Blog
Will Faught
May 2011
A Review Of The 1977 Turing Award Lecture By John Backus
By Edsger W. Dijkstra. I’ve never seen shit talking in scholarly criticism before: If that indication is correct, his objection is less against von Neumann programs than against his own clumsy way of trying to understand them. Some of that classic Dijkstra charm.
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142 Plane Crash Victims Were Statistically More Likely To Have Died In A Car Crash
My thoughts exactly. Fear of a plane crash isn’t irrational; it’s fearing the lack of control, which you don’t have in a plane crash.
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United tickets: $506. Travelodge room: $226. Enterprise car: $226. University publishing fee: $56. Master of Science in Computer Science: Priceless.
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I have Facebook and Twitter configured to copy everything I publish on my blog. Occasionally, I want to edit a post, but it’s already been copied, so I have to edit the same content in multiple places. The phrase “social surgery” popped into my head, and I thought I was very clever for thinking it up, but it turns out that I was beaten to it.
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I watched Inside Job a few weeks ago. The visuals used to explain collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were excellent. I actually hadn’t understood what credit default swaps were until I watched this movie. I thought the interviews of Satyajit Pas and Eliot Spitzer were wonderfully insightful. Be sure to watch their extra scenes, which alone are worth renting the movie. It was refreshing to get the Icelandic narrative and perspective of the financial disaster.
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I finally bought Apple’s wireless track pad and keyboard for my iMac. No more awkward wires! Free at last! At first I didn’t like the idea of a track pad for a desktop, but it grew on me in the store. I like the two-finger scrolling too much to do without it.
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Interoperation For Lazy And Eager Evaluation
My dissertation for Master of Science in Computer Science was just approved and published by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.
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I’ve had a Blu-ray player for a couple years now, and I’ve yet to see BD-Live content I like. Usually, it’s just ads for other movies. One time I saw a small ad in the corner of a Blu-ray interface for a movie ad in the BD-Live content. Somehow the movie studios have found yet another way to market to us, and have convinced us to pay for the privilege.
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Secret passages for your modern home. I love the chess lock.
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April 2011
George Bush was a bad president. Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No actual person or event is depicted.
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I watched Aliens today. In the scene where the ship is dropping to the planet below, the pilot says over the radio, “In the pipe. Five by five.” I realized that despite having seen this film several times, I had no idea what she meant, other than some general notion of well-being. My curiosity was piqued, so I looked around online and discovered that by “in the pipe,” she meant the ship was following the correct course, and by “five by five,” she meant her radio transmission quality was perfect.
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Donald Knuth: Asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much.
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IPhone Calendar Needs Improvement
I wholeheartedly agree with Ben Brooks and Marco Arment: we need a new calendar view that presents the next three days like in a week view and then puts events for the following week or two in a list, all visible at once. Using landscape orientation would be perfect for this. At least give us a week view. Event repetition needs the flexibility that Google Calendar provides: I want events that can repeat every Tuesday and Thursday.
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I tapped to look at the subscription information in the NYTimes iPad app. Apparently, one can save either $19 or $34 at the same time when paying $0.99 for either digital access plan. What is this, non-deterministic saving? Neither digital access plan interests me. I have no problem paying $5 per week for quality news coverage, but not letting me use their apps on all my devices is a deal breaker.
ideas ipad new york times opinions paywall
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Samsung Clones IPhone, Apple Sues
It’s like an iPhone from an alternate, yet similar, universe. Ars nailed the image comparison.
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The Science Of Why We Don’t Believe Science
Fascinating. Ironically, this confirms what I thought about conservatives.
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Eric D. Snider: Did you know that when she had her first meetings with the AOL staff, she brought them Greek cookies and regaled them with amusing personal anecdotes?? It’s true! Then she taught them traditional Greek folk songs! Then they all danced a tsamiko, drank ouzo, and ate gyros and baklava! Then Huffington emitted a bone-chilling shriek, unhinged her jaw, threw over the conference room table, and devoured everyone present.
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Marco Arment: Comments have always been a dysfunctional medium. They solve a real problem: authors’ need for validation, criticism, and feedback. But they solve it in a way that discourages civility and following up, and encourages hatred and spam.
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Kevin Drum: …I’d say it’s a well deserved flip of the bird. Republicans, as you can imagine, are less enthusiastic, and this bit of the speech undoubtedly accounts for most of the bile being tossed around on Fox and elsewhere today. But hey — sometimes the truth hurts. And all Obama did was speak the simple truth. In the past decade, Republicans slashed taxes, started two wars, approved a big unfunded entitlement, and presided over an economic collapse that cratered tax revenues and required massive government spending to counteract.
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Philip C. Plait, Bad Astronomy: With luck…we can plug up the drain of knowledge and topple the egg of ignorance. I love that there’s an egg-of-something.
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Seriously, They Still Make You?
