Looks like Verizon is upgrading its settop boxes, especially the channel guide. Glad to see Engadget also had some issues with the current boxes, although they liked it overall.
I’ve lodged my complaints before. Just wondering if the changes will show up before I kick FiOS TV to the curb.
Somewhat dusty, but new to me. How Guido von Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, writes main() functions. GvR discusses how to neatly and flexibly handle argv, exit codes, and usage errors. The discussion is worth reading as well.
I know everyone else is pointing to Stephen Wolfram’s the setup entry, but it’s sort of cool to see the tech one of the world’s smartest people uses on a daily basis. The only surprising thing is the general “off-the-shelfness” of Wolfram’s tools. Obviously Mathematica had to be #1 on the list, although I’m sure it’s completely kitted out with extensions, tweaks, and alpha features. Other than that, nothing really surprising or extravagant.
Except maybe for the telepresence robot.
I recently discovered dopeden’s Decks By the Beach podcast. Basically it’s a feed of DJ mixes. I downloaded all that I can find and have been enjoying most of them. Can’t complain about the price.
Listening to Dave Bullock’s mix on my iPod Touch, I was surprised to notice the ability to fast forward within the mix. There was also cover art, albeit quite grainy, for each stop. Neat.
Turns out the MPEG-4 file format, which Apple uses with the AAC audio encoding, supports chapter markers. Since the format is locked up in the ISO MPEG-4 standard, which you have to pay money for, the best info I could find about this feature was a tutorial on how to add them to an audio file using Apple’s GarageBand.
One of my major nits with DJ mixes on the Web is that you get them in one unnavigable wad of MP3 bits. Glad to know there’s at least one standard way of cleaning up this shortcoming. Too bad it’s not ridiculously convenient for DJs to capture their mixes this way.
… showed up in my Mac OS X.
Or at least a great plug did from Rick Yaeger of MacMerc.com for Algoriddim’s DJay software.
With a decent chunk of the Strictly Rhythm catalog now being offered digitally by Defected, might have to purchase a copy of DJay and give it a try.
Link parkin’: Git for the lazy. A sweet and quick introduction to the highly popular version control program git. Jibes with my experience learning how to use git. However it does highlight one inconsistency that mildly bugs me: the difference between git reset and git checkout for reversing edits.
I’m sure someone’s proposed some kind of aliasing of git checkout to a reset.
And I’m sure there’s either some reason I’ve never heard of it, or it doesn’t exist. That’s the UNIX way.
Just snagged a neato tip from the Finer Things in Mac blog. LaunchBar is a smart and convenient way to add items to iCal calendars. I’m starting to use iCal more as I use my iPod touch more, so this is good to know.
Clearly, AT & T bashing is the order of the day, at least for iPhone fanatics. But I’m not here to bury Ma Bell, but to praise her.
The wife’s been agitating for a new phone. She’d basically worn out a low end Nokia and was simply looking for something equivalent.
Meanwhile, the both of us were well past our upgrade deadlines. We were on separate individual plans and both of us were wildly underutilizing our minute allocations. So we stopped by the local AT & T store and looked into a Family Plan.
Previously, I had called to ask about this, and it sounded like a nightmare. In particular, I was told we’d have to upgrade both phones at the same time. Maybe it was the fact that we were in an AT & T corporate storefront, but the process was exceedingly painless. Some major corporate discounts and fee eliminations from my employer probably helped. My wife got the phone she was looking for, a Nokia 2330, plus we cut our combined monthly bill down by 50%. The only downer is we lost all our rollover minutes. Then again they were expiring at the rate of 400 a month, so it’s not like we were actually using them. Took us about 30 minutes total to conduct the transaction.
And I didn’t have to upgrade my phone, while maintaining my upgrade eligibility. So once I put a little cash aside, I can walk in and buy a fully subsidized app phone. Maybe that’s when I’ll find out the hard way about the downside of AT & T.
In the meantime, props to AT & T for excellent customer service.
This past week marked the anniversaries of starting this blog and getting the MacBook I’m writing this post on.
