Running again..
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.Metrowerks — lost in the dust
Posted by rae in software
at 10:24 am on Friday, 29 April 2005
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.
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..
at 7:51 am on Friday, 22 April 2005
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.
bigger and biggest on flickr.
Learning ASP and VBScript
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.
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:
at 10:43 pm on Monday, 18 April 2005
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');
Flickr compensation
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!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.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.
- 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.- More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.- 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.
ADHOC
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.
WWDC, here I come
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.
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. at 11:32 pm on Friday, 15 April 2005
Someone take lots of pictures for me, okay?
Especially of any pretty girls. 
Hi Hon!
** – modified Blade Runner quote
Power Programming Books
Found on a slashdot discussion about PHP 5:HTML Power ProgrammingROTFL…
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