It’s been a while since I’ve run across a full-blown Flash web site. I ran across this one while shopping. This one has got to take the cake for gratuitous, gaudy presentation. Not only is it showy, but it’s slower because of it. Someone needs to bring them out of the late ’90s.
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Getting Comfortable With Contracts
How to deal with business contracts as a small business owner.
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No-Brainer Pinboard Improvements
Some no-brainer improvements to Pinboard would be to fill in the URL title automatically like Delicious and display a large colored button to add new bookmarks so I don’t have to hunt for it in the links at the top of the page.
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I just tried to FaceTime someone for the first time, but I couldn’t find the button for it in the Contacts app. It turns out that there’s a FaceTime option in the phone settings you have to turn on to enable it and see the buttons.
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I recently bought a MacBook Air (13", 256 GB SSD, 4 GB RAM, 2.13 GHz) and a Canon S95. My prior digital camera was several years old and was showing its age. It was very difficult to get low-light shots to turn out right, and most of my pictures were low-light. The S95 is a godsend. I’ve only tried it out a little bit in my apartment so far, but even using the flash in near darkness (in my bathroom), the pictures look like they were taken with all the lights on.
canon s95 macbook air technology
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March 2011
Automated Compelling Reason Testing
Joel Spolsky: It turns out that nobody wrote the automated test to check if Vista provided users with a compelling reason to upgrade from XP.
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I tried out Minecraft today. All I did was mine blocks and build stuff. Didn’t see nighttime or zombies or spiders or anything else I’ve heard about. I was playing the free version, so maybe that stuff is paid only. The mining was surprisingly addictive, although it finally did get tiring after putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. I ended up with a bridge and a staircase-turret-fire-pit thingy that was quite a lot of work to make.
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Web Video Ad Conspiracy Theory
Fox.com and other web sites that stream TV episodes purposely use buggy video software so that it will crash and I’ll have to reload the page and watch the ads all over again.
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A few nights ago while lying in bed I put together a list of things that I don’t like about C: Side effects Weak typing Breakable semantics Simple types Design tends to put many cases into one struct No first-class functions No overflow/sign checks No homoiconicity or metacircular evaluation Weak macros Numerous code styles and conventions No namespaces Memory management Incorrect arithmetic Compiler-driven development Implementation-defined behavior No inherent or safe concurrency Multiple character sets Eager evaluation Encourages monolithic design Separate declarations and definitions No cheap container types like lists or tuples built in Difficult to reason about Debugging is necessary and primitive Declaration order matters I began to think about what I would change to improve it while keeping it attractive to current users.
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I love it! Way better than WYSIWYG formatting. Hats off to John Gruber.
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It took me several hours to figure out how to enable a Silverlight custom control to be “activated” by the space bar or enter keys like Button. It turns out when a control gets input events, it isn’t automatically given focus (i.e. OnGotFocus isn’t called). You have to call Focus() yourself. Hope this saves someone else some time.
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Silverlight Inherited Properties
I was working on a Silverlight control template last night and wondered which dependency properties are inherited and which aren’t. It’s a good idea to bind those that aren’t in the template so the dependency properties for UIElement, FrameworkElement, and Control work as expected for your control. However, I couldn’t find a list of inherited dependency properties in the documentation or elsewhere online. I discovered a somewhat reliable way to determine such a list: Look at the documentation for counterparts in WPF.
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Dedicated Hardware Needed For Flash
Ken Tindell: For embedded processors, it’s a problem: again, it’s CPU time and power consumption that makes things run sluggishly and runs the battery down. And the bigger the screen, the more data to be handled. The solution is again to get Flash to use specially-designed hardware for doing all this work: to have dedicated hardware pathways for converting video, for layering graphics and for scaling the outputs so that the huge amount of data being handled doesn’t hit the CPU and soak up memory bandwidth.
flash performance power smartphones technology
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A moving account of a Japanese Apple store sheltering people made homeless by the tsunami and helping them contact loved ones via their wifi network and computers.
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Dilbert: Teamwork means you can’t pick the side that’s right.
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Swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of the current, which is usually narrow. I’ve often heard how dangerous riptides are, but never how to save yourself from one.
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How well would the late Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Dr. Richard P. Feynman do in a technical interview at a software company?
feynman interview software technology
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Only $5! Next to that, Microsoft’s prices are exorbitant. I love the Git support and the integration of Interface Builder into a single window.
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Going With HTML Instead Of Silverlight
Compares HTML and Silverlight development by a variety of criteria, and concludes that HTML is a better long term bet. I’ve never seen it broken down like this before.
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February 2011
Mac OS Lion looks promising: Choose and organize apps like iOS Full screen apps Better way to see running apps File changes are saved automatically File versions are stored and accessible like Time Machine Restarting saves the state of running apps and restores them automatically Easy file sharing with any Mac on your network Server with wiki These are substantial new features that I would love to have. This is the kind of innovation I admire.
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