan i rented a garden spot near tonasket. my garden was in a former horse pasture. over the south side of the pasture fence was the home of a long time local horticulturalist named chet stevenson and his wife pearl. chet had worked in the okanogan valley apple industry for decades. chet and pearl shared a small frame house with a lush garden and home orchard. one of chet's many horticultural hobbies was raising his own strain of garlic. since i was in the garden seed business at the time, i bought a hundred pounds of chet's garlic and sold it through my mail order catalog, known as the good seed company. as the years went by i sold the seed company and moved to california. in the nineties i wrote to a friend in tonasket and asked him to sell me some of the chet's garlic. he sent me some, but he said people had stopped growing it because it was running out, it was no longer dependable.

i started growing it again and i saw what he meant. this version of chet's, while visually retaining the purple streaks on the skin of the bulb, did not conform to a stable single bulb. after the first growth of the main stalk is complete a new stalk sprouts from inside each leaf bract along the stem. meanwhile, below ground each individual clove divides into a bulb of several cloves. this growth pattern has persisted in my harvests of chet's garlic for ten years. this past summer my bed of 48 bulbs featured only one that did not produce secondary sprouting. i saved it aside, planning to use it for seed, but it quickly rotted.

today i planted a bed of 45 cloves of chet's garlic. on the east side of the bed are 12 cloves from outer, secondary sprouting regions. on the west side of the bed are 33 cloves from inner regions on the bulbs. i'll report back on this planting as the crop progresses.
posted by Will Ross at 13:02

Joel Spolsky has a great review of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.
posted by Will Ross at 11:37

Wry humor from Cringely:

"If your idea of having a life is following IEEE standards development, you know that 802.15.3 looks to be the first Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) networking technology used by folks who aren't spies and secret agents."

posted by Will Ross at 09:08