Snow Bitching · Vancouver’s weather has been sufficiently bad this winter to have made the national news a few times, and if you follow any local online voices, you may be growing tired of our whining about the weather. Well, I’m going to publish a few pictures of the carnage anyhow ...[11 comments]
Cow Hair · Being two photographs of cow hair. Live and on the cow I mean. Really ...[9 comments]
Android Diary I · Around noon today, I picked up my unlocked Android G1 dev phone, and as of now it’s my main phone, plus I’m trying to write an app for it. I suspect that my experiences are going to be shared by quite a few people in the not-too-distant future, so why not record them? ...[22 comments]
AD VI: How To Draw a Curved Line · [This is part of the Android Diary.] For my little piece of demo-ware, I wanted to draw curved lines between the circles representing entries in a geotagged feed. Android has a function for drawing arcs, but I had to do a little trigonometry to work out the arguments. This is by way of sharing the answer with any other Androiders who want to draw curved lines, and, well, I kind of enjoyed the math and who knows, maybe someone else will too ...[10 comments]
AD V: Demo-Ware · [This is part of the Android Diary.] I’d had an unofficial goal that the little Android goober I’m working on should be demo-able by the end of 2008. I made it by half an hour. It draws clickable zoomable renditions of geotagged feeds (RSS or Atom) on Google maps. The look and feel are cool. As of now, I’m not actually sure it’s useful for anything, but I think that geotagged feeds are potentially very interesting in general, so a viewer couldn’t hurt. The short-term lessons are about Android, though ...[3 comments]
AD IV: Programming Newbie · [This is part of the Android Diary.] As of late last night, I have a bit of nontrivial code actually running on the G1. I feel a bit reluctant to diarize since I’m a complete beginner, swimming in ignorance; but it occurs to me that for every expert out there, there are many n00bs like me, who might wonder what the experience is like ...[2 comments]
Make Your Own Presents · There’s extra satisfaction in giving something you’ve made yourself. For someone like me who is entirely without talent at drawing, carpentry, and with at best average manual dexterity, this limits the options. (A few years ago, I gave a nephew a couple of highly-developed Diablo II characters.) This year, I managed framed photos, mix-tapes, and a calendar. This is to recommend the practice, and includes a couple of tips ...[5 comments]
A.D. II: The Back Button · [This is part of the Android Diary.] One reason the Web succeeded is the generally well-designed user interface of its browsers; good UI design being the exception not the rule. A key feature of that interface, and arguably one of the single biggest innovations in UI history, is the “Back” button. One of the nicest things about the Android phone is that it has one too ...
On Internet Addiction · It’s obvious that I’m an addict. Not all addictions are bad; I’ve been hooked on books since the age of six and on music almost as long, and hope to maintain these habits into the grave. But the issue is quantitative; you have to balance your addictions, worthy or otherwise, to get things done ...[17 comments]
Fast Sleep · Mike DePetrillo’s Wake Up Your Mac Faster is the best Mac hint I’ve seen in months. I remember like yesterday, sometime in early 2002, watching Rohit Khare at a conference, popping open his Mac every little while to take a note, then shutting it again. I was still a Windows victim at that point, and I was flabbergasted; that was the single feature that weighed most heavily in my decision to switch. The trouble is, at some point between then and Leopard, that feature kind of went away. It wakes up fast enough, but if your machine is heavily loaded, it takes a long time to go to sleep, because it’s saving everything to disk just in case your battery runs down or something else bad happens. Which is a nice feature if you want it, but I don’t; the pain of very occasionally losing my state is way less than the pain of not being able to wake up my mac for the best part of a minute after I’ve told it to sleep. Party like it’s 2002![4 comments]
The School Concert · Our son is attending Grade Four in a specialized program that includes a compulsory String Instruments class, thus he’s been struggling to master a screechy little violin since September. It’s a public school; by some budgetary jiggery-pokery they manage to retain the services of a nearly-full-time Strings teacher. Last Thursday night was the Christmas Concert featuring the fourth and fifth graders, and we had no idea what to expect ...[6 comments]
Decemberblossoms · Walking down to the shops at the corner in the damp Pacific Northwest dimness, a hold-out rose caught my eye. It’s beat up and soaking wet, but this time of year you take the flowers you can get ...[2 comments]
On Lines and Angles · Item: They’re renovating the house across the street from us; a big job with the basement enlarged and the whole structure raised a few feet. The trouble is, from our front porch it looks like it’s ever-so-slightly tilted. Item: I was doing some photo-editing and having a little trouble getting one shot satisfactorily leveled. Those who’ve worked with Photoshop or equivalent know that a tilt of much less than 1º is obvious to an attentive eye. [The comments on this piece are remarkable; you might a perusal rewarding.] ...[27 comments]
Apple Owes Me $99 · I’ve already whined about the Apple Time Capsule we bought earlier this year; it’s a rare instance of an Apple Product that Just Doesn’t Work. There are two problems: First, if I get online while Lauren is, this locks up her WhiteBook so badly she has to reboot; we can’t share WiFi. Second, I have to run the Time Machine backups by hand and I also have to connect by wire for big ones, because the default setup leaves my BlackBook in an endless “Preparing Backup” cycle. So I went and bought another WiFi router for $99, and now at least we can both be on the Net. I’d advise caution with the Time Capsule product until Apple’s done a couple more releases of the hardware and OS X too. Pfui.[10 comments]
Overheard · In two separate finance-biz meetings last week: “You date your hardware vendor, but you marry Larry Ellison.”[4 comments]
Fuzzy Clichés and Money · Being an illustrated ramble through the last three days, which I spent in Manhattan talking about money. Some of the photos are the most painfully obvious clichés and to make it worse fuzzy and blurry too. Those adjectives might apply at least in part to the money business too ...[5 comments]
2008 Disk Performance · I did some research on storage-system performance for my QConf San Francisco preso and have numbers for your delectation (pictures too). Now is a good time to do this research because the hardware spectrum is shifting, and there are a bunch of things you might mean by the word “disk”. I managed to test some of the very hottest and latest stuff ...[10 comments]
Cameras Small and Large · There’s been lots of interesting forward motion in the photo-products space recently. I thought I’d summarize for the fairly-small set of readers who care about cameras and such, but aren’t obsessive enough to follow the daily news themselves. Also, I’ve tossed in some pretty winterdusk studies. Well, darkly pretty ...[10 comments]
