Miscellaneous ephemera
  • (05/06) If you are wondering who are the kind of people who are independents who would vote for Obama but never for Clinton (though also not for McCain), I'm one of 'em.
  • (05/05) My favorite description of Ruby, as a language, from Noodlings: "It's like they created a great new flavor of ice cream and then mixed in glass and razor blades."
  • (04/18) As they say in (very advanced) cooking classes: you can't make a quantum field theory without breaking some diffeomorphic invariances. I'm paraphrasing.
Thu, May 8, 4:17am An Almost Ideal PDF Display
Not sure why this thought hit me, but I figured out almost exactly what I want out of computer hardware in order to comfortably read PDF documents (and I have a zillion of them I want to spend time pouring over). The image shown to the right is of my 15" PowerBook, tipped over so that the screen is flush with the desk and the rest of the machine is sticking up in the air (see photos below). As it happens, the PB is sturdy and stable enough in the hinge mechanism to prevent it from falling over while the machine just sits in this odd position.

The other half of this formula is opening a PDF in Preview and then rotating it by 90°, making use of the slideshow feature and then hitting the full-screen control. Voila, a beautifully readable PDF document, even for intricate PDFs with lots of mathy goodness. [more...]
(in Computers » Mac » Hardware)
Fri, Apr 25, 2:15am Safari Window Sprawl
Ever since I was told about Safari's "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" option, I have been unable to control the flow of webpages that I feel I should get back to. [more...]
(3 comments, in Computers » Mac » Apps)
Thu, Apr 24, 12:19am What Should Time Machine Ignore?
Some things need not be backed up by Time Machine.

For instance, take my ~/tmp folder, where I dabbling in trying to build source code projects, often to no ends. And if it is great stuff, then I do the install into /usr/local and it gets backed up from there. [more...]
(2 comments, in Computers » Mac » OS X)
Fri, Apr 4, 4:07pm A New Dev Laptop?
I think I "need" a new development laptop machine. I have no mobile Intel Mac, and good weather is approaching. I must be set free to roam and code.

Here's a chart of the models I'm considering, and some of the factors important to me on each. The prices shown are not transparent from the chart, but are accurate (they include some custom configuration and Apple Care changes, and not with tax, shipping, etc). Any thoughts? I'm leaning toward option MacBook Pro a or b. [more...]
(5 comments, in Computers » Mac » Hardware)