Escaped Thoughts

Safari keychain interoperability landed today, so there's now one less reason for Safari users to resist trying out Camino when 1.1 is released. Yay! It should also be a big help to people who keep both around to deal with sites that are problematic in one or the other; not everyone is going to use Camino full-time, and hopefully this will make it a little more useful for those people to keep around.

There's certainly work left to do in keychain—storing multiple accounts for a site is still something we need to support—but this was a big step forward and I'm excited to see it land. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works for people in the coming weeks; I know there are likely to be some corners I missed, but I'm hopeful that they will mostly be small ones.

Category: Camino

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Time is fleeting. And I'm pretty sure madness is taking its toll.

I'm now officially closer to 30 than I am to 20, which is a somewhat disconcerting thought. Being 20 was relatively straightforward—just keep going to college—but I don't have the slightest idea what I'm supposed to be doing when I turn 30. “In my early 20's” was a nice category to be in for figuring out life, but I don't think I can still be in my early 20's at 26.

But on the other hand, I have a job I like and am very happily married, and those seem like good qualifications for being post-early-20's. And I have four more years to figure out this whole 30 thing.

Category: Life

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We learned today that when one steams purple cauliflower, the water in the lower pan ends up a vibrant blue-green color, which is somewhat disconcerting. Interestingly, the water that condenses around the edges of the upper pan is a more understandable purple.

If anyone can offer an explanation of this phenomenon, I'd love to hear it. It doesn't have to be an accurate explanation, or even more than passingly associated with reality. (Although perhaps I should be inventing my own explanation; after all, I have a Master's Degree... in Science!)

Category: Random

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It's officially Christmas. This isn't a surprise, of course, but just in case I had somehow missed it, Safeway was thoughtful enough to remind me during the entirety of my shopping by playing non-stop from a collection called “Top 100 Bad Holiday Covers And Remixes By No-Name Artists”.

At least, that's what I assume it was called.

Category: Society

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Today was cascading build failure day. Whee! Fun for the whole family. It's going to be a while before I start feeling bad about at any times I might briefly break the Camino tree again; today I spent enough time on build failures that were not my fault that I think I have a large stockpile of build karma.

The fun began with an SVG change that assumed Cairo, which therefore started the Camino tree burning. So SVG was disabled in Camino, but then Xcode was unhappy about a missing file. I misunderstood the reason for the missing file and thought the best way to deal with the problem was to go ahead and land my Cairo build patch right away. Which did need to happen soon, but in retrospect it would probably have been nice to wait for another day just to spread out the flames a bit. So anyway, when the tree stayed red I learned that the file was missing even with SVG enabled, on purpose, so turning on Cairo didn't actually help that particular problem. So I ripped out references to that file, and would have gone back to doing something useful with my day except that right around then we discovered that Cairo didn't build on 10.3. Oops. And the red continues.

What followed was a tedious debugging process where we finally found that this was a latent bug in cairo-cocoa, that no amount of testing on 10.4 would have found (yay! not my fault!). One of the files was being built in a very un-kosher way that hid (on the Firefox build machine) the fact that it was written using 10.4-only stuff, when it's supposed to build for 10.3. And our build machines are 10.3. And there was no easy fix. Good times.

So faced with either backing out Cairo (which would just open us up for more pain due to the trunk==Cairo mindset of the moment) or hacking around it in fairly ugly ways, I chose the latter. All was going well, until I discovered that one of our build machines is 10.4, and because of how badly messed up the compiling of that file was handled, My hack had broken the ability to build for 10.3 on 10.4. So the hacking got uglier, to the point where I thought long and hard about just backing out Cairo instead. But there the new hacks are, and over nine hours after this roller-coaster of build excitement began, things are finally green again.

Thanks for asking—how was your day?

Category: Camino

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So I'm about a third of the way through iWoz, and while some of the stories are certainly interesting I found myself getting irritated as I read it and tried to figure out why. At some level it's perhaps all his commentary on how great a lot of the stuff he did was, but mostly that doesn't bother me so much. Clearly, a lot of the stuff he did was in fact really cool, and clearly he is really smart, so that seems reasonable (even if he could have perhaps spend a little less time drawing attention to just how great he is).