Unlike the last anniversary, I don’t have much to say this time around. I’ve been on a nice continuous posting roll that I’m quite happy with. It’d be nice to post more about tech, but the current mix is fulfilling.
Probably the most surprising thing is how well the MacBook has held up. It’s pretty close to three generations old at this point and was bottom of the line for its time. Other than the bus speed, 3x now, and the graphics chip, NVIDIA instead of Intel, the specs are comparable with what Apple is currently selling.
Despite only having 4Gb of main memory, I comfortably keep 13-16 applications open simultaneously. This includes three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) holding lots of open tabs. With the continuous subtle improvement of Mac OS X, it feels like the overall experience is getting better. The machine rarely feels slow and never crashes.
Conclusions are upcoming. The streak will end in the next few weeks. And there will be a smartphone purchase by the end of September.
Onward and upward!
In preparation for the 2010 World Cup, I started watching some of the Barclay’s Premier League. Unfortunately, it was only the last few weekends of the league. Chelsea had pretty much locked up the title although Manchester United was mildly threatening.
Well, the Premier League’s back. Kick-off for the 2010-11 season is tomorrow. I’m sort of stoked to follow an entire campaign, end-to-end. The tricky bit is choosing a side to root for. ManU would feel a bit like rooting for the New York Yankees and Chelsea would just be front running. Sort of tempted to go with The Gunners.
On the ride home from work today, I decided to break out the Masters at Work’s compilation Strictly MAW, and listen to the second mix by Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez. Man, I had forgotten what classics many of the Strictly Rhythm tracks were, including:
Logic, The Warning. This might have been the first Strictly Rhythm 12” I ever bought. Great flip side too, The Final Frontier.
Barbara Tucker, I Get Lifted
Hardrive, Deep Inside. Deep, deep, deep inside. Deep deep down inside.
Underground Solution, Luv Dancin
Lil’ Mo Yin Yang, Reach
The Believers, Who Dares to Believe in Me?. Very underrated. The track that gives and just keeps on giving.
Erick “More” Morillo, Dancin
Aly-Us, Follow Me. Although I can’t stand this song. I don’t need any shower singing in my mix.
Glad to see the label is back in business.
Finished Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City. Egan retains the title as the singularly most challenging science fiction writer I have ever read in my life. Granted, I’m not a sci-fi completist but I find it hard to believe that there are more than one or two other hard sf writers who are in his class. Egan’s work is not easy reading, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
The Wikipedia page for Permutation City is actually a pretty good summary despite a few Wikiwarts. The essence of the book is a deep exploration of the consequences of viable computational simulation of human consciousness. Many other Singularity or “nerd rapture” books have this aspect as a feature, but they often have as a bug an implicit assumption that humans can straightforwardly make the transition to such an existence. Egan doesn’t take this easy path.
The Wikipedia entry lingers a little too long on the geeky computing aspects of the story, but the real reward is the varied characters who make the ultimate transition into a simulated “immortality”. And their varied human reactions. There’s the reluctant creator of both the simulated Elysium and a computational alien world within it. There’s the pair of stowaway lovers who get immortality but can’t join the society on which they’re essentially parasites. There’s the privileged asshole who carries a guilty secret into an infinite life, and winds up descending into a self-made hell.
When you get down to it, Egan does a deep dive into the philosophical question of if you can simulate consciousness into infinity, what does it actually mean to be human anymore?
P.S. The chapter titles are cute, and I’m sure there’s an Easter Egg or two beyond the play on the title.
P.P.S. If you’re looking for a taste of how hard Egan’s work can be, check out the FAQ for Permutation City
Apparently I was behind an update to Witch. I know I’ve previously plugged this window switching tool for the Macintosh, but it’s worth repeating. Witch is a nearly indispensable tool.
In the latest version Pop-up Previews, as seen above, are pretty cool.
The recent upgrade of Thunderbird busted my installation of Nostalgy. Thankfully the developer release is compatible with the latest version of Thunderbird. This just served to remind me of the amazing utility of keyboard based functionality. Nostalgy enables the ability to copy or move e-mails to folders based upon keystrokes. Between improved search in Thunderbird and Nostalgy, I can power through filing hundreds of e-mails in a short period of time.
