Archive for March 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Jesper:
That said, there’s a big technology—and philosophy—divide between C# and Objective-C, and between .NET and Cocoa. Coding in both of them means that I’m soaking both my feet in water of different temperatures. I am in a fairly unique position to stand with one foot in a bucket of cold water and one foot in a bucket of hot water and announce how, on average, I’m feeling pretty good. To wit: When I’m in C#, I end up missing Objective-C. When I’m in Objective-C, I end up missing C#.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Lee Bennett:
As one who is in the desktop publishing/graphic design industry, Brand New is a fantastic site I’ve recently discovered. It purposes to blog corporate identity updates.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
John Gruber:
There’s nothing complex or confusing about iCal’s event entry UI. And with specific fields for each item of data, it is more obvious than Backpack’s — but only for a first-time user, which is the wrong case to optimize for. But to me iCal’s date entry UI is clearly worse, much worse, and the reason why can be expressed by the fact that it forces you to deal with about 10 user interface elements, versus just 2 for Backpack.
Friday, March 23, 2007
David Pollak discusses his conversion of a Rails application to lift, a Web framework written in Scala, which is a statically typed high-level language that looks somewhat like a cross between Ruby and Java, and which compiles to Java byte code for speedy performance (via Lambda).
March 17 saw the deaths of both John Backus (via Lambda) and Tanya Reinhart (via David Pesetsky via e-mail). Backus was a computer scientist who developed FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur form for describing context-free grammars, and was an early advocate of functional (i.e. state-free) programming. Reinhart was a linguist who made many contributions to syntax, semantics, and other areas of linguistics, including discovering the concept of c-command domains.
Rest in Peace
Monday, March 19, 2007
Rob Griffiths
Somewhat shocked at the assertion we couldn’t go any further unless I pulled out my Visa card, I asked the rep “so let me get this straight. I have a machine which is under warranty. But in order to prove to you that it’s broken, I have to pay you money first so you can try to fix it over the phone?” He replied that I was correct. I then asked what my “free” repair options were for my broken machine, and there was basically only one: take it to an authorized service center, where they can do the diagnosis and then send it in if it’s really hardware.
AppleCare Mac
Friday, March 16, 2007
Dave Nanian:
Airport Disks are not fast. Don’t expect blazing speeds: wired, I’ve seen a maximum of about 1.5MB/s.…Don’t expect miracles. This is an inexpensive solution, and it behaves like one.
Plus, since it’s over the network, you have to copy to a disk image, so you won’t have a backup that you can boot from.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Dave Nanian:
It wasn’t that long ago that HP had the absolute worst OSX drivers of any major peripheral developer. Their scanners barely worked, their printers sort of worked, the software they loaded was pretty shamefully buggy, flaky… they just sucked.
Yup, that was my experience. I have a 6MP and a 48G that are excellent and seem as though they will keep working forever, but all the recent HP products I’ve used have been terrible. He says things are better now.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Collin Allen:
My favorite keyboard, the IceKey by MacAlly, is now available in black to match Apple’s product lineup. Though I already have one IceKey, I might just have to order the black version for my PC, as well!
The iceKey is also my favorite keyboard. It’s good to see that it hasn’t been abandoned, like some other good Mac keyboards.
Tim Wood shows what to put in your gdbinit so that you can catch when your code incorrectly sends a message nil.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Gilad Bracha (via Lambda):
Java was actually designed to have tuples from the start, but they never quite got in. At one point, I tried to add a tuple-like construct as part of JSR-65. We wanted to extend array initializers to full blown expressions. Eventually, that effort got quashed; I didn’t really resist, since the extension was painful, as such things always are in Java. We should have just done straight tuples as a separate construct—but at the time, that was frowned upon too.
Lee Bennett:
If you’ve got broadband, a couple hours to let bittorrent do its thing, and no fear of about 3.1 gigabytes, there’s no real reason to not download these songs.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Adam Engst:
The Nike+iPod Sport Kit can be a fun addition for anyone who runs with an iPod or wants a bit more encouragement to run, competitive runners shouldn’t bother with it. It simply isn’t worthwhile as a training aid for anyone who values distance and pace accuracy.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Erik Barzeski:
Rather than simply abandoning files, I believe “Keep Files” should move the files to a location outside of the clutter of the “iTunes Music” folder, maintaining (or re-creating) the artist/album folder structure that exists in the “iTunes Music” folder.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
