Honey, I Lost My Zeal

Vishnu Vyas:

Yes, I’ve been attached to each and every programming language I’ve ever learnt, thinking I could conquer the world with my new knowledge. How so naive of me. If you are under the same illusions that I was suffering from, I suggest go and write “production” code. Why? because production code is a wholly different deal from your hobby programming.…And you thought your pet language could do anything faster, better and sometimes even in supernatural ways than those of the “other” lesser languages? “Ha Ha Ha”, you self-delusional lemon-eater. In production code, when the demands are high everything that’s available tends to hit a brick wall. Wether its the global interpreter lock in python (one thats biting me big time right now) or the lack of good threading in lisp or the fact that working with C is like building a sky-scraper with lego blocks.

RAM Matters

Jonathan Rentzsch:

With the holidays fragmenting shipping schedules, I ended up spending a work-week with 512MB of memory. Torture: the Quad was agonizing with its paltry stock 512MB. It was slower than my [800 MHz] PowerBook as soon as I had three applications running.

iPodDisk 1.0

This GPL’d utility lets you access the music on your iPod directly in the Finder, complete with the artist-album hierarchy (via 2lmc Spool). Fantastic idea.

Aperture

Mike Evangelist, who’s been blogging and writing a book about his work on Apple’s DVD products, says Aperture is Apple’s most embarrassing work ever. John Siracusa and Tom Bridge think it’s following the Final Cut Pro trajectory. There are some interesting comments on Evangelist’s post, such as this one from John C. Randolph.

Aperture Mac