Nostalgy is one of two Thunderbird add-ons I have installed. The other is Correct Identity for selecting accounts on outgoing e-mail. I could probably get by without Correct Identity, but I might have to shoot myself if Nostalgy every bites the dust. Heartily recommended.
One of my favorite quips these days is “Rebooting is so last century.” A particular joy of my MacBook is that unintended reboots/crashes have been really infrequent. Granted, I’m not pushing it hard like a real developer, but on the other hand I do a couple of sleeps/suspends a day. I also keep a nice bevy of applications open at all times, including three browsers with plenty of tabs. There’s plenty of room for hard crashes.
As for my ancient Dell laptop for work? Not so much.
Combine the low crash rate with a reasonable OS update frequency and you get the kind of uptimes seen in the screenshot above. 52 days and I could have gone longer if the last.fm scrobbler hadn’t gotten borked by an iTunes update. A voluntary reboot was needed to get things right, along with updating Safari.
This could get real ugly, real fast.
I love Dr. Seuss.
I have an iPod Touch.
I have a 3 year old, fast going on 4.
Oceanhouse Media makes a collection of Dr. Seuss Apps. These are iOS specific renderings of 11 (currently) different Dr. Seuss classics including One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish, Hop on Pop, and The Cat in the Hat. Each book supports natural reader driven navigation, narrated navigation, and auto played. Curious as to how these are different in actual practice.
Unless the apps are totally awful, and the reviews at the iTunes store are pretty good, I could see eventually buying all of the titles. At $3.99 a pop, that ain’t cheap.
Previously, I was skeptical of Ridley Scott directing an adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. But things might be coming together.
Reported as coming directly from Joe Haldeman himself, Scott teamed up with a script writer he has worked with before, David Peoples. Peoples wrote the screenplay for Unforgiven and Twelve Monkeys. Oh and that iconic Blade Runner flick.
Upon further review though, Peoples has moved on from the writing project. The screenplay is now in the hands of Matthew Michael Carnahan. Nothing particularly outstanding on his short resume, but no particular dogs either.
The movie could still end up in development hell, but these bits of news make me a little less skeptical.
False lead via io9. Correction via firstshowing.net
While the crowd, admittedly small, on Hacker News wasn’t too excited, I have to say I’m intrigued by the recently widely opened rdio. The company’s blog has some of the product details including:
Select any and all of our seven million songs and play them, on-demand, as much as you want.
Sync as many songs as you can fit on your phone, and play them even when you’re offline (and of course, play everything when you’re online).
Follow friends to find new music, rather than staring at an empty search box
Find friends from Twitter, Facebook and email
Discover music in industry insiders’ Collections and Playlists, such as Spin Magazine, Pitchfork, KCRW Radio, The FADER and XLR8R Magazine
Not sure I’ll be into all the social features, but having a huge music library accessible from an iPod Touch is enticing.
Reminds me that I should check out last.fm’s iPod Touch client, if it exists.
You won’t get one from me. I’ve seen variations on this SF v NY, Stanford v New Jersey, West Coast v East Coast, theme a few times over the years. And while I spent 8 great years in the Bay Area, I can’t really speak much to NYC’s tech scene. Besides, I just love big cities in general, so I take all of these harangues as the venting of a singular individual with a decidedly narrow viewpoint.
But every now and then you have to admire the overall writing quality of an unhinged rant. Witness Antonio Garcia-Marquez just unloading on New York:
New York will never be more than a tech sideshow.
Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either.
…
In the Bay Area, you drive through Atherton or Woodside and see the mansions that Netscape, Apple, and Oracle built. On the Upper East Side you see houses built thanks to the depredations of previous generations, and owned by the predators of today (probably their children).
In the Bay Area, new money is better than old. In New York, it’s precisely the opposite. The mythology is all wrong.
