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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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| Sunday, April 30, 2006 | |
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It may not perform perfectly, but wow does the command gg=G go a long ways towards making you html purty when you're using VIm as your text editor. I'm pretty anal about whitespace in my code, as my hack for inserting it into SQL when using SQuirreL SQL might show. It's obviously not perfect, as this might show, but it ain't bad: 145: <tr style="height: 12.75pt;... posted by ruffin at 4/30/2006 10:53:00 PM |
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| Saturday, April 29, 2006 | |
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I wonder at times why The Gimp hasn't become more successful. Certainly for a while it was billed even by coworkers more in the know about image manipulation than myself as pretty much an even trade-out for Photoshop for 80% of practical Photoshop users. That is to say, there are a ton of non-graphic design experts out there using Photoshop when they don't need to be shelling out that kind of dough. The Gimp worked well. Lately The Gimp's Windows installer has gotten pretty friendly, to the point that anyone who would be savvy enough to use its tools should be able to install it with ease. This is great news. So why aren't many students and professional graphic designers using open source's most useful piece of desktop software? My first reaction is that there's likely some issue with local Adobe sales reps giving schools good discounts, and I'd like to think The Gimp is at least partially to blame for the price differential, if there is one. At the same time, people are [still] learning Photoshop for pretty trivial tasks, not The Gimp, so in the future, well, I think we know where the user base is headed. Why do I tend to use Macs? If I had to guess, it's because I used Apple IIe's through my younger days and the LC was as good as it got when I was studying Pascal. Getting students used to your app while they're students is pretty important. Aren't many Photoshop filters compatible with The Gimp? I just wonder what the barriers to entry are that haven't been knocked down. It's never been price, seemingly hasn't been feature set, isn't preformance thanks to Moore, and is no longer installation. Guess I'm due to try Photoshop again to see what I must be missing... posted by ruffin at 4/29/2006 07:23:00 PM |
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Every had Task Manager swap from its useful, tabbed self into a tabless meter that insists on floating above your other windows, with no clear way of going back to the UI you've grown to know and love? The Old New Thing : Where did my Task Manager tabs and buttons go?: Where did my Task Manager tabs and buttons go? Ah, welcome to 'Tiny Footprint Mode'. This mode exists for the ultrageeks who want to put a tiny little CPU meter in the corner of the screen. To go back to normal mode, just double-click a blank space in the border. Phew. Thank heavens. posted by ruffin at 4/29/2006 05:05:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, April 25, 2006 | |
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In a complete 180 from my typical "as if code rusted" schtick, I was awfully surprised to read the following from Dan Knight at LowEndMac.com: If you're dependent on Classic, as we are at Low End Mac with Claris HomePage and Photoshop 5.5 (which I find a lot faster than Photoshop Elements 3.0), stick with PowerPC hardware for now and pick up a PowerBook. You know, good for him. Yet I find it almost impossible to imagine someone (again, in complete contradiction to my usual stance, in a sense) who hasn't replaced everything they did in Classic with something in OS X native-land, assuming they've got hardware that'll run X admirably. I don't even install Classic on my Macs anymore, though I will admit to needing to find a cheap SE so that I can run vMac and the original Civilization and MacWrite. If I had a 366 MHz G3, I'd be all over OS 9. If I were in the market for the new 17" MacBook Knight is discussing, well, I think I'd also be in the market for OS X replacements for my software. ;^) posted by ruffin at 4/25/2006 08:52:00 PM |
