Miscellaneous ephemera
  • (06/18) Back from the WWDC and my mini SF vacation. Great weather and great friends to hang out with, new and old. Now getting back to what seems like a million things.
  • (06/03) Seems impossible to forget, but I often do: Playing (great) music really affects my mood, energy, ambition.
  • (06/01) Note to DB developers: Never make someone's email address a primary key! It will eventually cause all your customers large headaches. (Speaking here as a user of a few such sites.)
Tue, Apr 14, 4:18am Anybody Out There?
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!...
(11 comments, in Blogging)
Fri, Apr 10, 12:53am 32G Used Already?
Ok, so after 3 days my laptop is basically set up, but I haven't even done any productive work with it yet and I've already found 32 gigabytes of space on my drive gone! I mean, I have the dev tools and TeX on here, which takes up a lot of room, but 32G is more than I thought. Not a huge deal, just curious about it. So where'd all the space go? Step this way. [more...]
(in Computers » Mac)
Wed, Apr 8, 11:18pm Setting up a New Dev Laptop
Just got a bouncing baby MacBook Air, and now in the process of loading it up for Mac/iPhone work, scientific programming and other miscellanea. I'm jotting it down here for reference, and if anyone has items to add, please suggest your favorite must-have tools for on-the-go compu-zen. [more...]
(1 comment, in Computers » Mac)
Mon, Apr 6, 2:03pm Dust-Up Over Video Card
My love-hate relationship with my Radeon x1900 video card continues, but today was a good day for us. I have been noticing that my MacPro has been getting louder and louder, driving me nuts. I assumed the reason was because I had added two more internal drives in the last few months, and no doubt that is part of the problem, but I really noticed a problem every time I asked the video card to do anything more than drawing standard windows. Then it would really kick up a fuss of sound that was just too much to deal with. I remembered hearing that the x1900 sucks in dust like a vacuum, but forgot to both take it seriously or to check it once in a while. Well, today was that day. [more...]
(in Computers » Mac » Hardware)
Thu, Apr 2, 5:07pm Framework Rewrite Time
This latest rewrite has been coming for a while, but things haven't lined up until now to start making progress on it. The current incarnation of the engine runs this website in addition to several others, and it works fine, but as with all programming projects, it becomes clear how things could be better and that they should be so. The new rewrite will be initially written in Python, taking the best from the current PHP and Objective-C versions, which are the two most mature versions currently in service. Each has gotten tweaks over the last couple of years that ended up being unique to them, but which all versions should benefit from. [more...]
Thu, Mar 19, 1:56am iPhone SDK 3.0 Beta Night
So the beta is out, and it is good stuff. Developers have much to have fun with in here. Several things jumped out at me beyond what yesterday's presentation went over. I'm still updating the doc sets, but already taking the new sample code out for a spin. [more...]
(2 comments, in Computers » Programming » iPhone)
Tue, Feb 24, 11:42pm What and How
There's a book, the History of 20th Century Philosophy of Science, that starts immediately with the following sentence [more...]
(2 comments, in Nature » Philosophy)