I suspect Garcia-Marquez was mostly yanking chains, but the tone is just smirkingly self-righteous enough to make you nod your head occasionally, even though you don’t believe a word of his BS. And it’ll squeeze a chuckle or two out of you.
Not quite a Shivers class rant, but I found it quite entertaining.
Of Richard K. Morgan’s book Thirteen, a.k.a. Black Man in the UK, I once wrote:
Published in 2007, I wonder how Morgan interpreted the events of the 2008 Presidential elections. Must have sort of felt like contradiction and vindication at the same time.
Given what happened to Representative Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), I’d bet Morgan would tell me it’s all vindication. What contradiction?
Inglis fell victim to a Tea Party wave in South Carolina, despite being, in word and deed, inarguably conservative. Just not ornery enough to be completely obstructionist. And he had well reasoned positions and arguments (such an elitist intellectual thing to do).
We’re getting to the point where bringing reason to a political argument is like bringing a knife to the proverbial Chicago gunfight.
Finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s short story Errata today. Like many other readers, who probably came expecting a work of standard speculative fiction, I was mostly confused by the surreal nature of the tale, although I enjoyed it.
I think. Maybe. Sort of.
The whole story is freely available on tor.com, but I got the 99 cent e-book version through Amazon’s Kindle store. I did the reading on my iPod Touch which was fairly pleasant. It got even better once I figured out I could decrease the font size so I didn’t have to flip pages as much. Suggestion to other newcomers to Kindle for the iPhone, press those little A’s in the interface, and experiment a bit. Might improve your reading experience.
At least I chuckled at mentions of Juliette the Penguin.
Link parkin’: superuser.com has been building a collection of terminal hacks for Mac OS X.
Maybe this will ring a bell for someone.
On my iPod Touch, I have mail set up to use IMAP. From my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, I occasionally e-mail myself items that should get auto filtered into a particular folder. Intermittently, the Mail program simply uses IMAP to place the outgoing message into my sent folder and leaves it at that. Mail will completely skip sending the message through my SMTP server at mailhop.org. This scotches my automated filtering.
I switched my outbound SMTP server to one of Google’s, and now things seem to be a little more consistent. Weird.
So the movie Kids, directed by Larry Clark, turned 15 today. In that acknowledgement of 15 years is a lament for a New York that used to be.
Kids occupies an odd place in my movie experience. At 28 I wasn’t close to the age group portrayed, but I still had a little affinity from my contact with the SF rave scene. I went out of my way to catch the flick when I was visiting some friends in Pittsburgh, specifically because I wanted to see the portrayal of N.A.S.A. And of course the manufactured controversy about “A wake up call to the world!”
While I distinctively remember the movie, even only seeing it once, I can’t really call it a guilty pleasure. First it’s disturbing. You see a lot of malicious acts in modern cinema, but seeing “realistic” teens do it on the big screen (at least at that time) throws you off kilter. Second, it’s not entertaining. There is an overall plot, but the movie is really a sequence of staged pieces, with a barely engaging connective thread. You don’t walk out of the theater feeling you had a good time. Plus to be a guilty pleasure, it needs repeated viewing, and as I said I’ve only seen it once.
I will say this, it’s a provocative film. And another nice aspect is that New York, the actual ground level city with all it’s rivers of people and gritty nooks and crannys, featured prominently as a character.
Between Kids and Bully, Larry Clark makes me a little nervous.
If I had Netflix, I’d definitely watch Kids again. Available on the iTunes store though, maybe I’ll rent it.
P.S. I didn’t realize N.A.S.A. was homed in The Shelter
Coming to Verizon FiOS TV from DirecTV over a year ago, one of the major irritants was the channel guide. You’d think it wouldn’t be a big thing, but it seriously has me considering switching back to DirecTV, among a bunch of other things.
When we switched over, the main problem was the number of button presses it took to get the full episode information. Maybe there’s a smarter way, but it always takes me three.
Recently, things seem to have gotten worse. First, the episode info, especially for premium channels, often doesn’t have any actor information. Second, the category errors are increasing. Take for example, The Center of the World starring Molly Parker and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s a film about a depressed guy, holing up in Vegas, who pays a hooker to hang out with him for three nights. Strong adult themes are the order of the day. Verizon happily categorized it as Children. That’s it.
