Running again..

Posted by rae in Reid, entertainment, the Net
at 10:36 am on Friday, 29 April 2005

Went running for the second time today.

It’s still a bit chilly, so I run with my windbreaker. It’s handy, since I bring along Luisa’s iRiver mp3 player, and there’s an inside pocket.

I usually listen to science- and tech-oriented podcasts like the MacCast, Future Tense, Quirks and Quarks, /Nerd, Slacker Astronomy and Science at NASA.

There are more actually. Here, I’ll just dump my entire podcast list for your edification. Note that all the links are to the RSS feeds for the podcasts themselves, not the main sites like I have above.

GeekSpeak Linux Log Future Tense Engadget Laporte Report
/Nerd Sound Bytes Battlestar Galactica Quirks and Quarks Science @ NASA
How To Do Stuff Regulus! Singularity SWAOG This Week In Science
HDTV Two Minute Tech TechnoMania Everything Digital Geek News Central
EarthCore: a Novel Octopus Man Apple Log Slacker Astronomy Tech Conference
MAKE Laporte Report BrainLoaf U.I. Junkie MacCast

Hope that’s useful for someone.

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Metrowerks — lost in the dust

Posted by rae in software
at 10:24 am on Friday, 29 April 2005

I was at Metrowerks site today, and it took me quite a while to find any mention of Mac OS. For those non-Mac-developers out there, Metrowerks was *the* compiler to use for writing Mac apps from the mid-1990’s through around 2002. You see, Mac OS X is based on FredBSD, and like most open source operating systems out there, the main developer toolset is the GNU tools.

Well, Apple went and wrapped UI around the tools and called it Xcode. At first, Xcode was slow and clunky. Hell, even today it’s not even half as fast as Metrowerks’ product, the now-discontinued Code Warrior.

The problem is that Xcode is free.
It’s tough to beat a marketing strategy like that.

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New pool liner!

Posted by rae in family
at 7:51 am on Friday, 22 April 2005

This is a followup post to both my and Luisa’s bog entries about our pool liner problems.

If you’ve seen my recent photos on flickr, you already know that the pool has gotten its new skin. And it looks great, too..


click any picture to see a tnir album of all of the shots I took; you can also see a big version, or the biggest version of the shot above on flickr.


bigger and biggest on flickr.


bigger and biggest on flickr.

That last shot shows the vacuum pump that has literally now been running night and day. It’s really, really loud, so we phoned our neighbours about it before we left it on all night, and they said it was okay. Michael couldn’t sleep in his room and used the pull-out in Luisa’s office instead. That’s how loud it was, even with a box over it to filter out the worst high-end stuff.

The new liner looks absolutely great. I love the deep colour and the nice pattern along the edges. Bill Snow and his guys worked hard to put it in.


bigger and biggest on flickr.
That’s Bill in the red hat there. With all the tugging and pulling and tugging and pushing and smoothing and tugging and… well, it was like a giant bed being made.

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Learning ASP and VBScript

Posted by rae in development, work
at 11:05 pm on Monday, 18 April 2005

So I started a web job recently that I was told involved Perl and PHP. That’s cool, I’m up on both of those and it would be extra fun because there might be database work involved.

Well, it turns out that it isn’t so. In fact, it’s a server that only has ASP and VBScript. They may have JScript too. But i figure that writing stuff in ages-old BASIC that I leanred in the late 1970’s is safer than learning a new language and implementing an app with it in the space of a couple of weeks.

Man, what a letdown. I had forgotten just how brain-damaged BASIC really is. I was HOPING that VBScript, being a huge subset of Microsoft’s cornerstone, Visual Basic, would have maybe, hopefully evolved nicely. But no, I discover that it has idiotic things like different keywords for functions that return a value versus ones that don’t. I mean, come on! It’s not like the funcion declares its return type or anything. And how ass-backwards is it that you return a value by assigning it to the name of the function? Geez! Grow up a couple of decades, why don’t you? They had BASICs with “return” statements back in the 1980’s.

