Somebody pays this guy money? Jim Kosek on Snowpocalypse.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 14 ed. (1968). Attributed to Edmund Burke (1729 -1797).

Snowpocalypse, Part II

Official snowfall total from snowpocalypse part II: 16.9 inches.

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport has recorded more than 6 feet, 7 inches of snow so far this winter, with more on the way.

LaTeX Title Page Picture

While updating some Latex for the JHU ACM, I wondered if it would be possible to put an image file with our logo on it in the title page. Turns out, someone wondered the same thing and eventually created the titlepic package in 2008. Its use is really easy:

\titlepic{\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{cover.jpg}}
\maketitle
It's got a couple options for customization, and there's a solution in the comments on http://typethinker.blogspot.com/2008/08/picture-on-title-page-in-latex.html for putting your picture above the title, as I did.

Telling an inspiring story about a beautiful design feels disingenuous. Yes, we all strive for beautiful code. But that is not what a talented young programmer needs to hear. I wish someone had instead warned me that programming is a desperate losing battle against the unconquerable complexity of code, and the treachery of requirements.

— Jonathan Edwards, Beautiful Code

Tumblr RSS Feeds / Google Reader

For those technologically astute enough to realize, Google Reader is not playing nice with the RSS feed from my blog. The issue was reported to Tumblr and Google. Google's response:

Thanks for reporting this. We've discussed the issue with the appropriate Tumblr engineers* and we hope to have a solution this week. In the mean time, a refresh (with the feed select use the "Refresh" button) should fix the problem (it's a transient issue that goes away once we're able to re-fetch the feed).

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

* actually, it was Superfeedr engineers, since they handle some feed-related functionality for Tumblr.
Super quick reply, and an easy fix. Hopefully it gets permanently fixed soon.

Going Live!

We're fully customized, populated, and linked. Going live!