(identity 'myron)

Sun, 21 Aug 2005

Click Through [/tech]

One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone new to Mac OS complains that there's no proper maximize button for windows. And my reply, which never satisfies the other person, has always been that Mac users rarely maximize windows. It wouldn't make any more sense to us than it would covering everything on a desk with one giant piece of paper before starting to write on it. Not a satisfying explanation, I suppose, which is why I found this entry at Daring Fireball really nice to read. He makes an argument against something seemingly unrelated, click-through, but in doing so, brings many concepts together explaining how Mac users typically use their GUI and why maximized windows is, to us, a waste of screen space.

Ultimately, though, my point is that Mac OS isn't Windows any more than Windows is Mac OS. Throwing away one's preconceptions goes a long way in figuring that out.

// posted at 23:34. permalink   comments

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Pimpin' Out the Desktop [/tech]

I'll sheepishly admit that I've been waiting patiently for 5 years to see some OS 9'isms return in OS X. Some things have come back, notably spring-loaded folders, but others are still sorely missed in OS X like tabbed pop-up folders. Anyway, forget Apple, I'm not the first one want to OS 9'ify my OS X setup, so it turns out there's two really great guides to doing it: Refugee Utilities for the Mac OS X Interface and Make Your Mac a Monster Machine. The latter goes even further than just OS 9'ifying, it makes the user experience better than either 9 or X.

I've chosen to install DragThing and WindowShade X. The first to get a decent launcher, tabbed pop-up folders and a pseudo app switcher. The latter to manage windows. And man does it kick ass. Years ago I tried it but didn't think it was worth the money, but now it gives you everything from making windows always-on-top or transparent on command, window shading and finally, minimize in place. This last feature probably needs some explanation. It's similar to minimizing to the dock except it's a freely floating mini-window once minimized. What's the big deal? You can rearrange it to anywhere you want on the desktop and that's huge. You can organize them spatially to help you quickly identify which is which, much like setting aside groups of papers on a cluttered desk.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of my desktop at a decent level of clutter with thirteen open windows being managed variously by transparency, minimize-in-place and window shading (note that each window also contains its own tabs. Opera here has forty tabs open across three windows alone):

As a parting note, you might think this is a pretty neurotic way to work with a computer, but if you're an old time Mac OS user, chances are you have a grin on your face right now and you recognize exactly why I do it this way. Cheers to you, my friend.

// posted at 12:33. permalink   comments

Sat, 21 May 2005

My Mac Mini has arrived [/tech]

My new Mac Mini arrived on Friday and I took a few pics while opening it. Tried my best to show its tiny footprint. Enjoy.

Pics in higher res and more.

// posted at 20:05. permalink   comments

Wed, 13 Apr 2005

Tactical Language Training [/tech]

Came across this in ACM news, Tactical Language Training:

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researcher Ralph Chatham has developed a video game, "Tactical Iraqi," that trains soldiers to speak rudimentary Arabic in order to facilitate effective and respectful communication with locals. Tactical Iraqi uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 computer game as a foundation, and users must wear headphones and speak into microphones to interact with the game environment and characters.

The webpage for it seems to be here, but it doesn't seem to give too much info....

// posted at 22:02. permalink   comments

Mon, 10 Jan 2005

ADC documentation [/tech]

In learning Cocoa programming, I've gotten the chance to go through a lot of Apple's developer documentation and it's pretty damn good. The crazy thing is how extensive their documentation is, even covering things like recommendations on the design process. It's hard to get excited about technical literature, but of everything I've read out there, this sucks the least. Compare with MSDN. Blech.

The Objective-C Programming Language still holds a special place in my heart for being the first time that things finally clicked in understanding what object-oriented programming was. Highly recommended.

// posted at 18:15. permalink   comments

Sat, 01 Jan 2005

ACM Queue Interviews Alan Kay [/tech]

The December/January issue of the ACM Queue has a really good interview with Alan Kay. Unfortunately, it's not available online from what I can tell. [Update: It's available here, but you need a ACM account (free?) to get it.] Here are the quotes I found interesting:

Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn't show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

....

In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

....

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it's certainly engineering of a sort—but it's the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

....

The stuff that is in vogue today is only about "one-half" of those languages[, Lisp and Smalltalk]. Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out. They made it impossible for the Sun software people to do what needed to be done.

....

What should Java have had in it to be a first-quality language, not just a commercial success?

Like I said, it's a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn't have to have any particular musical merits.

....

If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is no secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

....