But I realized that what really bothers me that it's that he's not very honest about himself. An illustrative example, starting with a passage from the beginning of the book about how his childhood shaped him:

[...] my dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. Extreme ethics, really. That's the biggest thing he taught me. He used to tell me that it was worse to lie about doing something bad under oath than it was to actually do something bad [...] That really sunk in. I never lie, even to this day. Not even a little.

Then later, this passage from when he and The Other Steve are approached (completely coincidentally, although he didn't yet know it) by police officers just after making illegal Blue Box calls from a pay phone:

But then the cop turned back to us and patted us down. He felt my Blue Box and I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to him. We knew we were caught. The cop asked me what it was. I was not about to say “Oh, this is a Blue Box for making free telephone calls.” So for some reason I said it was an electronic music synthesizer.

And then after convincing them of the above:

The internal joy I felt when the cop believed our story about the Blue Box being the Moog synthesizer is almost indescribable. Not only were we not arrested for making illegal calls with or owning a Blue Box, but these supposedly intelligent cops had bought our B.S.

Um, what? Someone who gloats to himself (and now an audience of millions) about how cool it was to lie to the police to avoid the consequences of doing something he knew to be illegal at the time is not a practitioner of “extreme ethics”, and I'm pretty sure that lying to the police isn't consistent with never lying “even a little”. And it's not just the dishonesty, but the sense that he's taking something away from others—yes, he's clearly a gifted engineer, so talking about that is fine. But there are people out there who genuinely are extremely ethical, and this just feels to me like he's robbing them of something in order to claim a virtue that he doesn't really seem to posses, rather than being satisfied with the (remarkable) things that he legitimately did accomplish.

I guess what it comes down to is that I can respect pride, but when it crosses into unfounded ego it's not so respectable.

Category: A & E

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Laura and I went to watch part of a nearby collegiate ballroom dance competition, and were pleased to discover that we haven't lost that most important attribute: petty cattiness. Who cares if our style is getting sloppy as long as we can watch other people with sloppy style and verbally rip them apart? Given that, I suspect we'd have no problem jumping back into the competitive circuit. (In fairness to us, these were people dancing several levels above where we ever danced, so their style really should have been much better.)

But in all seriousness, it was a lot of fun. There were a few couples that were very good and were a lot of fun to watch, and we caught some of the fun events (the ubiquitous reverse-lead Cha-Cha being one of them), which are great to watch and reminded us of some of the fun parts of competitions. And hopefully watching and doing a bit of dancing during the general dances will finally goad us into finding some new lessons so we start dancing regularly again. It would just be for fun though; watching the comp was entertaining, but we don't really want to get back into that circuit.

But if we did, we could totally kick some of their butts.

Category: Random

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Today I met Hixie and chatted with him about web standards for an hour or so, then got a book signed by Woz. Not too shabby for the space of a few hours.

Category: Random

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The list of bugs for 1.1 is definitely shrinking, and I just landed both the first part of session saving (woohoo, easy nightly-build upgrading!) and a fix for a big popup-blocking regression. Keychain is also getting very close to landing, so I'm hoping that in the next week or two I can get some cool new feature work done on both that and the session saver.

It feels very good to be splitting time between feature work and polish, since it means I feel like we're neither rushing features out without smoothing edges, nor delivering an update that won't have some substantial new user features. Should be a solid release.

Category: Camino

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I learned today that the next batch of hybrid HOV-lane stickers won't actually be issued until January 1st, since that's when the law that authorizes them goes into effect. It looks like my smug superiority will have to wait a little longer.

Category: Life

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I think the number one thing I got out of today's second half of the wine and food class (besides some really tasty food) was the realization that now I can say I generally prefer white wine to red and it's not total ignorance. Now I can come up with various plausible-sounding reasons instead of trailing off with “...but it's probably because I just don't know any better.”

Also: mmmm, desert wine. But I already knew that.

