Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

I'll keep this brief. I've had iOS 7 since Wednesday afternoon, and carry my iPod with me pretty much everywhere. It plus a cheap Android phone serve as my poor man's iPhone for now.

Music is much improved. Finally, albums.
iOS 7 runs much more slowly than iOS 6 on my iPod touch.

The touch has essentially the same innards as the iPhone 4S.
There's often some noticeable glitchiness and jumpiness.

The control panel pop-up finally makes brightness reasonably accessible.

Siri can also bring up brightness.

It's actually quite hard to get the control panel pop-up to come up. I often have to swipe several times before anything happens.
I've noticed some glitchiness playing music with my iOS-aware car receiver. For example, I lost the ability to pause and seek at one point until I unplugged and replugged the iPod.
There are cosmetic improvements. That's nice, I guess.
Radio is fine, but obviously not great without 3G service. ;^) I use it more in iTunes. But like Pandora, it quickly moves too far away from my original station seed, and I'm back to my playlists.

Why can't Pandora or iTunes Radio figure out when I want bands with female frontmen [sic]? Sheesh.

The rest seems to be small improvements. Mail, for example, seems to keep flagged email from a person at the top of any thread you have with them so you actually see it. That's smart.

One message is clear: iOS 7 is pitching itself at the iPhone 5+. I haven't touched an iPhone 5S, but I'm guessing it's intentionally the only place you get the iOS 7 experience as it was designed. That's the advantage of being Apple; they can design to whatever hardware they want, backwards compat be damned

I wouldn't go back to iOS 6, but it's obvious iOS 7 isn't smooth (yet?) on my current hardware. That said, it's just good enough I saved my cash and bought an iPhone 4S on Virgin Mobile rather than shelled out the extra dollars for the 5S on AT&T.

I really can't see getting an iPhone 5C at this point, when the 5 is the same phone and runs $50 less. I could almost see spending the extra $200 to get a 5 on Virgin, but Sprint, which powers Virgin, doesn't have LTE here yet, and, at $30/month, I figured I'd rather upgrade to an iPhone 6 six months earlier.

Labels: fimp, ios

Get Kingsoft Office Professional 2013 (Win) free | The Cheapskate - CNET News:

al_chirico

@Cool_Daddy For me, I like being able to actually read the data file. The xxxX formated files are XML files. So, If you know XML or HTML, you can just search the file for something you're looking for. This is especially helpful if you're passing a xxxX file to another program. You can just deconstruct the file as input data. Try doing that with an earlier xxx file. Just my 2 cents.

I read through this comment that's essentially in favor of the use of Microsoft's "Office Open XML" file formats and came away with an unexpected take-home. First, why should we care how hard it is to open a .doc file in a text editor at this point? We have plenty of excellent, freeware applications that can do that job for us (AbiWord, though seemingly dead, is still one of my favorites). There's no real practical advantage for having a .doc file in a human readable file format now, is there, minus outliers like, "I just installed my OS and have no internet access and MUST edit the contents of my file in the 'pack-in' text editor!"

But then I shift from the consumer's pov to Microsoft's. If the long game says that proprietary file formats will be broken and provide no (again, long-term) advantage, why bother with them at all? Why not just use XML for your file format? The format's so complex at this point, the degree of obfuscation in XML versions of the files is still tremendous. You're past the point of something simply reproduced -- heck, even MS's Mac Business Unit had a heck of a time pulling it off, and that was an inside job! It's the difference between html made by Seamonkey Composer and html made by Word's "Save As HTML". HTML is supposed to be a nice, human-editable format. Yet one product is pretty easy to edit by hand, and the other nearly impossible. (See also AbiWord's Save As HTML for docs; beautiful stuff.)

So why move from bytecode to XML if you're Microsoft? XML might be a better tool for serializing docs, and puts contracts with governments that demand "free and open" (and therefore, ostensibly, forward compatible and archival) formats back on the table and kill the "open" movement flat.

And there's really no difference to the end user now either, minus those guys who post to CNET and claim to be opening/editing their docs in Notepad. ;^)

Microsoft moving to XML seems better, but, in the end, holds the status quo. (C#'s release as an open standard, however, had much different, more beneficial results. Wonder if that was expected?)

