Blog
Will Faught
February 2011
I just started experimenting with builds in Keynote. I’m amazed at how simple it is to make fairly complex animations. Everything is attractive and slick. $20 on the Apple App Store is a steal. PowerPoint 2010 is $139. Microsoft: Where is the app store already?
apple keynote microsoft powerpoint technology world
1 minute
A stranger who leaves their dog in their car parks near me at work sometimes. I know this because I can hear it yapping incessantly in the morning as I get out of my car and walk past. What terribly boring and cramped days it must have. I hope it shits all over their back seat.
1 minute
I woke up early this morning and found myself propped up on my elbow and spitting repeatedly on my pillow. I then realized that I had just been doing this in a dream. As far as I know, I’ve only sleepwalked once, but I’ve never heard of sleepspitting. Gross.
1 minute
Missed Blade Runner Opportunity
At one point Rachel (the replicant that Deckard hooks up with) asks Deckard if he’s ever taken the Voight-Kampff test (which determines whether someone is a replicant) himself. I’m surprised the story didn’t do more with this potential plot twist. Deckard’s character would have been more interesting had he wrestled with the suspicion that he too is a replicant.
1 minute
I’m surprised Facebook doesn’t offer a blog service. What better way to create a new source of information for advertisers and improve the attractiveness of the Facebook community? Ditch the notes, give us blogs.
1 minute
I used C quite a bit in college. Now I use C++ at work, and now I can really appreciate the relative simplicity and elegance of C. C++ just smells. C# seems to be a synthesis of the best qualities of C and Java. One of the great absurdities of computation is how widespread C++ is.
1 minute
The Cross Media Bar is the sleekest UI I’ve seen. Everything is ordered in a very structured, hierarchical way. You navigate it by doing up, down, left, and right movements that feel like drilling down into a tree, but look like a mix of scrolling a list and moving between pages. It has a very simple, minimal aesthetic, which pleases my own taste. I was disappointed to see that it won’t also be used in Sony’s NGP (PSP 2), but I can see that it wouldn’t make for a good touch interface as-is.
playstation sony technology xmb
1 minute
It’s been fascinating following the political unrest in Egypt the past couple weeks. I’m very excited for the Egyptian people and hope Mubarak will be ousted. I was struck when looking at pictures of the protests at how westernized their clothing was. I’d say that most of the people were dressed that way, although most of them are probably young. I hope this is all sorted out in time for me to tour there.
1 minute
This is the most useless documentation I’ve ever seen. Every Boolean property “gets a value that indicates” something. Inherited methods are mixed with the others. You have to drill down one page to see the list of overrides for a method name. I’ve seen some class docs explain what they do by restating the class name in sentence form. I pine for the Javadocs of yore.
documentation javadocs msdn technology
1 minute
I hate it when text isn’t selectable in a dialog box or window. Gee, maybe I’d like to look up exception 0x00000035 without having to squint and count zeroes.
1 minute
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: In a similar way, we can regard the evaluator as a very special machine that takes as input a description of a machine. Given this input, the evaluator configures itself to emulate the machine described… From this perspective, our evaluator is seen to be a universal machine. It mimics other machines when these are described as Lisp programs. This is striking. Try to imagine an analogous evaluator for electrical circuits.
lisp sicp technology universal machine
1 minute
I was given Quadrivium as a gift for Christmas and have been reading it on and off since then. It illustrates many of the ideas of the four classic liberal arts developed by Euclid, Archimedes, and many others: number, geometry, music, and cosmology. It’s not a particularly deep book, but it covers a wonderful array of topics, and has quite exquisite and detailed illustrations. When reading it, I was struck by the sheer lack of exposure I had had to a lot of these core ideas.
1 minute
It’s kinda crazy how high Apple’s stock is right now (currently $339). I wish I had invested more in it when it was only $90. I only considered buying their stock at the time because I believed in what they were doing, and didn’t really care about dividends or stock price fluctuations. I recently took stock of what I spend my money on and realized that Netflix is another company that I believe in, and would consider investing in without doing any research.
apple netflix nintendo stock technology world
2 minutes
OmniFocus Is Missing Location Notifications
OmniFocus for iPhone is a pretty great task organizer. You can even view a map of your surrounding area to see which tasks you can accomplish near your location. What confuses me is why they haven’t added what seems to me to be an obvious extension of this: location-based notifications. When I’m in the neighborhood of a QFC, I’d like my iPhone to notify me that I can get an errand done.