Category: Life

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The newest piece of my on-again-off-again, two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance with GTD is another attempting at getting the appropriate parts of my life into a calendar. In the past I've had a couple of false starts, where I did a reasonable job for a week or two, then slowly stopped checking my calendar regularly, completely eliminating the usefulness of having things there at all. Part of the problem was that I spent a lot of time at work, where I was using a different calendar system (I was on iCal at home), and looking at two calendars all the time was a pain. Plus, syncing back and forth from work to home was a mess when I was constantly switching computers and reinstalling the entire OS. (On top of which, syncing to development versions of an OS is not for the faint of heart; data loss in an environment where you know it could happen and plan accordingly is one thing, but automatically syncing that back to your home machine is another thing altogether.)

This time around I thought I should check out that whole Google Calendar thing, and it's really quite nice (and no, I'm not required to say that). It's a web interface, which means it's not quite iCal in some respects, but it's without a doubt very usable. On the other hand, it's a web interface, so it isn't iCal in some other respects too: access, both read and write, from anywhere internet-enabled (which is where I spend most of my time) being a big one. Perhaps even bigger is the very flexible inter-user calendar sharing system, which means that Laura and I can have a shared calendar that we can both write to (she has argued that we have one of those already, hanging in the kitchen, but as I can't get to it easily from my desk at home or at work, that's not terribly useful to me). So instead of Laura telling me things and hoping I remember to put them on the calendar, or me putting things on my calendar and hoping I remember to tell Laura, we'll only do the work once, and we'll both get the information reliably. I'm pretty confident that those two things will make the difference and keep me from falling off the wagon yet again.

On the other hand I'm often pretty confident when I start a new GTD piece, so we'll see how that goes. I can but try after all.

My hope is to slowly and steadily pick up GTD habits that I keep for more than a few weeks at a time; I've managed to get a couple to stick, and just those pieces have definitely made me at least a little less disorganized. Hopefully over time I can sidle up sideways to the eventual goal of stress-free productivity.

Category: Life

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As promised, some pictures from the butterflies' winter home in Santa Cruz. These give some sense of how many butterflies there were (although I'm told that it's nowhere near what it once was):

And a few pictures of the stars of the show:

Sadly, my camera was really not up to the task in terms of zoom; these only look like it was due to heavy cropping. Laura and I spent a lot of time looking enviously at other visitors with much more substantial lenses—in fact, Laura is looking at telephoto lenses for her digital Rebel as I write this, so maybe next year's crop of photos will be even better.

(Yes, the title is terrible. It's my weblog, and I'll do as I please.)

Category: Photos

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Hornsby's hard cider isn't nearly as good as Woodchuck. Sadly, the I haven't been able to find the latter around here.

Pictures from our visit to the butterfly migration in Santa Cruz are coming, but I haven't had a chance to sift through them yet. Stay tuned!

Category: Random

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Having to do a bunch of work that seems like it should have been made available in the Cocoa APIs is always annoying, but I've been learning how intensely painful it is when you are trying to implement functionality that turns out to be messy to do correctly yourself when you went to a developer conference a few months earlier and learned that it would all be a single method call in a version of the OS that you unfortunately can't design for yet.

I guess it will help me appreciate the API I do have. And build character or something. I guess someday I'll be able to say “Why, back when I was a developer we didn't have all these new-fangled APIs. We had to code all that ourselves, and we liked it!” and it'll all be worthwhile.

Category: Geek

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My lesson for the day: the time before you can actually go to sleep is substantially longer than the amount of time it takes to discover that you accidentally broke the build and back out the offending patch. I'm definitely not doing checkins less than two or three hours before I plan to go to bed in the future.