Sorry, it’s just so sad to work with such a big pile of stinking poo. Not that Perl is a panacea by any stretch of the imagination. Nor PHP, which is really just a castrated Perl. If you’ve been reading you know that I loooove Ruby, that darling of scripting languages.

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Fixed the RSS feed

Posted by rae in web site
at 10:43 pm on Monday, 18 April 2005

Btw, for those who care (NewsFire and FireFox users mostly), I’ve fixed the RSS feed for ReidNews. WordPress has this REALLY ANNOYING DEFAULT of adding line breaks in the middle of your HTML wherever you hit return. I understand that it’s a nice feature, but it should be a HELL OF A LOT EASIER TO TURN OFF.

I had to edit my “rae” blog style and add a line that says:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');
I also had to edit the styles for all my RSS feeds and do likewise. So I had to edit four different places, JUST TO TURN THIS DAMN THING OFF.

Can you tell I am unimpressed? There oughta be a preference somewhere..

Hey, it’s open source — maybe I can add one myself. HAH!

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Flickr compensation

Posted by rae in Reid, the Net
at 10:38 pm on Monday, 18 April 2005

Got this email from Flickr today..

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK!

  1. Double what you paid for!
    Your original 2 year pro account has been doubled to 4 years, and your new expiry date is Jan 14, 2009.
  2. More capacity!
    Now you can upload 2 GB per month.
  3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
    This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.
Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Hm, what to do with 2 Flickr Pro acounts? I don’t think Luisa will wnat one, since I’m the photo archivist of the family.

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ADHOC

Posted by rae in Reid, development
at 1:58 am on Sunday, 17 April 2005

While we’re on the topic of conferences, is anyone going to ADHOC (formerly MacHack)?

It’s convenient because (a) it’s in Detroit, a drivable distance from Toronto, and (b) it only costs $500. As a bonus, Cory is one of the two keynote speakers, the other being Jordan Hubbard, of FreeBSD fame and now an employee at Apple.

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WWDC, here I come

Posted by rae in Reid, development, work
at 11:53 pm on Saturday, 16 April 2005

Well, like I recently said I might, I bought my WWDC eTicket tonight, and got the “Tiger Early Starter Kit” option. Tiger (Apple’s next version of Mac OS X) is due to come out Apr 29th, which as Apple’s website helpfully tells me is in 12 days.

Along with a copy of Tiger, I get entry to the WWDC, an ADC “Select” membership, and a DVD from the 2004 WWDC sessions. I find these WWDC DVDs really, really valuable for learning new APIs. They are basically videos of the sessions at the conference, and some include the PowerPoint KeyNote notes alongside the movie, which includes real source code examples, etc. In the past, these DVDs have sold for as much as $800 US.

We’re going to see an Erasure concert on the Saturday before I go, so I’ll be going Sunday-to-Saturday, instead of the usual Saturday-to-Saturday. The price of plane tickets is about $60 higher than the Sat-to-Sat tickets. Oh well, it’s worth it to go to the concert! Ted is graciously letting me crash with him, so my lodgings are taken care of.

So now I just have to buy plane tickets and choose which sessions I want to go to.

P.S. Anyone have an iBook or PowerBook I could borrow for a week?

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Sick again, sick again, jiggity jig**

Posted by rae in Reid
at 11:32 pm on Friday, 15 April 2005

sigh

The dry, scratchy, itchy cough is back. Just in time to make me cancel a cardio test I was going to take next week as part of my semi-sesqi-tri-annual physical. Oh well.

In other news, I’m doing some web work through the end of the month, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Thus, I won’t be able to make Andy’s gaming thing on Sunday. :-( Someone take lots of pictures for me, okay? Especially of any pretty girls. ;-)

 

Hi Hon!

** – modified Blade Runner quote

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Power Programming Books

Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net
at 7:13 am on Thursday, 14 April 2005

Found on a slashdot discussion about PHP 5:

HTML Power Programming
BASIC Operating System Design
Enterprise AppleScript Applications
Kernel Programming With Javascript
Power Shell Scripting with Bash
RTFM for Manual readers
How to click “Next, Next, Next, I Agree, Next, Next, Next, Finish” for Dummies
ROTFL…

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