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!...

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

There's a book, the History of 20^th Century Philosophy of Science, that starts immediately with the following sentence [more...]