Chinese Workers’ Problems · This New York Times story, telling ugly stories of human suffering at Chinese outsourcers, isn’t about Apple. It’s pure politics and economics ...
[13 comments]
[13 comments]
Size Still Matters · I have to carry two phones; one for G-stuff, which is often unreleased software running on unreleased hardware, and another for my personal life. For the last few months, the G-phone has been a Galaxy Nexus and the Tim-phone a Nexus S ...
[12 comments]
[12 comments]
Browser Sedimentation · I wanted to hit my browser’s “home” button and for a baffling moment couldn’t find it. This remains a rare experience, but I found it a worrying symptom ...
[14 comments]
[14 comments]
Cirque Does MJ · The full name of Cirque du Soleil’s new show is Michael Jackson Immortal; Google took me and somewhere between ten and twenty thousand other employees off to see it last week in Oakland. You weren’t supposed to have “real” cameras, but here’s one my point-and-shoot managed ...
[1 comment]
[1 comment]
HttpURLConnection’s Dark Secrets · If you’re programming in the Java language and want to talk to a Web server, there are several libraries you can choose from. HttpURLConnection is one popular choice, and for Android programming, the engineering team has now officially suggested that you use it where possible ...
[12 comments]
[12 comments]
Not Piracy · Sites all over the Internet are going dark to show that they object to legislation currently before the US Congress. I’m not American but these words are coming at you from a server in LA, so I guess I can weigh in. I’ll limit my discussion to one word, “Piracy”; what the “P” stands for in SOPA ...
[13 comments]
[13 comments]
Grey and Red · The grey is one of Vancouver’s rare snowy evenings. The red is the new illuminated circumference of BC Place, our venue for football and big-name rockers and the Home/Boat show. Its new look, with illumination and slanted retaining piers, has definitely added to the visual appeal downtown ...
Skyrim · I bought it for the houseguests over Christmas, got mildly hooked, took a character to level 17, but that’s it, I’m bored ...
[6 comments]
[6 comments]
Newsworthy Tablet Launches · I glanced at my newsreader yesterday and gave up almost instantly because it was full of irrelevant fluff from CES. Particularly irritating was a post over at The Verge announcing breathlessly that a vendor not worth mentioning here was... wait for it... planning to release a tablet in 2012! I twitterbitched: Dear Verge: “X plans to launch a tablet in 2012” is not a news story for ANY value of X. Which was clearly wrong; many people tweeted back values of X for which it would be newsworthy: Cracker Barrel, Macdonalds, NASA, Vladimir Putin, a lost Amazonian tribe, the US Government, Pfizer, and God via Moses. Any others?
[6 comments]
[6 comments]
Oily Politics · The politics start with whether you say “tar sands” or “oil sands”. Whatever you want to call them, they’re up in Northern Alberta. Observers of American politics will have noticed the Keystone XL project, which would take the sands’ crude oil south to Texas. Northern Gateway, the Canadian version, would carry crude west to Kitimat on the Pacific coast for export to Asia; it’s in the news because the public hearings start next week, with thousands queued up to offer opinions. I’m generally contra, and increasingly optimistic ...
[7 comments]
[7 comments]
Computer Longevity · We have a lot of computers around the house, but the main family living-room workhorse is a 2008 Mac Pro. Everyone knows that computers have short working lives, but I’m thinking this one could be with us for a while ...
[19 comments]
[19 comments]
All The Way Home · It’s a play I’ll be attending here in Vancouver later this month and would like to recommend, but I have a conflict of interest. Here’s the Web site; if you get interested in seeing it you’d better move fast as there are only seven performances and some are already sold out ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Local Uncertainty Maximum · Welcome to the end of the year. As I look forward into 2012, I foresee, uh... almost nothing. In fact I can’t recall a time when the uncertainty was so pervasive. Here is a small compendium of prognosticational impotence ...
[6 comments]
[6 comments]
Type-System Criteria · Starting some time around 2005, under the influence of Perl, Python, Erlang, and Ruby, I became convinced that application programs should be written in dynamically-typed languages. You get it built faster, there’s less code to maintain, and the bugs are no worse. I’ve felt negative not just about statically-typed tools in general, but about the Java programming language in particular. Living in the Android world has forced me to think about this more ...
[21 comments]
[21 comments]