Category: Camino

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While the national races are looking pretty good, some of the state and local issues are looking not so pleasant. I'm really hoping that the precincts that have reported are not representative of the remainder of the state. Sure, I knew that several things I voted for wouldn't pass (because it would just be crazy to tax the multi-bazillion-dollar-earning oil companies for destroying the environment extracting oil) and that others were borderline (education? housing? the environment? who uses them?), but there are times I just foolishly like to think, if not the best, at least some decency of my fellow man. Overwhelming support for permanently tagging sex offenders with GPS devices? I'm not a big fan of sex offenders by any stretch of the imagination, but come on. Let's review that for a second: they will be tagged (you know, like cattle) for the rest of their lives. I'm sure that won't increase any sense of alienation that would hinder their ability to potentially become functional members of society again. Oh, and they get to pay for it too, as an added bonus. And then they can't live within some distance of schools and parks (because, you know, sex offenders have no means of transportation). The writers of this initiative did miss one obvious component: we want to keep them away from schools, and we don't care about removing any shred of dignity. Clearly the solution here is to surgically implant electric dog collars. Maybe next election.

I know I feel more secure the more Big Brother watches over me. I have nothing to fear if I haven't done anything wrong.

Freedom is slavery. War is peace.

Category: Society

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Laura and I just got back from learning more about wine in an hour and a half than we had gleaned from several years of random tasting. It turns out there really is something to that whole actually learning about wine thing.

I think the biggest take-away lesson was that I had wildly underestimated the extent to which food pairing matters. I always thought it was a sort of “find a wine you like, and then if it goes with the food, so much the better” sort of thing, when in actuality it's a “if you drink wine with the wrong food you stand a good chance of ruining the wine completely and coming away with totally the wrong idea” thing.

Who knew?

Category: Life

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Most of the time I haven't been working recently has been spent on Camino, which is part of the reason it's been so quiet around here. For a while I was averaging about a bug fix per day, which was pretty satisfying. I'm scaling back a bit now, partially because I need to spend time on things besides Camino at least occasionally, partially to make sure I don't burn out, and partially because I've overloaded the review queue lately and don't want to make it too much worse until it's had time to drain.

Most of the work I've been doing has been to try to chip away at the 1.1 bugs, many of which have been minor polish that Camino has been needing for a while but weren't ever really high enough priority to fix. Having them on the 1.1 list was good incentive to just burn through them instead seeing many of them punted (again, in many cases).

There are some bigger ticket items on my plate too though; on top of the Keychain rewrite I did to celebrate my return, I'm hoping that there will be time in the 1.1 schedule to do the part users will actually care about: Keychain interoperability with Safari. We've heard lots of times that people trying Camino after using Safari are dismayed to discover that they have to try to remember all their site passwords... which mostly they don't because they've just been letting Keychain do it for them, that being the entire point of the Keychain. I think a lot more people will be willing to give Camino a try once we pick up Safari-stored passwords, and it should also be a boon for those who can't quite decide and go back and forth regularly.

The other larger thing I'm working on is session saving, which is something I've wanted for a while. I tend to accumulate lots of open pages over time as a sort of holding area for my brain. This works fine up until a) I want to either install an OS update or upgrade Camino, or b) Camino crashes (pretty rarely, but it does happen since I live on development builds). When I find myself delaying system upgrades for upward of a week just because I don't want to go to the trouble of manually saving all my browser/brain state, there's definitely a need for the software to be doing something different—and of course minimizing data loss is always a good thing. I'm a little concerned that users won't understand why things like forms and AJAX-y pages don't look just like when they quit; I suspect there will be some unhappiness the first time people discover that it's remembering where they were, not the actual page as it was when they were looking at it. There's some hope that we may be able to leverage the work Firefox did for session saving and get the whole experience, but if not, well, losing a bit of data is better than losing lots, and there are still a lot of pages out there that do actually look the same when you reload them.

In short, I'm definitely feeling good about developing again, and definitely feeling good about the upcoming 1.1 release.

Oh, and I also did my first (mini) super-reviews and my first check-in recently, so that was pretty cool.

Category: Camino

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It has been pointed out to me that I haven't updated in a while, which, while not especially surprising given my record, is certainly true. To make up for it, I'm kicking off another post-a-day week to encourage me to catch up.