All these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

There's a lot more interesting stuff in this interview, but I leave it up to you to pick up the issue and read it yourself. It's well worth it.

// posted at 16:06. permalink   comments

Tue, 07 Dec 2004

Macsyma [/tech]

I've gotten a little more interested in numerical analysis since taking an introductory course and oddly enough, the subject intersects a little with some Lisp history—specifically, the computer algebra system, Macsyma. One of the people involved in its development retells its history here. He includes interesting snippets of commentary about Symbolics, Wolfram Research, and funnily enough, the disdain some mathematicians have for anything but pure math:

In late 1997 I had virtually nailed down an endowment of roughly $50 million to enable Macsyma to revolutionize the interaction of mathematics and software.

• We persuaded our potential benefactor that automated computation was the emerging intellectual technology in mathematics; and that, while axiom-sets-and-mappings mathematics is extremely valuable, symbolic math software offers greater opportunities to yield major results over the next few decades.
• Our donor told us he definitely planned to fund this plan.
• We prepared rough programs and budgets, contacted many academics to explore interest, and we explored legal and tax implications of various structures.

In the spring of 1998 a leading pure math department persuaded our potential donor (an alum) that the best minds only work on pure math. So the frontier of automated operational mathematics lost to the mature activity of supporting bright guys to discover more theorems.

I view this result as a victory of tactical competence over strategic effectiveness.

[...]

In spring 1999 I tried to persuade Florida State to adopt Macsyma as a powerful addition to their small program in symbolic mathematics software.

• The project leader, Mika Seppala, told FSU that supporting Macsyma as an open academic math system with ample resources would eventually make FSU the world center of math software.
• The dean of science agreed. He is charged with long-term development of the school of science. We agreed that the best way to improve their standing is to beat the established leaders into the emerging growth fields, and this looked like an attractive opportunity.
• The mathematics faculty strongly rejected the proposal. They were unwilling to see resources diverted to something other than pure mathematics, since their resource base was already tight due to difficulties which FSU, as a second-tier math department, has winning research grants.

So the initiative collapsed.

My numerical analysis course was the only course I've taken in 5 years that gave full freedom of choice in what programming language to use on assignments. And I have to say, it made a world of difference in how much interest I retained on the subject. :P

// posted at 21:04. permalink   comments

Mon, 11 Oct 2004

MSN [/tech]

MSN messenger was messed up all of yesterday so that your messages weren't sent, but half the time, you couldn't tell whether or not they were. The perfect scene for miscommunication and hijinks. Way to go, microsoft.

// posted at 09:18. permalink   comments

Tue, 31 Aug 2004

New iMac [/tech]

The new iMac G5 is out. It reminds me a lot of what the PC world has been trying to do for a while now—everything into the display, except of course the iMac is designed with an extra touch of elegance that no PC maker except maybe Sony has ever come close to having. Kudos to Apple.

// posted at 09:24. permalink   comments

Mon, 09 Aug 2004

Am I a geek? [/tech]

What's that, you say? It's my laminated emacs reference card. Yes. I laminated it. I wasn't happy to just stick it up on my wall, see, since I'm always working away from my home computer. And I figured it'd get trashed in my backpack in no time, so I printed it out duplex and laminated it. I even took care to print it in reverse on the backside so that it flips vertically and not horizontally.

Now my conscience is screaming for me to laminate a Vim one too.

So how accurate is this whole geek test thing? 14%, I think not. But here's a curve-ball for you all, I just traded my Object Oriented Programming for a book of poetry, Leaves of Grass. What's more is that I'm enjoying it more than any other book in recent memory and yet it's the first piece of poetry I've ever read voluntarily. My high school English teacher would be proud....

// posted at 18:46. permalink   comments

Mon, 19 Jul 2004

typoGenerator [/tech]

Random image from google images + some text of your choice + random effects = ...

Sometimes they're ugly, other times they're beautiful. Try it yourself.

// posted at 15:59. permalink   comments

Sat, 26 Jun 2004

Emacs and Vim reference cards [/tech]

I bit the bullet and printed out the emacs reference card. It's quite pretty hanging on the wall behind my computer. I know It's been quite a while now but I'm still not getting the hang of emacs. I can't see how a vi user really ever gets used to it without spawning a split personality to cope with the duality. As evidence of this, I couldn't resist the temptation of also printing out a vim reference card. It's even prettier than the emacs one....

He stole the precioussss! No, emacs is our friend! ;)

// posted at 21:55. permalink   comments