The ratings on the App Store have always been problematic, as all community-driven ratings systems on the internet are problematic. One very bad idea that Apple implemented was asking for ratings when a user deletes an app from their phone / touch. That this technique unduly skews ratings toward the 1-star side on lesser-used apps is evident when glancing thru the store. [Read more...]

This is just a quick hack example using F-Scirpt to add a feature to WriteRoom that isn't currently implemented. It's just one Cocoa API call away from doing what I want. This is not a permanent fix to my problem, but I thought it was neat enough to show others how F-Script can at least let you do little things quickly like this for those unfamiliar. [Read more...]

With things running smoothly with my SciPy setup, I have been having fun trying out new libraries. Here's just a short list of some that I have been playing with. [Read more...]

What follows is my collection of notes about installing a full 64-bit stack of NumPy, SciPy, PyLab, and all that entails on a fresh Snow Leopard system. If it helps out someone else trying to do something similar that would be great. If you look through what I've done and find things that could have been done better or in a more correct way, let me know. We will be building most things needed from source.

After trial and error, and plenty of the latter, I have streamlined the process down to installing the following, in order: gfortran, FFTW, UMFPACK, NumPy, SciPy and finally matplotlib (which includes PyLab). [Read more...]

So, for the 1^st time since 2001, with the exception of when I moved, I'm allowing my Cube to go to sleep and sleep hard drives when idle. Yes, my trusty 500MHz G4 Cube, perhaps the single most reliable computer I've ever bought, serving up pages 24/7 for the last 8 years without a sound or a complaint (bought a few months before it was discontinued), is no longer my web and database server. It is now free to live a life of leisure and spiritual fulfillment.

The Cube was never the limiting factor on my web serving. The limiting factor was the DSL line that I was using from home. But I got fed up with the maximum speed that AT&T has forever cursed DSL customers who live near me and the high price being paid for it. So I switched to Cable for my home service, and am now sharing an dual-G5 Xserve, colocated at a place with a fat pipe to the net. The speed gains are probably obvious to anyone stopping by before and after. And all this is costing me less than before. A happy change. [Read more...]

Everything in my web domains has been frozen for the last 3 weeks as I've been slowly moving everything to a friend's dual-G5 Xserve colocated in the area. Better bandwidth and higher speeds means that I'll also be able to try some web experiments that I've so far been unable to try out. The DNS is ready to start pointing people over there as soon as I get a few kinks worked out. Right now the hold-up seems to be getting some ObjC code to talk to the MySQL processes, which I'm hoping to get done today. [Read more...]

Anyone reading this blog anymore? I've heard from other friends that their blog readership has dropped way down, and my logs seem like they show mostly search engines stopping by. Or is subject matter discussed here just too boring? Discussion comment forms not working? Everyone using RSS these days and not going to the webpages? (RSS is a double-edged sword.) Blah blah blah. Echo!...