Most Recent Articles
The Bloop in Real Time·Tuesday December 16, 2008
Here’s my slowed down version of the famous “Bloop”. You won’t be able to hear it with tiny little computer speakers. Either find a subwoofer or some nice over the ear headphones and crank the Cthulu Bloop.
Cordoba: The Small Chrysler·Thursday October 16, 2008
I was rearranging my bookcase and happened across a 1976 Readers Digest. I saw this ad and just had to laugh!
All my menu extras are gone!·Tuesday May 6, 2008
For most of the day today I’ve been missing all the OS X menu extras in the top right of my MacBook screen, including my clock, airport and volume controls. I never knew how much I used that stuff until it suddenly wasn’t there.
Why is there no process viewer in Firefox?·Monday March 10, 2008
What I need is a plug-in that monitors all the javascript and plugins that are running and keeps track of how long each runs. Then I want a unix top-like view of all the pages open and how many resources each is consuming (how much memory, how much cpu time their javascript is taking, etc).
Time Machine and a Linux server·Saturday March 1, 2008
Getting Time Machine to work with my Linux server was annoyingly hard—the default Debian server doesn’t support Leopard out of the box and Time Machine itself doesn’t support non-apple file shares.
Leopard Permissions Going Crazy·Sunday February 24, 2008
So a couple days ago I noticed I had no permission to access one of my directories…
Selling out: How a Free Software advocate ended up releasing a shareware program·Wednesday January 23, 2008
I write computer programs for a living though quite often I end up writing code for myself at home… When I quit my job and started consulting I lost the security that comes from a steady paycheck… So when I needed to write a piece of software to scratch my own itch I started thinking about selling it instead of releasing it as free software.
Polling is always wrong·Friday September 21, 2007
I read this article on reddit and while I thought the author was correct that RSS is really a bad design, I think he missed the real underlying reason why. That reason is that polling is always wrong. Always. Really!
The iPhone is not expensive·Thursday June 28, 2007
Every review I read about the iPhone whines that the price is high. So let’s see how high it really is.
Tivo Desktop on Linux·Tuesday February 20, 2007
I tried out TiVo Desktop on my Mac and it was kind of cool… I found some articles and discovered the TiVo Desktop is just a http daemon plus some mdns stuff. Sounds easy enough!
Efficient JavaScript or Inefficient Browser?·Tuesday November 7, 2006
I caught this article on Reddit this weekend and had definite mixed feelings about it. Many of their suggestions were obviously good ideas. But some of what was masquerading as optimization “advice” seemed more like work-arounds for a substandard javascript implementation.
Calling Applescript from Perl·Saturday November 4, 2006
I needed to call some Applescript from perl and was quite proud of my end result.
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In the end, I like that it fits on one line and that it lets the Applescript sit in the program in its native form.
Darwin Ports Pextlib Problem·Sunday October 15, 2006
I deleted all the Tcl-ish things in /usr/local/bin (and didn’t find anything anywhere else, oddly enough), reinstalled Darwin Ports, and it worked! Yay.
"Commit Patch": Managing your mess·Tuesday August 22, 2006
If I’m working on a bug or a new feature I end up making other random enhancements or fixes that aren’t at all related. With commit-patch, I now can precisely specify the patch I want to commit and leave the rest behind as uncommitted changes in my working directory.
Closures In Straight C·Friday June 9, 2006
Turns out, I’ve been using the concept of closures forever. I would say almost since I first learned C on my Macintosh back in high school.
3 big problems with Javascript·Monday February 27, 2006
I really love javascript, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its faults. I can make a number of little nitpicks but I want to focus on three major deficiencies of the language.
Hardware friendly C structures·Tuesday November 15, 2005
What I really want is a language that has really good structures. That is, they can represent hardware/fixed layouts effectively.