Mmm shiny (2010/10/08)
It’s finally happened.
[read more...]We are living in the future. (2010/10/06)
A lot of the things people said we “would” be able to do are now pretty commonplace. One of my phones (the G2) has an app called “tricorder” that can measure gravity (well, acceleration – good luck telling those apart), magnetism, some kinds of EM spectrum, and can do real-time spectrum analysis of audio. It could probably do real-time spectrum analysis of the camera input, too, but they happen not to have written that yet. You can take a picture of an object and have a decent chance of the software figuring out what it is and telling you where you can buy one. If you can get a barcode, you’re set – it can get exactly that item for you.
[read more...]Initial impressions of the Android G2, plus comparison with iPhone (2010/10/03)
Well, it’d been a while since I last got a phone, and I was due for an upgrade. And Microsoft seems pretty firmly committed to destroying the old Sidekick line. Worse, my Sidekick has a habit of stuttering when trying to send touch tone signals during a call, making online systems a nightmare to navigate. So I popped over to Radio Shack and got a G2.
[read more...]This is getting ridiculous. (2010/09/27)
So, I’ve been doing some cleaning, and I’ve consolidated some stuff, and moved some stuff around.
[read more...]More thoughts about learning (computer) languages... (2010/09/22)
I’ve picked up a fair number of programming languages. In recent years, though, I’ve noticed something: They’re getting easier. Now, before you jump out and say “of course, language design has improved”, I’m not talking about improvements in language design; I’m talking about a shift in what my brain does when confronted with a new thing which looks sort of like a programming language.
[read more...]Prescriptive and descriptive language, and what it means... (2010/09/21)
There’s two basic schools of thought about grammar and language usage, although very few people adhere rigorously to either.
[read more...]Initial thoughts on Python (2010/09/18)
Well, for one reason and another, I have to learn Python. Like many people, I started out disliking the whitespace sensitivity. I’ve already been pretty badly burned by it at least once – to be fair, that’s partially because my editor likes to use tabs.
[read more...]An open letter to Blizzard (2010/09/09)
Yeah, still thinking about this. Decided that, just because I liked the company so much for so long, I ought to give them a summary which isn’t bounded by what you can post on the forums or surrounded by trash-talking teenagers. This is a copy (edited for blog) of something I sent to their PR department, after customer support told me those were the right people to send it to.
[read more...]More thoughts about Real ID (2010/09/06)
A while back, I quit World of Warcraft over Real ID. A few days after this, Blizzard announced that they were not, at least for the moment, going to go ahead with the announced plan to move all their forums over to posting exclusively under peoples’ “real names” (by which they mean “the name registered to the account, whether or not it is your legal name”).
[read more...]How to use OS X Server's built-in spamd (2010/09/02)
So, I’m now using OS X Server for a machine which does some email processing, but for Various Diverse Reasons, it is beneficial to me to be able to use the spamc client directly, which means I need to have spamd running. Luckily, someone else cleverly already solved this problem, producing a launchd .plist file for spamd.