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When a computer of some sort becomes an audience for text -- anywhere down the line -- some interesting products result. Item name: Volkswagen : Rabbit PICK UP 1982 VW RABBIT PICKUP BIO DIESEL TOYOTA TDI CADDY So, um, what does Toyota have to do with a VW Pickup? Not much, but it sure makes the truck pop up in the alerts of people looking for Toyotas on ebaymotors. Another popular move is to say something a car is not, I've noticed, like that your Oldsmobile Cutlass is "NOT 442" (442 is a popular performance package that could be ordered on a Cutlass). Perhaps the most clever use of text designed for software, in these cases search engines of some sort, is VB.NET. It's freaking impossible to find things for Visual Basic 6.0 through Google now. Rather, it's nearly impossible to limit your search to VB6 and not get back solutions/matches that only work in VB.NET. Why? Because nobody pre-.NET knew that adding the 6.0 (or 3.0, etc) would be so useful. Microsoft managed an embrace and extend of articles written for past products, turning the searches the articles enabled pre-.NET into advertisements for Microsoft's new (and, let me be clear, not necessarily better) way of programming things. Because of the lack of version numbers in past articles, they could be easily appropriated and co-opted by the new .NET release. Microsoft could have named their new release basic.NET or the like, which would have made some sense, as they broke the incredibly high level of backwards compatibility in VB6- with .NET. Heck, you could still use line numbers in VB6 if you wanted, and most of the time pasting VB3 into 6 didn't give you any headaches. Now there's obsolescence, and the old articles, thanks to their name and Google, unwittingly are used to push you "forward". Perhaps at some point I'll come back and write this with words that are easier to understand. Ever wish you had iSight (*sigh*; I /just/ got the pun) built into your computer? posted by ruffin at 4/25/2006 10:26:00 AM |
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| Monday, April 24, 2006 | |
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There are times in one's life where they must apologize. This might be one for me. It turns out SQrL's problem with tying up the processor for no good reason on my iBook (see previous post from today) might be SQrL's problem. I haven't noticed this sort of wastefulness from SQrL on my Windows boxen, but my Java app, The Digest Handler, is only taking up 0.2-0.3% of the processor's time when idling. More than native apps, but much, much less than 10%. I'm not sure where exactly to place blame for this one, and SQrL's GUI is a bit more complicated than The Digest Handler's, but it seems to be at least marginally more problematic than the lazy "Blame Canada", er, Apple, approach. posted by ruffin at 4/24/2006 06:06:00 PM |
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I left SQuirreL-SQL running last night, so it was running while I was "enjoying the wireless (battery-powered) life" on my iBook today. I found out that I left SQrL running because my battery seemed to be running down quite a bit faster than usual. This happened on my iBook 500 eventually, but apparently b/c that battery's juices gave out. Apparently not so quite yet here -- the culprit was the 10-15% drain on the processor SQrL constantly lodges, whether it's connected to anything or not, even if it isn't being displayed! Why can't Java on Mac be as good as other Java imps? For what they lose by not being Sun, you'd hope they'd gain by being Apple. In other news, got in a wreck today (sandwiched between some other vehicles), and the insurance shop runs claims through what's pretty obviously a DOS system running in a full-screen window on Windows. This is where I borrow, yet again, the phrase, "as if code rusted." You'd think we'd do better in industry to concentrate on making the app run great in hardware designed specifically (and increasingly) for the task at hand rather than continue to play push-you-pull-me with soft- and hard-ware. Why should every industry have to retrain their employees simply because Microsoft decided every developer should buy .NET? My insurance co. doesn't buy it (yet). As long as I get my cash fairly and quickly (don't hold breath) -- or at least as quickly and fairly as most everyone else in the same situation (gasp!) -- they should stick with what they've got. Most workers "need" email, possibly a browser (though I'd argue that for many), and an industry-specific app or two. They don't need general-purpose PCs. Recently on one of the StarMax lists to which I subscribe some fellow posted that upgrading for him wasn't an option. He'd been using some app on his StarMax for years and it wouldn't run in OS X. Macs are particularly bad for backwards compat, but he has a point. What in the world did new systems have to offer, other than software that worked differently? That's not always a good thing. (Wish I could find the danged post...) And finally, what in the goodness makes iTerm suck up so danged much of my proc's power when I'm hacking five or six php files in syntax-highlighted VIm? I love the transparency, but goodness. iTerm has now passed World of Warcraft as the app most likely to get the iBook's fan started. posted by ruffin at 4/24/2006 03:13:00 PM |
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| Sunday, April 16, 2006 | |