Sigh.
Then again this is an extreme First World problem to have.
Since I’ve been experimenting with using my iPod Touch as an e-book reader, I’m more alert to the overall e-reader market. Amazon’s latest Kindle, at $139 for the Wi-Fi only edition, is a pretty tempting gadget.
There’s plenty of recaps kicking around the ‘net, but I liked Engadget’s quick reactions. Here’s the highlights:
Cheaper
Faster page turning
Lighter
Longer battery life
More storage
The highly useful comments on Hacker News also break down the tradeoffs between the Kindle and other e-book devices/approaches at an OCD level. Of course the device really is dedicated to reading and targeted at folk who read, particularly books, a lot.
Can you say “Moore’s Law in effect”? The thing is now pretty doggone close to an impulse purchase for mere mortals. Kindle pricing has moved down into game console cost territory. And the programming is a bit cheaper.
I’m not down on my iPod Touch, but I’m trending towards becoming a computer sherpa (term courtesy Ken Forbus). I’ll probably have an app phone by the end of the year along with some kind of pad or e-reader. A phalanx of the Touch, an Android phone, and a Kindle would make a nice combination.
Hey Lee, let me know what you think of the new Kindles!
Link parkin’: Since my little side project involves SQLite at its core, Brett Wilson’s article provided some good insights on how to get the best out of the little embedded database that could.
Geez I’ve been using RSS for a long time. Recently I noticed that I had an unruly sprawl of feeds across 3 different Google Reader accounts and NetNewsWire on my personal laptop. Time for some housekeeping.
I collapsed most of the feeds from the Google Reader accounts into one account. The few leftover are work related, so I just left them in a work-specific account. Meanwhile, the collapsed set I now read on my iPod Touch using NetNewsWire for that platform.
That pile of feeds covers a large portion of my broad technology, gadget, and culture interests dating back to my past life. It’s a big part of my daily info fix. Reading them on the touch feels a lot more productive. I sit down for one session after work and flick through a big pile of the days items in about 30 minutes. Works better than the intermittent grazing I was doing during the day.
Now I need to make more usage of sending items to Evernote or e-mailing posts from NetNewsWire.
About two years ago, I was lucky enough to catch Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight at the Udvar-Hazy Airbus IMAX Theater. This was after missing the flick on it’s first run in the theater. And failing to see it in the downtown DC screen at the Air and Space Museum because it sold out. And passing again when it came to Udvar-Hazy because I thought it would cost $12 for parking, doubling the price of the film. Thankfully, The Dark Knight made a return engagement.
The great thing about Udvar-Hazy is that
It’s a full fledged IMAX screen, not the watered down mall version.
They don’t do commercials or trailers. When it’s starting time, the movie you paid for starts.
At least when I went, the venue was way undersold, so me and about 10 other fine folks got the theater to ourselves. Imagine the lush IMAX rendition of Gotham City completely filling your visual field.
Don’t be fooled by the Udvar-Hazy posted parking restrictions, parking is free after hours.
It’s an easy 20 minute ride from my house.
Needless to say, I’m completely stoked that Inception is making an engagement at Udvar-Hazy. A lot of folks seem to like the movie, while there’s a vocal segment who don’t. Whatever the case may be, seeing it on a massive IMAX screen will be an interesting experience.
An interview with Joey Negro, which deserves its own post, surfaced the name of Pal Joey. In the murky depths of my DJ hind brain, I remembered Pal Joey as being somewhat legendary, but the big hits didn’t leap immediately to mind.
Finally got around to looking up Pal Joey on discogs.com and man does he have a pretty impressive discography. Soho’s Hot Music is probably the most legendary track (I’ve got the Outer Rhythm version parked in storage), but there’s a host of other significant original, production, and remix efforts across all forms of dance music.
Didn’t know he’d gotten his introduction to the scene working at New York’s legendary Vinylmania record shop.
Didn’t know he’d worked with KRS-ONE on Love’s Gonna Get’Cha.