Labels: microsoft, ooxml, open, xml

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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Saturday, September 28, 2013
Research hitting the road, purposefully avoiding the classroom I couldn't think of a good title. Sorry. I just like the way this quote (in context; read the link. it's great.) points out that research must hit the road directly, and making the practice heuristic can be a detriment to getting things done. What you learned in undergrad, even the ability to make what you learned easy for others to understand, isn't always enough to become a practitioner. Take that, Nemo. From Eric Lippert in 2008: Arrays considered somewhat harmful - Fabulous Adventures In Coding - Site Home - MSDN Blogs: The difficulty is, pedagogically, that it is hard to discuss the merits of those tools without already having down concepts like classes, interfaces, generics, asymptotic performance, query expressions, and so on. It’s a hard problem for the writer and for the teacher. Fortunately, for me, it's not a problem that I personally have to solve. Labels: coding, teaching posted by ruffin at 9/28/2013 12:11:00 PM

Friday, September 27, 2013
Developer over 40? Congratulations, Mr. Skillz. Is the "over 40" part something I added for my own self-aggrandizement? Yes. Kevin Montrose: One interpretation of those results, which I have no additional evidence for, is that you don’t really get worse at things over time you mostly just learn new things. That would gel with recent observations about older developers being more skilled than younger ones. [from the page to which that links:] Older software programmers have long complained of age discrimination. But according to study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, companies should think twice before hiring a young hot-shot hacker over a seasoned developer. Interesting compared to two links I just put into draft wondering if the reason it's better to hire young is because they're more willing to take risks and receive amorphous rewards. You know, that young kids will do anything for "fake internet points". Of course we've got lots of counter-arguments. One is that folks that stink at programming and enrolled in that at school "to get a good job" stop. Perhaps there are fewer old bad programmers because, professionally speaking, they die out. Also, since the NCSU study looks at StackOverflow a ton, you're also getting a cross-section of developers who either 1.) Continue to act young, and like fake internet points, or 2.) Had a community-minded orientation from the start. I'd argue that #2 is a group of people who are better employees from the start. Still, a good link to put on the old resume, eh? Labels: age, coding, stackoverflow posted by ruffin at 9/27/2013 02:05:00 PM

Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Managing Visual Studio windows when you change displays with your laptop Can I save the window layout in Visual Studio 2010/2012? - Stack Overflow: There's a nice Visual Studio plugin that lets you save and load custom window layouts: http://perspectives.codeplex.com (you can also find it in the VS gallery). I use it because I often have to switch between a three screens layout(when my laptop is docket) and a single screen layout (laptop display only). Wish I'd googled that a little earlier on. I've driven myself crazy rearranging windows when I go from three screens docked in the office to one with the laptop on its own to two at home (where I don't have my usb video out... at some point, I should consider getting another usb to video, but my personal Lenovo can output to two more displays and its built-in display doesn't stink like my work computer's does. (Overshare alert.)) Labels: noteToSelf, visual studio posted by ruffin at 9/24/2013 10:08:00 AM

Monday, September 23, 2013
Apple Fail: AppleTV Bricking Apple Pulls Apple TV 6.0 Update Following Reports of Bricking - Mac Rumors: While some devices were bricked, rendering them completely unusable, others experienced Wi-Fi connection issues and other problems that necessitated an iTunes restore. Restoring requires a micro USB cable to connect the Apple TV to a PC or Mac with iTunes. Labels: apple fail posted by ruffin at 9/23/2013 02:08:00 PM

SourceForge installer includes "offers" now Learn More About Software Offers - SourceForge.net: At installation time you'll be prompted to consider one or more third-party offers, which you’re under no obligation to accept. However, we hope you’ll consider it, because by doing that you'll make possible for us to share advertising revenues with those projects. (This is from my latest download of FileZilla -- "Transmit, when are you going xplat?" he asked wistfully. ;^D) Even in the age of GitHub, I like SourceForge. You know [okay okay, you don't; I could upload any zip I want to SF if I want] simply by virtue of the URL what you're getting -- open source software. But I hate this sort of forced spam. Java/Oracle has been doing it lately too, which the "opt in" checkboxes clicked, so a Nexter is in trouble. Java's is classless. SF's is close. They have Decline buttons in SF's and there is a nice link asking, "Why am I seeing this?" that hits the page, above, but I really don't like the way cash has invaded installation of f/Free software. It might be micropayment/fundraising time for SF? I don't know, but I do know that I hate this. Labels: filezilla, hats of money, sourceforge posted by ruffin at 9/23/2013 10:56:00 AM