We'll begin today with work, which is of course part of what's been keeping me busy this past month. I've been settling in, and am just now starting to feel at least marginally useful; there's been a lot to get up to speed on and acclimated to. The work style I have now is so different than what I've been used to for the last couple of years that it's taking me a while to get used to how to structure my time. Not having the bulk of most days' work determined by events I have no way to predict seems strange and magical.

There is of course also the adjustment to being the new guy. I'm still figuring out where I fit, which can be hard, since it means I'm not really having much of a positive impact. But I know that that's just what happens when you are the new guy, and that it will pass—besides, having a lot to learn means that I'm learning a lot, which is something I enjoy. I definitely still believe that I made the right decision.

And then there's adjusting to the snacks. Working near a convenient supply of M&Ms is indeed a test of my willpower, and as I feared it's not a test I'm particularly well-prepared for. I tend to be good at resting buying snacks, but bad at resisting eating them once they are there. That model had been working well; we don't buy too many snacks, so I don't snack too much. When I lose control over the part that I'm good at, it's a whole different ball game. (Although I at least do avoid the M&Ms in favor of slightly better snacks. Mostly). But hey, I did say I like learning new things, right? And hopefully I can spin the snack-guilt into motivating me to start excercising at the almost-as-conveniently-located gym, especially since I need a regular excercise routine more than ever now that I'm not biking to work...

...which brings me to my last recap for today's installment: my new car! Having one car stopped working so well when I needed the car every day, so we finally broke down and bought a second car. I looked at a hybrid Civic and a Prius (if you are going to be commuting every day, at least try not to be evil about it, right?), and am now the very happy owner of a 2007 Prius. The civic felt smaller, its CVT was noticiably less C than that of the Prius, and, frankly, the Prius is just plain awesomer. Having a car that unlocks when I touch the handle almost makes up for the fact that we still don't have the flying cars we've been promised for so long. I finally collected the last requisite box-top to be able to send off for my HOV lane stickers, which should make me love having a Prius even more every morning and evening as I shave a substantial chunk off of my commute. And really, what's the point of having a Prius if I can't enjoy a smug sense of moral superiority as I blow by SUVs stuck in gridlock?

(I am also starting to look into actually carpooling too, in continued pursuit of non-evilness—I'm just kidding about the smug moral superiority thing. Mostly.)

Category: Life

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I celebrated my return to Camino today with 6 patches. Granted only one was at all sizeable, but it was still fun.

It's good to be back.

Category: Camino

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I ordered a new iPod for myself the other day. You could call it a going away present, or a final moment of weakness in the face of life inside the RDF; both are equally accurate.

It really says something about both the industry and Apple that I was surprised when I realized that my current iPod is only two years old. Given all the substantial changes the entire iPod line has gone through, it seemed impossible that it was really only two years. And while I fully recognize that there was no real need for me to upgrade (unlike my recent computer purchase, where a five-year-old computer really wasn't sufficient for me any more), there a number of major improvements: a brighter, color screen; between two and three times the battery life, five times the storage, better software and hardware interface (I just missed the click wheel last time around)—and all at a lower price, even before discount.

The other surprise was my realization that as far as I can remember, this was the first time I've ever purchased an Apple product and had a choice about the color. I decided on the features I wanted and I wasn't done. It was very confusing for me. Ultimately I decide on white though, because while black seems to be the new white, white is the original white. And there's just no arguing with that.

Update: I just got my shipping notice, and it says it will arrive on (or before) the 22nd. That would be very fitting: leaving Apple behind, but coming home to find a little reminder of it waiting for me. I could probably construct some kind of strained metaphor involving my old iPod, my new iPod, and stages of my career, but I think I'll spare us all that particular awkwardness.

Category: Life

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At the end of this month, I'll be starting a new job—I am at last jumping into real, full-time, software development. This is about the time I had expected to move into development when I started, so that's not too much of a surprise. What is surprising, even to me, is that my office will be a little more of a move than I would have thought.

That's right, I'm leaving the fruit business, and going to write Mac software for another company you may have heard of. This was not an easy decision, as my current employer has a great deal to recommend it. Ultimately, though, I think the move will give me more opportunity to explore my interests, which is really what I need at this point in my career. (Rumors that I am going for the free M&Ms are lies and slander.)