Didn’t know he’d remixed Deee-Lite’s How Do You Say…Love.
Didn’t know he’d remixed The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds.
Didn’t know he’d remixed Sade’s Cherish the Day.
Didn’t know the Earth People tracks Dance and Reach Up to Mars were some of his earliest cuts. Need to dig in to my archives and see if I have these collector’s items.
And according to the Pal Joey Music discography he’s still going strong.
I think I’ve given up on the HTC Evo. The reviews are a little too mixed with not enough bang for buck over an iPhone 4. The criminal charges against the Evo’s battery life seem to be sticking.
But Motorola’s Droid X, Verizon’s answer to the Evo, looks like it has some potential. First off, I’m not seeing the battery life complaints. Second, you’re only in for an extra $20 to use it as a mobile hotspot, albeit for only 2GB a month. The upside is that none of your hotspot bytes count against your mobile smartphone limit, which is unlimited for $30 a month.
The general consensus seems to be it’s a good hardware package, decent call performance, with good battery life, but the UI falls a little short. Pricing is closer to the iPhone than the Evo, with similar bandwidth limitations. Seems like a safe app phone choice if you’re not into Apple, AT&T, or 4G.
Here’s the reviews I’ve seen so far:
ArsTechnica was mostly positive. The overall package reviewed well, but various fit, finish, camera, and UI coherence dings prevented them from raving.
The Droid X is an impressive device that delivers a lot of compelling functionality. It couples outstanding hardware specifications with a great battery life and some useful software customizations. The product’s weak areas are in the incompleteness of its custom software stack, its general lack of polish relative to other custom Android environments like HTC Sense, and its noisy camera hardware and user-unfriendly camera software.
Gizmodo was generally down. The writing of the review was a bit over the top:
As a pure expression of the limits of mobile hardware and industrial design, the Droid X is kind of a beautiful thing. But that’s about the only good thing about the Droid X.
The software—a discordant melange of the not-so-fresh Android 2.1 and various bits of the Blur “social networking” interface from Motorola’s lower-end Android phones—is the shudder-inducing poster child for the horrors that can occur when most hardware companies try to make software. It’s ugly, scattershot, and confusing. It feels almost malicious.
AnandTech was a bit more positive than Ars. Amazingly they also soundly beat Ars on thoroughness and attention to detail in the review, not that Ars was slouching. However, it is a bit more geeky, with a decided emphasis on performance benchmarks.
If you’re on Verizon and prefer the larger screen, the Droid X takes our pick for the best Android phone on the market today. All we really need is a good Nexus One successor for those users who want something a bit smaller, and maybe an entirely new form factor for the ultimate smallest in devices.
Engadget’s review was first out the block, somewhat thinner than the others, and slightly lukewarm.
Cast in that light, the Droid X becomes a much less magical phone than the Droid was. It’s good, and it’s a pretty enjoyable execution of Android 2.1, but it’s not a must-have phone — especially in light of the Droid Incredible and the upcoming Droid 2. From a hardware perspective, this phone is pretty much a bang-on execution of what a high-end mobile powerhouse should be, but Motorola clearly still has work to do in order to play in the same software league as HTC does with Sense. If it can get there — or heck, if it can just offer this phone with stock Froyo — you’ve got perhaps the best Android phone ever made.
At work I’m stuck with Windows XP, papered over to look like UNIX as much as possible. Luckily our sysadmins have installed a version of GNU Emacs for Windows that works pretty well.
I don’t like the default font, whatever it is. I much rather prefer Lucida Console. So any time I reboot the machine or restart Emacs, I had to right click on the main frame and select Lucida Console. You’d think as a tried and true geek, I’d follow the DRY principle on this one. But noooooooo…
I’ve been doing this little font setting dance for over 3+ years. Pathetic.
Knowing from long experience how arcane configuring Emacs can be, I was dreading a multi-hour session reading Info files and writing Emacs Lisp. But last week I finally hunkered down and decided to nail this one. Only took me about 45 minutes or so combining Google searching and Emacs Lisp experimentation.
