I've planted some herbs today. I like to use fresh herbs for cooking, but if I buy a bunch in the supermarket it's usually too much, and the remainders will go to waste.

I've planted six different types: Genovese basil, thyme, a pepper 'hot mix', sweet basil, tomato's and parsley. I'm growing them indoors, in a sort of mini hothouse, and it will take a week or two before the first leaves start appearing. A nice thing to look forward to, somehow.

Today I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte: Presenting Data and Information. Mr. Tufte is a professor at Yale and is an expert in the field of data visualization. I read about him in last year's Christmas edition of The Economist and I've used his website in the past.

Mr. Tufte is in the Triangle today and tomorrow, and the course was in a small conference center near the airport. We received a package with four of his books and the course was build around sections of the books. The course touched on a large variety of topics and we saw many example graphs and videos. I especially liked his idea of sparklines, embedded high-resolution graphs embedded in regular text. For example, the US deficit from 1980 to 2003 looked like (not very good, in other words).

Mr. Tufte brought an original first edition of a book by Galileo, more than 400 years old, and a while later he did a review of the iPhone. An important point of view that I learned today is: adding detail to add clarity. "Simplifying" information by leaving things out or abbreviating them, does no justice to the smartness of human audiences. If a diagram or a picture is cluttered, you're first action should not be to start leaving out data, but to reevaluate your design of the diagram or picture.

It was a very inspirational day and I'm looking forward to read the books.

A plant in our living room is sick.

There are little things on the leaves and the leaves look wet. I'm not sure what to do about it but it doesn't look very healthy.

The plant is pretty far from the other plants and they seem to be fine but I'm worried that it might be contagious.

Is there a cure for something like this? Any recommendations?

For everybody living in the Triangle: the Full Frame Festival is starting soon. This year it will be from April 3 to April 6, in downtown Durham.

Last year I saw more than 10 documentaries in a few days and it was an amazing experience -- very enriching.

The schedule was sent out tonight; it should be on the Full Frame website tomorrow: http://www.fullframefest.org

Tonight I was at the March meeting of the Raleigh-area Ruby brigade. It was the first time I went and found it quite interesting. There were 'lightning talks': everybody was invited to give a short presentation on technical subjects. Most of them were only a few minutes, and a broad variety of topics was presented, very cool.

- Larry presented http://soundmanager2.rubyforge.org, a small library that makes embedding MP3 sounds on a website really easy and pretty
- Quick example of combining Ruby and Silverlight. Silverlight is "Microsoft's Flash" and is based on an ActiveX object. According to the presenter a runtime environment for the Mac and Linux is available also.
- Probably my favorite talk of the evening: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com. A concise overview of where these three languages are different in how they deal with instance variables. Insightful and funny.
- Fixture Freedom. How to get rid of fixtures in test cases (and why that's useful). http://fixturebusters.com
- CTAGS and RTAGS. I had heard of CTAGS before but never really dug into it. It's a way to make an index of important symbols in your source code. Maybe I'm naive here, but if you want code insight wouldn't it be time to move to an IDE like Eclipse instead of using VIM? (/ducks...)
- Data tables for Ruby -- similar in purpose to Matt Raible's display tag library for Java
- A 'public service announcement' -- a plead to not use MySQL
- A comparison of Subversion with git. Git allows you to have the version history locally on your development machine. It also allows you to make local commits, and works together with Subversion nicely. This looks like a really interesting tool.

The order in which the topics were presented was based on their duration: the shorter the talk, the earlier you were scheduled. A fun and useful evening.