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.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike,
always wear white.
A week in, Vista seem more to me to be little more than a hardware-intensive visual update. I'm very happy to have the built-in firewall, and though the Cancel or Allow pop-up is annoying and quite humourous at the same time, I've grown to appreciate the motivation behind it. With Windows, you need this sort of careful protection in ways you don't with other OSes.
Past that, though, it seems to be just a new skin on top of Windows, often for the worse. The networking control panels are particularly hard to operate with dialup, in large part due to an over-reliance on HTML navigation paradigms. Internet Explorer seems to be just under the [new] skin everywhere you look, and rather than providing good navigational clues from one pane to the next, I'm often hitting the "back" button I never expected would exist.
Occasionally, I'm hit by the impression that Vista just isn't finished. Once, I received a dialog box that Aero, apparently a fancy-smancy Quartz Extreme/Aqua parallel, was slowing my performance down. Unfortunately I have Vista Home Basic, which shouldn't have Aero. When I clicked the link for help, I was told that help file didn't exist on my version of the OS. That Windows Live Mail can't check Hotmail... but that Windows Live Mail Beta claims to [1]... is another example.
[1] I don't know if it's telling the truth yet; it starts with an error telling me I need to be connected to the net. I am, dang it!
In any event, I've only lost one peripheral so far to the lack of Vista drivers, but it's one of my scanners which I'd like to keep *coughcough* at least until I can find the power supply to the other *coughcough*. To use it, I'll need to install Win2k on my Vista machine, which apparently requires some new hoop jumping.
This one has been recently updated, and doesn't seem to have the same sorts of errors cropping up as this one does.
Ekit is a free open source Java HTML editor applet and application. The Ekit standalone also allows for HTML to be loaded and saved, as well as serialized and saved as an RTF. It is approaching its first production release version.
I'm not sure why Sun's Java coders don't support a sort of minimalist mindset as part of their Ivory Tower Syndrone, but they don't. This is not news, and I believe I complained about this the last time I acquired a Windows laptop and was trying to find a decent RSS aggregator. Regardless, it hurts to see the pain again.
JNN is a decent RSS aggregator, notoriously referred to as James Gosling's "weekend hack." It did all your RSS reader needed to do. Unfortunately it's since had one heck of a lot of dependencies added to it, which I'll paste here for those not lucky enough to be registered java.net members.
It's annoying when people make code this incestuous. I'm not going on a limb when I say the full power of each of these libs is not necessary for the application to work, but occasionally JNN utilizes only a few functions from a library because whatever developer (here's one possible culprit of many) was familiar with that other project.
I hate dependencies. If you're going to add them, make the application degrade gracefully if they aren't found. Right now, JNN just stops at its splash screen without so much as a dialog box. Slick. And for heaven's sake, include the danged libraries in the download to your app from the app's home page. Can this really be the home of the sorry as crap DefaultModels for their GUI renderers? (That is, when developing with Java, the kitchen, at least with respect to GUIs, is so bare/minimalist that it's nearly unusable, forcing you to roll your own objects rather than leaning heavily on the libraries.)
Skillz-a-plenty. Hopefully I'll finally bother to CVS the initial version and fork this one into something usable from a hacker's point of view.
Though I should have already known, it was awfully nice to see that Java 6 came preinstalled on my new Dell.
java version "1.6.0-oem" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-oem-b104) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0-oem-b104, mixed mode, sharing)
posted by ruffin
at 8/25/2007 02:54:00 PM
I don't know, but from MacWorld's description of iMovie '08, it sounds like a real step backwards. Posting to YouTube is a natural and helpful feature that's sorely lacking for any Mac users under the age of about 33, but why the heck would Apple gut so much of the rest of it? From MacWorld's "First Look":
Unfortunately, iMovie ’08 also offers no support for third-party plug-ins, choking off (for now anyway) a healthy niche business that has provided effects and transitions not found in iMovie itself.
Forget about the convenience of setting bookmarks to locate sections of your movie while editing.
Gone, too, are DVD chapter markers—Apple clearly believes that the future of distribution is online or via mobile devices, because the link between iMovie and iDVD is now tenuous at best. You’ll have to export your movie [from iMovie '08] to QuickTime, open it in iMovie HD 6, and add markers there before pushing it out to iDVD if you want to retain the capability to have multiple chapters on a DVD.
[emph mine]
Wow. And all this comes with a sys req of a G5 or an Intel Mac, as I've lamented previously. It's no wonder Apple's offering to replace the new version of iMovie with the old, free of charge. Kinda like Apple's support of 3D gaming, things sure seem rushed around here.
(Here's a nickel that iLife 08's release delay came from waiting on iMovie '08 to make it out of testing, and that things would have taken even longer if they hadn't started slashing features. Seems like I've blogged on that easy way out (and my taking it) before as well...)
posted by ruffin
at 8/15/2007 11:40:00 PM
Was surprised to find that the number of comments at Tikkabik, a blog by pretty much the guy in fairly reputable Mac game reviews, Peter Cohen, gets about as many (and, from the evidence I've seen to date, possibly fewer) comments than this crummy, nearly personal-life free blog of mine.
Go read and give Mr. Cohen a piece of your mind, dangit.
posted by ruffin
at 8/10/2007 08:07:00 PM
Ouch. I was about to recommend a G4 iMac-using family member to upgrade to the recently released iLife '08, but then read its system requirements:
iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or fast
It also needs OS X 10.4, which eliminates this family member's computer on two counts.
In any event, this "completely redesigned" iMovie shows that, at least in-house, the G3 and G4 are D-E-D [sic] dead to Apple. In the latter case, that seems a little quick.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has this to say about the inclusion (and closing up) of FreeBSD in OS X:
And I'm a big fan of open source software and we use a lot of it at Apple (wrapped up in our own proprietary code and sold for big money, of course -- thanks, suckas!)
I continue to have very little idea why anyone would release an OS worth of code using a BSD license other than the hope to reach nirvana. The difference between what's happened with FreeBSD (sucked into OS X; good luck seeing that again) and KHTML (sucked into Safari, but LGPL licensed, now unforking with the original codebase) is the perfect compare and contrast for how Free software works in a capitalistic society.
Buy used books, listen to RMS 80% of the time, and, at night, always wear white.
I like Mr. Gruber, but this is a little too optimistic:
What is it about this “146,000 activations” number that has rotted out the minds of the business press? If you care about opening weekend iPhone sales, the number that matters is 270,000, which is how many phones Apple sold. As for the effect on Apple’s stock price since the iPhone went on sale, the stock is up. It closed at $122 on June 29; as I type this it’s at $137.
As I type, it's $130 and falling, almost to the level where I'd told myself to buy more. (Aside: I really need an online stock trading account.)
As the register said, are there really 100k people (more importantly, over 1/3) who bought one to use simply as a fancy iPod without a phone? Possibly, but I wonder how many thought they'd get rich quick, buy 'em up, and resell. There are only 527 on ebay right now.
It really is strange. Are there about to be a swarm of returns?
posted by ruffin
at 8/01/2007 10:44:00 AM
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