Saturday, September 21, 2013
iOS 7 First Impressions on a 5th gen iPod touch I'll keep this brief. I've had iOS 7 since Wednesday afternoon, and carry my iPod with me pretty much everywhere. It plus a cheap Android phone serve as my poor man's iPhone for now. Music is much improved. Finally, albums. iOS 7 runs much more slowly than iOS 6 on my iPod touch. The touch has essentially the same innards as the iPhone 4S. There's often some noticeable glitchiness and jumpiness. The control panel pop-up finally makes brightness reasonably accessible. Siri can also bring up brightness. It's actually quite hard to get the control panel pop-up to come up. I often have to swipe several times before anything happens. I've noticed some glitchiness playing music with my iOS-aware car receiver. For example, I lost the ability to pause and seek at one point until I unplugged and replugged the iPod. There are cosmetic improvements. That's nice, I guess. Radio is fine, but obviously not great without 3G service. ;^) I use it more in iTunes. But like Pandora, it quickly moves too far away from my original station seed, and I'm back to my playlists. Why can't Pandora or iTunes Radio figure out when I want bands with female frontmen [sic]? Sheesh. The rest seems to be small improvements. Mail, for example, seems to keep flagged email from a person at the top of any thread you have with them so you actually see it. That's smart. One message is clear: iOS 7 is pitching itself at the iPhone 5+. I haven't touched an iPhone 5S, but I'm guessing it's intentionally the only place you get the iOS 7 experience as it was designed. That's the advantage of being Apple; they can design to whatever hardware they want, backwards compat be damned I wouldn't go back to iOS 6, but it's obvious iOS 7 isn't smooth (yet?) on my current hardware. That said, it's just good enough I saved my cash and bought an iPhone 4S on Virgin Mobile rather than shelled out the extra dollars for the 5S on AT&T. I really can't see getting an iPhone 5C at this point, when the 5 is the same phone and runs $50 less. I could almost see spending the extra $200 to get a 5 on Virgin, but Sprint, which powers Virgin, doesn't have LTE here yet, and, at $30/month, I figured I'd rather upgrade to an iPhone 6 six months earlier. Labels: fimp, ios posted by ruffin at 9/21/2013 10:19:00 AM

Thursday, September 19, 2013
Using a Apple Wireless Keyboard on Windows 7 uxsoft Apple Wireless Keyboard: AppleWirelessKeyboard is a small utility program for Windows that talks to the Apple Wireless Keyboard and responds to the Fn and Eject keys. So far so good. Had been using SharpKeys, but having fn-arrow key combos back is wonderful. If this keeps working well, I see a donation coming soon. Thank heavens. posted by ruffin at 9/19/2013 11:53:00 AM

Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Why use mashed proprietary when you can obfuscate? Get Kingsoft Office Professional 2013 (Win) free \| The Cheapskate - CNET News: al_chirico @Cool_Daddy For me, I like being able to actually read the data file. The xxxX formated files are XML files. So, If you know XML or HTML, you can just search the file for something you're looking for. This is especially helpful if you're passing a xxxX file to another program. You can just deconstruct the file as input data. Try doing that with an earlier xxx file. Just my 2 cents. I read through this comment that's essentially in favor of the use of Microsoft's "Office Open XML" file formats and came away with an unexpected take-home. First, why should we care how hard it is to open a .doc file in a text editor at this point? We have plenty of excellent, freeware applications that can do that job for us (AbiWord, though seemingly dead, is still one of my favorites). There's no real practical advantage for having a .doc file in a human readable file format now, is there, minus outliers like, "I just installed my OS and have no internet access and MUST edit the contents of my file in the 'pack-in' text editor!" But then I shift from the consumer's pov to Microsoft's. If the long game says that proprietary file formats will be broken and provide no (again, long-term) advantage, why bother with them at all? Why not just use XML for your file format? The format's so complex at this point, the degree of obfuscation in XML versions of the files is still tremendous. You're past the point of something simply reproduced -- heck, even MS's Mac Business Unit had a heck of a time pulling it off, and that was an inside job! It's the difference between html made by Seamonkey Composer and html made by Word's "Save As HTML". HTML is supposed to be a nice, human-editable format. Yet one product is pretty easy to edit by hand, and the other nearly impossible. (See also AbiWord's Save As HTML for docs; beautiful stuff.) So why move from bytecode to XML if you're Microsoft? XML might be a better tool for serializing docs, and puts contracts with governments that demand "free and open" (and therefore, ostensibly, forward compatible and archival) formats back on the table and kill the "open" movement flat. And there's really no difference to the end user now either, minus those guys who post to CNET and claim to be opening/editing their docs in Notepad. ;^) Microsoft moving to XML seems better, but, in the end, holds the status quo. (C#'s release as an open standard, however, had much different, more beneficial results. Wonder if that was expected?) Labels: microsoft, ooxml, open, xml posted by ruffin at 9/18/2013 01:03:00 PM

