http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss en Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:02:22 -0500 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:02:26 -0500 iBlog 1.4.6 Ruske Wandering through an ever-expanding forest of technologies, becoming very lost, and occasionally finding a sunny spot in a clearing. Expect to stumble across Cocoa, Java, .NET, and other software development topics, with frequent personal detours of no consequence whatsoever. Ruske Arts & Entertainment http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20080624010145/index.html Or so says retired meteorologist John Coleman in a bit of spam (as seen on Snopes.com), forwarded to me by some dear friends. After a little reading on this claim, I sent this reply... ]]> Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:01:45 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20080624010145/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20080604112917/index.html Yeah, I know, I said I was keeping my Palm, but that was almost a year ago. And so much has changed since then... ]]> Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:29:17 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20080604112917/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20070701224416/index.html The stars aligned: my wife had been asking what new toy I might like for my birthday, my call-dropping Sprint service reached the end of its 3 year contract, the Palm OS was disappearing from even Palm's own phones, and Apple had introduced the most anticipated new gadget of all time: the iPhone. True, my 15GB iPod still seemed to have a lot of life left in it, and nothing in particular going against it --- but why fight fate? ... ]]> Sun, 01 Jul 2007 22:44:16 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20070701224416/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20070115090713/index.html One way or another, all programmers eventually learn the importance of commenting their code. The importance of clear documentation increases with the size of the team and the complexity of the project. Ideally, the code will not only be documented but unit tested as well. Here's an example of what happens when, for one reason or another, we let ourselves be less than thorough... ]]> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:07:13 -0600 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20070115090713/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060702075209/index.html Several weeks ago a maxed-out MacBook Pro arrived at my doorstep, and since then I've been putting it through the paces as a .NET development system --- using Microsoft's own Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP, running under OS X via Parallels Desktop for Mac. To my surprise, I not only got this to work, but work well enough to blow away my 1.6 GHz Dell running XP natively with twice as much RAM... ]]> Sun, 02 Jul 2006 07:52:09 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060702075209/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060415103448/index.html I don't say much about my .NET work here, sometimes because the nature of that work is proprietary, but usually because there's so much about .NET already on the web that it'd just be redundant. I had a hard time finding out exactly how .NET 2.0 supported tooltips for ListView subitems, though, so I thought I'd put a small blurb on the web for the benefit of others... ]]> Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:34:48 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060415103448/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20060406235442/index.html Yesterday I went on a bit about Apple's Boot Camp software that enables booting into Windows, and said I'd prefer running Windows in a virtual machine (VM) when it became available. Turns out that such software is available today for beta testing from Parallels; here's the press release. And according to this, it's very, very fast, too --- if the video isn't faked, it's darn impressive... ]]> Thu, 06 Apr 2006 23:54:42 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E20060406235442/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060405133828/index.html It's official: Apple announced that they'll provide the ability for new Intel-based Macs to boot Windows XP via Boot Camp, available now as a public Beta and later as a feature bundled with OS X. While some clever people have succeeded in bringing up Windows on a Mac before, an official Apple solution will be better received, particularly among businesses that might like to give Macs a try. But the question my fellow Visual Studio users may be asking is, "Why bother?"... ]]> Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:18:28 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1501534740/E20060405133828/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20060223230717/index.html I support the idea of legal music downloads, and I agree that copyright holders deserve to be compensated for their work. All the music I've downloaded has been through Apple's iTunes music store, and everything on my iPod comes from either that or CDs I purchased in the past... ]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:07:17 -0600 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20060223230717/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20050927110428/index.html The FOX television science fiction series Firefly was "hailed by critics as one of the most cancelled series of the year," joked creator Joss Whedon. Shown out of order by FOX, Firefly was pulled after just 11 episodes. But the strength of the DVD sales, which included an additional 3 episodes that never aired, helped Whedon get the backing of Universal Studios for a feature film. That film, Serenity, arrives in theaters today... ]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2005 06:04:28 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C1252493963/E20050927110428/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E844527267/index.html I released my little Firefox Counter widget, and within two weeks the feed changed to remove the thousands separators (commas, the U.S. and British convention). With over 70 million downloads of Firefox now, it's a big number to view without such separators. Javascript to the rescue... ]]> Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:52:46 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E844527267/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E53762809/index.html Yes and no. If you've downloaded the Firefox Counter widget and you're not seeing an increasing count at the moment, it's because SpreadFirefox.com --- the site that provides the counter data --- is temporarily down... ]]> Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:57:08 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E53762809/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E153682441/index.html With much guidance from Danny Goodman's new Mac OS X Technology Guide to Dashboard, graphic bits from the Firefox logo artists, and an RSS feed from SpreadFirefox.com, I've thrown together my first OS X Tiger Dashboard widget. A simple little thing, the Firefox Counter widget just displays the minute-by-minute download count for Firefox... ]]> Tue, 05 Jul 2005 08:12:41 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E153682441/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E784248792/index.html Back in March I took a first look at unit testing in Objective-C and a few of the options available. I chose UnitKit. Well, with the release of XCode 2.1, Apple not only adds support for Intel processors, but also integrates a unit testing framework, OCUnit (XCode's release notes can be found here). While this will expand the number of developers who embrace unit testing and improve software quality on the Mac platform, it does call into question the future of alternative testing frameworks like UnitKit... ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:52:58 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E784248792/index.html http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E448563224/index.html Apple's announcement that they'd be migrating their product line to Intel processors is sure getting its share of press. I've been reading a lot of the predictions, some good and some rubbish, but Macworld has a FAQ that seems to be pretty realistic... ]]> Tue, 07 Jun 2005 22:52:05 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/ruske/ruske/C2127905073/E448563224/index.html