The next couple of years should be very exciting for me, as I'll finally be doing the sort of work I've wanted to do since computer science and I crossed paths one fateful semester in college. Full speed ahead!

P.S. Some of the keenly observant readers out there may notice that I have resurrected the Camino category in the sidebar. This is not a coincidence.

Category: Life

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I went up to the city to see 2001, with the idea that it might be better on the big screen. Basically though, it's bigger, louder (painfully so), but still just as mind-numbingly boring; I jokingly suggested that I should go home and watch Blade Runner (director's cut) since it might actually be tolerable in comparison. I'm also tempted to make an edited version: all the important content, but about 1/10th the length. I think it could be a pretty good short.

Yes, I dislike both Blade Runner and 2001. Sometimes I'm a bad nerd.

The evening wasn't a total loss though. I saw the Castro district for the first time, which was interesting. I also saw a shirt which amused me greatly: “Feelings are boring. Kissing is awesome.” It came as no surprise when I learned that it's merchandise from the deeply bizarre but often humorous Dinosaur Comics.

Category: A & E

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No posts in a while courtesy of that big source of chaos we like to call “life”. I may elaborate on parts later, but here's the really short version:

• June was largely good. We had an enjoyable (despite the weather) trip to Europe, resulting in lots of good pictures and stories. On the down side one exciting prospect failed to pan out, but I don't hold June responsible.
• July was terrible—quite probably the worst month of my life to date, for a couple of reasons. About all I can say about July is that it's over.

What does August hold for me? Hard to say at this point. There will be elements of July about it; this is certain. But life has ways of twisting, and there are a few bright spots scattered on the horizon that I can see already. I'm counting on you to do the right thing here, August.

Category: Life

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Over the last couple of weeks, my comment-spam filter has been breaking down. Considering how basic a test it was, I'm pretty surprised it held up as long as it did; it relied on the fact that the strategy of the bots was very dumb: grab the page, parse it, and submit. It happened so quickly that it was pretty easy to distinguish from a valid comment, since rarely do real people submit a comment within a handful of seconds of loading the page. Now, as I've been expecting for some time, the bot pattern has changed to: grab a bunch of pages to parse, wait a minute or so, then post to all of them. They are even smart enough to make sure that although they are rotating through proxies to prevent IP-filtering, they always match up the proxy that requested the page and the proxy used to post the comment, so there's no obvious attack point there.

So now I've implemented another silly trick that shouldn't really work in general, but will in fact catch all of the spam that's been slipping in recently. Hopefully that will hold until I decide what my next big gun will be.

Category: Geek

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Yesterday was the anniversary of a very special day: that's right, it's was the anniversary of Kentucky's official statehood. And what's so special about that, you ask? I'll tell you: it set things up so that exactly 210 years later, I would have the exceeding good fortune to marry a wonderful native of that state. And here I am four years later, and still thrilled with my luck. Kentucky knows how to grow them right.

(And a happy belated anniversary also to Duncan and Kris, who have excellent taste in wedding days if I do say so myself.)

Category: Life

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I just spend 10 or 15 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't get a mini ethernet network set up between my laptop and my iMac (to transfer some large files without waiting forever to do it over the wireless network I use for most things). No matter what I did, I just couldn't get the machines to see each other—in fact, I couldn't even get the iMac to show the ethernet port as anything but inactive. I even unplugged and replugged the network cable, to make sure it wasn't something stupid like a loose wire.

If only it had been something that stupid, instead of something much, much stupider. You see, I'm very used to my G4, with the tower on the floor next to my desk, and the monitor on my desk. And because I haven't yet decommissioned the G4, the tower is still sitting next to my desk. Right next to where I set the laptop down. And the iMac really does look like it's just a monitor. I think we can all see where this is going...

Lesson learned: plugging in the ethernet cable is good, but it's even better to plug it into the right computer.

Category: Geek

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In any given hand, Laura is not allowed to score more points than Stuart.

I hope that settles that question. Now that it appears on the internet (with the word “official”, no less!), it must be true.