Saturday, September 14, 2013
In software, failure isn't failure. Enderle on Ballmer: "The other aspect of the talk that stuck with me was how Steve was going to meet with the top employees in the company to collaboratively make Microsoft better. This clearly didn’t happen and I think the pointed feedback he got may have driven a wedge between him and the employees. Over the next few years, rather than getting closer to the employees, he had been isolated from them and failures like Zune and Vista, which could have easily been anticipated and avoided, resulted." Failure happens in software development. If you execute everyone who fails, you're left only with those who do nothing. Failure isn't conventional failure in software development until someone's shortsighted enough to ignore when it initially happens or to treat it as such. Labels: business, microsoft posted by ruffin at 9/14/2013 09:05:00 AM

Friday, September 13, 2013
CSS Priority/Specificity html - CSS: Understanding the selector's priority / specificity - Stack Overflow: A selector's specificity is calculated as follows: count 1 if the declaration is from is a 'style' attribute rather than a rule with a selector, 0 otherwise (= a) (In HTML, values of an element's "style" attribute are style sheet rules. These rules have no selectors, so a=1, b=0, c=0, and d=0.) count the number of ID attributes in the selector (= b) count the number of other attributes and pseudo-classes in the selector (= c) count the number of element names and pseudo-elements in the selector (= d) The specificity is based only on the form of the selector. In particular, a selector of the form "[id=p33]" is counted as an attribute selector (a=0, b=0, c=1, d=0), even if the id attribute is defined as an "ID" in the source document's DTD. Winner winner. Labels: css, noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 9/13/2013 04:21:00 PM

Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Another cracked site, another burnt password Dear NotebookReview Forums User: We've discovered a security breach in the NotebookReview Forums. We are strongly encouraging you to change your passwords on the NotebookReview Forum and on any other systems where you use the same username and passwords. Well, if you reuse one throwaway login and password for lots of sites like this, that would really stink. I think I've mentioned on here before that sites like these cracking is becoming pretty commonplace. I wonder how many of these would have been prevented by folks upgrading their forum software. It looks like this one is vBulletin. I wonder if it was phpBB before. Labels: fail, security posted by ruffin at 9/11/2013 09:04:00 PM

Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Note to Starbucks: No more salads, please. Look, folks come to Starbucks to get work done. Coffee wakes you up. Tables hold laptops. WiFi allows you to do, well, anything you want over a VPN. You know what really, really stinks when you're trying to work? CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH. CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH. You know how I know? Because it's happening to me in a Starbucks right now. And I do have my headphones on. Salad and coffee shops don't mix. They don't. I don't pay $2-$5 for tea and a quiet snack for fun. I pay it to work for an hour. Okay? Labels: fail, starbucks posted by ruffin at 9/10/2013 06:43:00 PM

Monday, September 09, 2013
'Patent trolls' put brakes on S.F. transit app - SFGate 'Patent trolls' put brakes on S.F. transit app - SFGate: Many of the patents might not hold up in court, but it can easily cost $1 million to mount a defense. For a company whose business model is filing lawsuits, the only incremental cost of each new case is the filing fee - about $500. With decks stacked like that, most organizations simply surrender, often settling for tens of thousand of dollars. "It's a shakedown, it's extortion, but it's legal," said Julie Samuels, an attorney who is the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's easy to be a troll, it's cheap to be a troll, and it's totally unethical. It's exploiting a loophole in a broken system." Nothing stifles creative garage-built enterprises like the amorphous yet ever-present threat of nuclear patent trolls. If it's this easy to reinvent your patent in a cleanroom, you don't deserve protection. Labels: development, patents posted by ruffin at 9/09/2013 12:57:00 PM

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