1 minute
Learn You A Haskell For Great Good!
I’ve been reading this Haskell tutorial, and I’m almost finished with it. Most of it was review for me, but the sections on functors, applicative functors, monoids, monads, and zippers are very thorough and invaluable references. I love the tone of the writing and the artwork. It’s so fanciful. I would totally buy this book if it were for sale. Check it out.
1 minute
I really like my Tumblr theme. It’s called Easy Reader, and it’s free. In the past, I’ve left blog services because I wasn’t satisfied with the blog themes they had available for free. I’m a big fan of simplicity. There’s just something satisfying about good presentation. Hopefully this will entice me to stick around and blog more.
1 minute
What is the percentage of households with internet access in the United States? 75%, estimated as of 2008. Wolfram Alpha is really cool.
internet access technology wolfram alpha world
1 minute
That’s when I woke up this morning. I went to bed around 12:30 AM. My body is dumb. The upside is that I got quite a bit done this morning before work. I want to try getting up regularly two or three hours earlier than usual to see if that makes any lasting impact on my productivity. I’ve never been a morning person, so I won’t hold my breath.
1 minute
January 2011
I think the next home computer setup I’ll have will be a MacBook Air combined with a wireless keyboard and mouse and an Apple 27" display. I like the idea of being able to take my whole digital presence on the go with me, but be able to plug in for some extra screen space if I need it. Having a dedicated computer for the desktop seems like overkill these days.
1 minute
Once again I’ve moved from Blogger to another blogging service, and once again Blogger has screwed me. I seem to be the only one who can’t export their posts from Blogger without getting an error. So, once again I’m starting a blog from scratch. I’m hoping I can write more regularly this time around. We’ll see.
1 minute
November 2010
Most of these are characters from Shakespeare plays. Pinch Nym Bottom Bumble Duncan Beadle Lennox Snare Cato Blunt Cinna Mortimer Juno Rook Percy Leonine Page Pander Porter Prium Snug Sprite Surrey Taurus Verges
1 minute
I haven’t much enjoyed playing Red Dead Redemption. Controls Despite using an analog stick to direct movement, your character, John, can only move on foot at four speeds. The two slowest are controlled alone by the analog stick. You hold a button to run and tap it to sprint. It’s mind boggling that you don’t have full analog control of John’s speed. Any speed slower than sprinting when on foot or riding a horse is intolerable.
games red dead redemption reviews rockstar world
7 minutes
October 2010
A great introduction to Haskell: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
1 minute
The big thing touted for Windows Phone 7 as the innovation over iPhone is hubs: information aggregated into one place and viewable at a glance. It seems to me that Apple could easily add such a feature to the home screen by letting you drag downward or upward to view a Dashboard like in Mac OS X that you can put widgets on that call out whatever information you care about—upcoming calendar events, missed calls, new messages, weather, whatever.
apple iphone mac microsoft technology windows phone
1 minute
September 2010
I recently bought a Kindle 3 to condense the space occupied by my book collection and to make it portable, searchable, annotatable, and replaceable. The average $10 per book isn’t bad, especially now when I only read a couple books a month. It’s light, slim, attractive, readable, and has long battery life. Reading the paper-like screen noticeably strains my eyes less than my iPad’s LCD screen. It’s somewhat astonishing that it can display images without using power.