Turns out the key is understanding the Emacs frame (window to the rest of the world) parameters and ignoring the face stuff. Faces are Emacs way of specifying font stylings for regions of text. They play nice with Emacs options customization menu. You’d think they would be one stop shopping for text options. But even if you set the default font for the default face, your text won’t show up right in every frame.
Here’s what you want in your .emacs.el, emacs.el, init.el or whatever:
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(font . "-outline-Lucida Console-normal-r-normal-normal-11-82-96-96-c-70-iso8859-1"))
This says, for every frame opened, use my particular version of Lucida Console to initialize the frame’s text font parameter. Then per frame settings and face stylings can kick in afterwards. Generating the font specification is left as an exercise to the reader. default-frame-alist, besides letting you set the default font, also initializes some obvious window geometry and color parameters, as well as some fun stuff like opacity and window bar title.
And with that, I save myself a whopping 10-15 seconds every time I start up Emacs, along with my sanity.
One last thing, I tried using set-default-font and it did not work.
Just as a point of reference, here’s the result of (emacs-version) on my work machine:
"GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2004-03-10 on NYAUMO"
So Your Mileage May Vary.
Posted in the hopes that this may help someone else someday.
Just poking around for cheap books in Amazon’s Kindle e-book section, I found this collection of Conan the Barbarian short stories:
Gods of the North (a.k.a. The Frost Giant’s Daughter)
Queen of the Black Coast
Shadows in the Moonlight
A Witch Shall be Born
Shadows in Zamboula
The Devil in Iron
The People of the Black Circle
The Pool of the Black One
Red Nails
Jewels of Gwahlur
Beyond the Black River
The Hour of the Dragon
The Hyborian Age
These are all top of the line Robert E. Howard originals, no L. Sprague De Camp to be found. I’m particularly excited to have some version of Beyond the Black River, one of the best Conan stories ever.
Oh and all this for only 99 cents.
Okay, so I went $1 over budget. But I felt like I couldn’t have just one book on the Kindle for iPod. It might get lonely. At least Amazon finally got the Tor.com titles up on the Kindle store. Apologies in advance if the titles were hidden on a shelf and obscured from my view.
In any event, taking advantage of the Tor.com special I purchased the following short stories:
After the Coup by John Scalzi (iBooks)
Down on the Farm by Charles Stross (iBooks)
Shade by Steven Gould (Kindle)
The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder by Elizabeth Bear (iBooks)
Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory by Rudy Rucker (iBooks)
Errata by Jeff VanderMeer (Kindle)
On a whim, I started with VanderMeer’s Errata. I don’t know if it’s SF, but it’s pretty damn weird. But oddly engaging. And the Kindle iPod reading experience has been pretty good so far.
ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng conducts a faceoff between Verizon’s MiFi and Sprint’s Overdrive 4G mobile hotspots. The results aren’t particularly conclusive, but I enjoyed this sentence:
On top of the MiFi’s pretty looks, it also performs better at basic tasks like turning on and shutting down. While the MiFi can power on and off and be ready to use within seconds, the Overdrive takes its time powering on—taking a minute or more. If that sounds bad, things are about to get worse.
Not very promising.
Cheng provides loose, basic performance measurements. For uploads and downloads the Overdrive does really well on a 4G network and somewhat worse than the MiFi on a 3G network. So no clear winner. Cheng also throws in a comparison with a tethered iPhone 4 on AT&T’s 3G network, which does surprisingly well. Ping times are horrible on the iPhone 4 though.
Frankly, if I had to pull a trigger, for my needs I’d go with an iPhone 4, punt on the mobile hotspots, and use the savings to max out the storage on the iPhone.
The science fiction publisher Tor is running a special of sorts. As an experiment in supplying content for various e-readers, they’re making a bunch of previously posted short stories available for 99 cents. Authors include John Scalzi and Charles Stross, two of my favorites, along with Elizabeth Bear and Steven Gould, two I need to check out.
