The latest issue of National Geographic has a great article on Frederick Law Olmsted, an amazingly prolific landscape architect best known for designing Central Park with his partner, Calbert Vaux. Not mentioned in the article is his Bay Area work. For example, he drew up the first campus plan for UC Berkeley in 1866, which established the basic orientation the campus has to this day. And his 1888 master plan for Stanford is once again guiding new construction, most notably the Hewlett and Packard Quad (formerly the Science and Engineering Quad) and its sequel, SEQ 2.

Tyler Thompson doesn’t speak the language, but he sings it very well.

Oakland: Boy, 9, a rising star in Chinese opera • San Francisco Chronicle

Boy who sings in Chinese draws oohs, ahs • Oakland Tribune (link good until Feb. 20, 2005)

(Chronicle link added on Febrary 16, 2006)

I just found out that Windows 2000 and XP have hard links and symbolic links, just like Unix. But Windows doesn’t expose those features in the user interface. Dang it, I could have been using links for the past 5 years! Thankfully, some enterprising programmers have created utilities for creating and removing symbolic links (called junction points in Windows) and hard links:

• NTFS Link, by Michael Elsdörfer, integrates handling links into Windows Explorer
• Junction, by Mark Russinovich, is a command-line tool

Also, take a look at the article Windows Symbolic and Hard Links to find out all about hard links and symbolic links, why they’re so nifty in the first place, and why they’re a lot better than shortcut files.