1 minute
Microsoft recently released a beta of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve used it a little and have some initial impressions. Overall, it’s a much-needed improvement over 8. It’s a cross between Firefox and Chrome, incorporating features from each, although there are some 8 leftovers. The look is simple and clean and comes off as much more lightweight. It’s a pleasure to see and to use. The address bar and tabs area were set horizontally adjacent to each other.
browsers internet explorer microsoft reviews technology
4 minutes
I’m going to donate my old desktop computer. To be safe, I wanted to wipe the hard drive. I figured an Ubuntu Live CD would do the trick, and I almost got it to work by guessing the command, but I had mistakenly specified the partition (sda5) instead of the drive itself (sda). It worked like a charm. Here’s how I did it: sudo swapoff -a sudo shred -vfz /dev/sda
1 minute
I was loathe to get a media center PC because: it would be a living room eyesore, it would use a keyboard and a mouse instead of a remote, it would cost as much as a regular computer, and TV episode rentals would cost too much. I think Apple has finally solved these problems with their newest Apple TV: It’s tiny and black and can pull any media wirelessly from my desktop, I can use my iPhone to control it, it’s $100, and TV episode rentals are $1.
2 minutes
Despite wanting Firefox-like extensions for Safari, I only just tried Safari extensions. Gentle Status Bar and Middle-Click AutoScroll add Chrome-like behavior. AdBlock is a necessity for any clean experience. Delicous, Instapaper, and Add To Google Reader are invaluable when finding things to go back to. Add To Amazon Wish List is a good idea, but I sense it’s naively implemented.
browsers chrome extensions firefox safari technology
1 minute
My favorite computer science paper is Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs by John Backus. It struck me because it reflected my own thoughts on contemporary languages. I started to compile quotations from the paper, but found I was quoting more than not, so instead I’ll just give you a taste by quoting the very beginning. If this piques your interest, I highly recommend reading the paper; it’s very readable, insightful, and prophetic.
coding john backus languages papers technology
2 minutes
Just skimmed an overview of HTML5. Love the new canvas and the new input form elements, like colors, emails, URLs, and searches. I’m glad they ditched the crufty stuff like <center>. I wish there was help for animations.
1 minute
If you’re a programmer and you’re not using a distributed version control system, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Learn why Git is better than your version control system and then learn how it works.
coding git technology version control
1 minute
I was just looking at my film collection and realized that I never want to own another film. I’ll eventually sell off most of them, except for my favorites that I can watch a hundred times and still love. If I want to watch a film, I can just queue it on Netflix and have it within days. If I have the urge to watch a film immediately, I can rent it on iTunes or Amazon for just a few dollars and start watching it immediately.
amazon apple tv ipad iphone itunes kindle movies netflix technology
1 minute
Python And Ruby In Silverlight
This just blew my mind. The DLR is the shit.
browsers dlr python ruby silverlight technology
1 minute
August 2010
I’ve come to love reading essays by Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky about programming and the business of programming. Their writing is excellent, their topics interesting and practical, their substance deep and intelligent, their style natural and accessible, their meaning clear and concise. I especially enjoy reading Graham because he demonstrates the practical advantages of functional programming, and Lisp in particular, through anecdotes of his own experience starting a software company and wiping the floor with his competitors.
coding essays joel spolsky lisp paul graham technology
1 minute
There are lots of great quotations from his essays. I’ll update here as I find new ones. From The Other Road Ahead: In the desktop software business, doing a release is a huge trauma, in which the whole company sweats and strains to push out a single, giant piece of code. Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product. and: When you release only one new version a year, you tend to deal with bugs wholesale.
coding essays languages paul graham technology
3 minutes
July 2010
If you use GoDaddy and have trouble using their Total DNS Control feature to configure your domains, try permitting all cookies, or permitting cookies from secureserver.net, or using another browser, like Firefox. I kept getting an error saying the feature was unavailable, so I couldn’t redirect my domain name to Blogger. I tried using Firefox instead of Safari and it magically worked.
blogger dns firefox godaddy safari technology
1 minute
I hiked Mailbox Peak with my friend Andrew and some of his friends a few weeks ago. I hadn’t been hiking in a long time and was really out of shape. It was three miles long and 3900 feet up to the summit. I was so tired by the time I got to the bottom I was hobbling with the help of my walking stick. The trail didn’t switch back and forth so much as plough straight up the mountainside with few places to rest.
andrew wang hiking life mailbox peak
1 minute
June 2010
At some point Facebook decided to convert everyone’s profile information like Favorite Movies or Interests from free-form text to lists of Facebook pages. Now my profile doesn’t say I like the TV show Heroes, but instead says I like the TV show Official HEROES Page. Terrible. When they switched, they automatically matched up your profile’s text with existing pages and converted it for you. Unfortunately, the exact meaning of the text can be lost.