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I finally have an answer, of sorts, for the times when I'm asked about the Wikipedia and its use. I say that it's much like a cop show when they have a hot lead that wouldn't stand up in court. You know, perhaps they broke into a proverbial perp's trunk without the perp's consent or a warrant and found cocaine/money/the holy grail. They know the perp's guilty now and can practically eliminate other suspects, which gives them the benefit of not wasting time in the wrong place any more. Problem is the info isn't worth anything by itself. Without a second source, they'll look like Dan Rather reaching the point where he's got his back to the wall, his shirttails on fire and the bill collector[] at the door (sorry). They know the facts, but haven't a case. That's the Wikipedia. It's great at telling you what you need to find in a reputable source and can save a lot of time supplementing your research, but that's about it. Though, since academics et al seem to have a real issue with encyclopedias anyhow, it doesn't sound like a position that's much worse than when I would flip through The World Book in middle school. posted by ruffin at 4/16/2006 08:29:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, April 12, 2006 | |
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I lied. NVu is not good. Great place for a document to be birthed, but a horrible place to live. Added extraneous tags and newlines all over the freakin' place, and once you clean up you're liable to have a maintenance nightmare. The only html editor is a good text editor. posted by ruffin at 4/12/2006 12:08:00 PM |
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| Sunday, April 09, 2006 | |
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I've wanted to use my Mac to burn VCDs for a while, but never enough to shell out for Roxio's Toast. I was suspicious there were command-line applications that would do the trick on OS X, yet I was never able to stumble over the right ones. Welp, finally there's an app that takes all the searching out and can almost literally take you from a .mov file to a VCD with about two clicks, MMT-EZ. Here's its own description: MMT-EZ is an easy and complete solution to take your iMovie project to DVD or VideoCD. It does not claim to compete with professional applications, but hey for FREE, all the basic features are there, from encoding to burning. Quite accurate. The only glitch I had the first time I tried was that I didn't load up the drive with a blank disc before starting. The second time through, I inserted a disc and, when I came back several hours later (not sure how long it took), the VCD was half-way out of the drive, waiting on me. Neat stuff. No (well, few) frills, but it sure saves a lot of Google time. posted by ruffin at 4/09/2006 06:20:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, April 05, 2006 | |
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This is a very bad idea: Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. Apple's letting people dual boot Windows alongside OS X on new Mac hardware instead of adopting a model more like that of Mac on Linux that allows you to run OS X within a window once you've booted into Linux. Make sense? What Apple needs to do is to allow people to run Windows in a window on OS X, so that OS X is right there, ready to do things just a little bit easier than booting up something separate in Windows. iTunes on OS X, Mail, etc, would likely take over as users primary apps of choice, and you'd slowly wean people away from Windows. As it is, Apple's becoming a hardware -- stylish, sure, but still hardware -- vendor. That's not where they're going to be most profitable, I don't believe. posted by ruffin at 4/05/2006 05:25:00 PM |
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| Monday, April 03, 2006 | |
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This, ultimately, makes a lot of sense: This is significant because it means that Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing, and it will influence industry-standard testing methodologies going forward, possibly including Mac OS X testing. We speculate that Apple will now develop Windows drivers for Intel Macs like the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processors. You will probably still need to buy your own copy of Windows XP (or Vista), but this is exciting stuff. So to make OS X run on generic hardware is illegal, but running Windows on Mac hardware ain't, and is, in fact, even encouraged? I hate to reference Joel's tipping point blog again, but I will (well, have). Now there's really no reason not to buy a Mac when you go in for your next Windows box upgrade other than price, and even that's somewhat debatable if you're into paying for stylish computers. While you're there, it sounds like Apple is convinced that if you use Windows from within OS X, you'll find yourself sticking around. Sounds like a good bet to me. posted by ruffin at 4/03/2006 12:38:00 PM |
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