That is all.

Category: Random

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In preparation for heading to Germany, in light of all the German we didn't keep studying like we had intended to, we plastered index cards all over the apartment last night identifying objects with their German names. The cards tell me that I am sitting at "der Computer", looking at "der Bildschirm" as I tap away at "die Tastatur". Probably not critical words I grant you, but many of the others are much more useful. Hopefully that plus some targeted studying of important words (we didn't find any prepositions or adjectives around the apartment, unfortunately) will slightly reduce our ignorance before we strike out.

And hopefully the week in France won't erase what limited German we have...

Category: Life

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Okay, so I missed my post for yesterday. But Sunday morning is a lot like Saturday night, right?

Anyway, I have an excuse: I was playing with hugin. It's an automagic panorama creation tool—you drop in some pictures, feed it lens information, define control points in pairs of images that correspond to the same point in reality, optionally tweak some parameters I don't understand yet, and poof! Instant panorama. It does all the necessary warping of the images to remove perspective effects and minimize barrel distortion, while keeping the horizon level, then positions them correctly and does some edge blurring to remove harsh lines.

It's not perfect; the OS X port still has some roughness to the UI, and it doesn't (as I was hoping it would) automatically do color level adjustments of the pictures to match the colors at the control points in order to prevent sudden color variation across the final image. On the other hand, setting the control points is surprisingly painless, and it's pretty impressive to see how quickly it figures everything out. It's certainly unbelievably easy compared to doing everything myself in the Gimp, and does a lot more actual distorting rather than relying on meticulous airbrushing to fake it. And as an added bonus, there's actually a step where I have all the distorted and positioned images as separate files; it would be easy for me to inject some manual color adjustments at that point, or even to to my own custom fuzzing and stitching if there are any details I want to get just right.

All in all, I rate it extremely cool. Stay tuned for a sample panorama or two.

Category: Photos

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This was just too good not to mention:

What might cause us to go to EDA-Level Red:

you may wonder? I'm glad you asked. And as for why, well, there are apparently plenty of reasons.

Category: Random

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I'd been meaning to post a detailed comparison of just how much better my new iMac is than my old G4, but I think it's easiest to just sum it up: it's about a jillion times better.

I'm very pleased with the speed, the screen, the quietness, and even the look (despite my misgivings when then G5 iMacs were first introduced). All in all a great computer, saving me lots of time (and sanity) that would previously have been spent sitting and waiting a little bit longer every time I did something moderately taxing. It even runs Aperture like a champ, which is good since I'm probably going to be switching over from iPhoto to Aperture—after having played around with it for a few hours, I am hooked.

So for anyone who was wondering how I'm liking my new computer, the answer is: very much, thank you.

Category: Life

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Today's deceptively simple quiz: Fill in the blank in the title. Give both the spelling and pronunciation of the missing word.

Category: Language

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I think it's safe to say that the answer to the question "Will getting a domain encourage me to post more?" is "No". I've had some posts floating around in my head, but for whatever reason they never actually made it up here. But two months of dead space is getting to be a bit much even by my standards—so, to compensate, I'm going to try an experiment: I will post something every day for a week. I certainly don't expect to post every day forever, but maybe some forced posting will get things kick-started a bit.

Here goes!

Category: Life

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I ordered my new computer today, since my G4 733 has been feeling its age for a while now—or more accurately, I have been feeling its age. The slow, stuttering-music-playback-inducing app launching and switching has been thrown into sharp relief by my new iMac at work, as has the volume of the fans. Finally, I snapped.

I had been planning to wait for an Intel-based tower, since I've always been an easy-upgrade, separate-tower-and-monitor kind of guy. After all, it's far better to be able to upgrade your monitor or your CPU separately, right? And a tower is just way more expandable than an all-in one. So clearly, buying an iMac isn't the right choice for me.