1 minute
May 2010
On one hand, my smartphone has a touch screen and fits in my pocket, and on the other, my laptop has a physical keyboard and a large screen. Apple’s iPad brings together the strengths of both, except for the superior typing provided by laptops. Somewhere between these two lies Apple’s iPad, which provides the immediacy, simplicity, and tactile interaction of a smartphone, and the size, complexity, and greater expressiveness of a laptop.
4 minutes
My Favorite Snow Crash Quotations
I’m rereading it again. Ah, so good. In fact, the squat franchise itself looks like nothing more than a low-slung base for the great aramid fiber pillars that thrust the billboard up into the trademark firmament. Marca Registrada, baby. When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn’t been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motocycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.
1 minute
December 2009
I signed up for a LinkedIn account a while ago. I can’t remember how it happened. I know it wasn’t because all the cool kids were doing it. Maybe I did it just in case it turned into something big, and then I’d already be registered. Anyways, I never use it, but I periodically get ‘acquaintance’ requests (there’s nothing fun or friendly about them; the lame default message that everyone uses is something like “I would like to establish a connection with you”) from people I know in person, and occasionally from people I’ve never met.
life linkedin networking social
1 minute
September 2009
I’ve sometimes observed the following meanings for religious sayings: It’s god’s will: I think it’s fine; I want it to happen; leave things alone. Amen: I agree; I’m right. Apparently, when you have a personal thought, you can shroud it in divine invocations to make it sound more legitimate and unquestionable. It’s really quite fascinating when you consider the complexity of what’s being communicated and how it’s being interpreted.
1 minute
Just saw District 9 with Brian and Shay. It was great to see a sci-fi movie in the theaters (and I don’t mean the kind of sci-fi that Transformers is). Although there wasn’t much science in the movie. Still, fun to see aliens, and the parallels between how the humans treat the aliens and South Africa’s racial history were interesting to see. There were a few plot holes, I think, but it was still fun to watch.
1 minute
Bought My Holiday Flight Tickets
I figured that it would be cheaper to fly from the SEA airport in Seattle to SFO in San Francisco than to SMF in Sacramento, since there would probably be more flights on that route. I just checked and found to my surprise that SFO tickets are significantly more expensive. Maybe there’s more demand? Interesting. I wish one of these flight booking web sites would create a feature that would find the best ticket deal for me for a given holiday.
airlines bing flights life priceline sacramento san francisco tickets travelocity
1 minute
August 2009
I just know Herbal Essences is scamming me. The shampoo bottle empties faster than the conditioner bottle, but both are the same size. So I get more of the same shampoo, but then the conditioner runs out, so then I get more of the same conditioner. Around and around. Curse you, evil cleansing company! Must you torment me so?
conditioner herbal essences life scam shampoo
1 minute
There was a gunshot about a block from my building after midnight about a week ago. A few minutes afterward, several police cruisers arrived with lights flashing. It seemed to happen in front of some kind of bar or restaurant that I could see from my bedroom window. What the hell’s going on? Chill out, people!
apartment gunshot life night police seattle
1 minute
I discovered a web site that’s great for learning how to shop for products I’ve never bought before in a short period of time. When I shop, I want to buy something I know will satisfy my needs for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to have to buy another one because it broke or a newer one came out that I want instead. I want to do the comparison shopping and deal seeking just once.
comforters consumer search down expert expertise fleeting life shopping web site
2 minutes
I met my friend Chris from work at a piano bar in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle a few weeks ago. It was around 9 or 10 p.m. and I had never been to that part of town at night before. Let me tell you, that is one shady place. There are a lot of homeless people there. It doesn’t feel comfortable to linger outside. I parked my car a few blocks from the bar.
life piano bar pioneer square seattle
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