It might seem stupid to pay for content that’s already been freely posted and is still available on the Web. But I figure it’s worth five bucks to to test drive e-books on my iPod touch, buy at a price that works for me, and support the authors. Also, gives me a chance to try out the iBooks and Amazon stores.
Current score, Apple 1, Amazon 0. I can pre-order the short stories from iBooks whereas the Kindle store is showing neither hide nor hair.
Over and above the fact that the only major (e.g. national or international) sporting event of note was golf’s Open Championship, a.k.a. The British Open, I noticed that all of the live coverage was only on ESPN. You got some mop-up “best of” coverage on ABC after the live coverage was over, but otherwise you were SOL. Is this the first “major” event that’s gone from at least some over-the-air to cable only?
If you don’t have cable or satellite (Internet?) and you’re a sports fan, things are looking increasingly grim.
But not to worry, suggests ESPN executive vice president John Wildhack: “The delineating between broadcast (TV) and cable is over. If you asked anyone under 40 the difference … you’d get a quizzical look.”
You might be able to get some local team games over the air, but even there much of the product has migrated onto cable. This applies to all sports. On broadcast today, in my market (DC with the Nationals and Orioles), you got FOX MLB on Saturday and a celebrity golf tournament on Sunday. That was your broadcast sports selection for the weekend!
Thumbs up. ESPN having close to comprehensive live coverage, despite the time difference and the wacky Friday weather.
Thumbs down. ESPN had way too many undifferentiated talking heads. I couldn’t tell the difference between Tom Watson and Tom Weiskopff. Actual stroke coverage seemed to suffer. Found their Open Championship fillers (voiced by Ian McShane) as overly pompous. On top of it all, they got a pretty undramatic final round. Yawn!
Just for fun, I completed a pretty basic implementation of automatically storing Python lists of integers in an SQLite database. Python’s sqlite3 module provides hooks for extending a db connection with functions to automate the conversion of Python types on the way in and out. wirebin provided the serialization and deserialization.
For a braindead performance evaluation of deserialization, I created a million row database, with a single column corresponding to the list datatype. The size of the lists stored ranged from 1 to 1000 elements, elements ranging in value from 1 to 1000. Using Python’s builtin timing functions, all rows can be retrieved, using automatic deserialization, in about 5 seconds. A very coarse test, but indications are that it takes on the order of microseconds to pull a list out of the DB. Not bad, and I expect that this would scale linearly, and very slowly, with the number of elements in the list. I need to do a simple timing of serialization and insertion, but I anticipate that should be in the same order of magnitude.
One gotcha that tripped me up is that binary data, e.g. as generated by wirebin, has to be converted into an SQLite binary blob using sqlite3.Binary. You can’t just send any old string. And SQLite may silently drop your inserted value if you don’t do this conversion. I suspect null characters are the offending culprit. So for a while there, my list objects were going missing, yet I wasn’t getting any errors or exceptions. On the way out, you get a buffer object, which can be cast to a string and then fed to wirebin for deserialization. It’s all good.
Slouching towards prefuse in Python. Now I just have to figure out the right representations for nodes, edges, and lists of each.
This one had been bugging me for a while. I had a big playlist of dj mix MP3s downloaded from the ‘Net. Hadn’t listened to the vast majority and wanted to nuke ‘em all in one fell swoop. Selecting all and hitting Delete just removed them from the playlist.
Turns out selecting in the playlist and hitting Option-Delete deletes from the iTunes library.
Sanity preserved. Space recovered. Thanks Google. Thanks Mac OS X Hints. Hope this post helps someone else get over this hump.
Chris Heathcote observes that last.fm was looking to hire a “data griot”, although I think the position listing has been removed. I’m guessing the job involves data analysis, visualization, and storytelling about the results. I’d sign up for that gig!
The terms data science and data scientist seem like they might be heading for fad territory, but the demand for a particular combination of hard skills is definitely on the way up. I’m not sure how merging those talents with the artistic stylings of a real griot is advantageous in a commercial context, but with an explosion of massive data, I can see an expansion in creative opportunities.
In short, there’s a lot more room for guys like Jonathan Harris.
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