Only... it doesn't really matter. I've owned 4 computers, not counting the one I just ordered, and I've never upgraded just the monitor or the CPU. Sure, there was a laptop in there to foul things up, but I wouldn't have stayed with a CRT when I got my G4 anyway, and in the five years I've had that I never could justify a new monitor to myself. And component upgrades? It's a nice thought, but mostly I just add memory. Being able to add a wireless card to the G4 was nice, but I never really needed it. The CD -> DVD upgrade was necessary for Tiger, but that was after the machine was already 4+ years old. So while it sounds nice, it's really not that big a deal for me after all.

“But surely,” I said, “I couldn't be happy with an iMac. I'm a Power User™, right?”

Right?

As it turns out: not so much. The most strenuous thing I do regularly with my computer is work with my digital photos. I use the internet and iApps, and that's most of what I need. Sure I play some games, but only a tiny fraction of what I used to—I don't play the kind of games that push the envelope of computing power. Diablo II is the most taxing game I have, and I can play that on my G4. Heck, I could play it on my old G3 laptop. It's not exactly cutting edge. And sure, I do a few super-geeky things still, but mostly that's scripting and web development. It only takes so much horsepower to run a text editor—especially when your text editor is vi. Yes, I do some programming that involves compiling, but not so much I need the kind of raw power a higher-end beast like the Quad G5 offers.

So here it is: Hi, I'm Stuart, and I'm not as much of a geek as I thought.

Category: Life

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While setting up the new site I did a bit of rearranging, since I wasn't worried about preserving existing links. In the process, I was trying to decide where to put this whole section—I had used /blog/ before, but I dislike the word on aesthetic principles. I decided on weblog, which is less ugly (albeit a bit harder to say), but not before I got to thinking about the development of the term; I've heard the argument somewhere that both blog and weblog are equally silly, because it's just a new medium for something like a journal (not really a new form of communication) and therefore doesn't deserve a word.

Now even if one accepts the idea that it's not a fundamentally new style of communication (I don't) there's plenty of precedent for creating new words or phrases when something is adapted to/adopted by a new medium. Which brings me to today's “quiz”: list in the comments as many such words or phrases as you can think of. Points will be awarded for each non-duplicate answer that is accepted by a panel of expert judges*.

To get the ball rolling: television show

Update: Laura (despite now being hugely in the lead) thought the criteria needed some clarification. Specifically, the term itself must clearly indicate the appropriation of the old word for some new medium. So “radio play” counts, but “forum” doesn't.

* Panel of expert judges may or may not actually exist. No purchase necessary to play.

Category: Language

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That's right, I finally decided to carve out a little chunk of the intarweb for my very own. For now it's just the weblog, but I'll eventually move more content here and create a real site of some sort of description. Maybe.

Will this actually motivate me to update regularly? Will photos go up in a timely manner? Will there be a new exciting language quiz every month? Tune in next time to find out! Same bat time, completely different bat channel!

Category: Life

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With all this uproar about Yahoo! turning over information to the Chinese government, I'm sure glad we have congress to step in and set people straight. It really warms my heart to know that our government is here to help make sure that everyone knows that it's simply not acceptable to go around turning over records concerning information access to a government with a proven record of human-rights abuse against enemies of the state.

Thank goodness we won't stand for that sort of thing in the good old U.S. of A. I'd say more, but I have to run; There are some books I need to pick up at the library.

Category: Society

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In the state of the union, our esteemed president told us that we need to band together as a nation to stand firm against a grave new threat to our nation—and indeed to our very way of life. He was talking, of course, about the growing problem of the creation of human-animal hybrids.

And that's why it's simply shocking to see that the Department of Homeland Security—the very group that is supposed to keep us safe—is trying to brainwash America's children into not only accepting human-animal hybrids, but looking up to them. This is a threat far more serious than that posed by Harry Potter, more serious even than the war against Christmas. After all, once our children have meekly submitted to the government-sactioned, half-animal spawn of Satan, and are forced to do their evil bidding, holiday greeting cards will be the least of our worries.

So I call on everyone to stand up and demand that the government stop paying lip service to preserving the sanctity of creation while behind our backs it teaches our children that abominations of nature are to be respected and emulated. This is our sacred duty. The animal-people must not prevail.

Category: Society

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