So we just got back from seeing “V for Vendetta.” It was better than Battlefield Earth. But not by much.
Single quote that encapsulates the suckitude of the movie: “Ideas are bulletproof.” (Spoken by V, who has just been gifted with an assload of bullets and then asked “why won’t you die?”)
One RAM upgrade and an erase-and-install later, and I’ve got a machine that should be quite usable. A unit test suite that took nearly 10 seconds to run on the G4 iBook runs in under 2 seconds on this, so this is a Good Thing.
It also seems likely that the video ghosting problem (random [...]
So I picked up a new MacBook today. This is the first Mac-to-Mac transfer I’ve been through (the last time I bought a new Mac, it was to replace the one that got stolen), and I was pleased to see how smoothly that process went. I haven’t launched all my apps post-transfer, and [...]
For those of you who skipped over my previous two posts as just more geekery (which they were), something struck me as very odd about the black version of the MacBook laptop Apple announced yesterday: it’s priced at $200 more, but the only difference is that it has 20GB more disk space. Upgrading [...]
I’m typing this on a new MacBook sitting in MacForce, checking it out to see how it is to work on. I actually rather like the new keyboard; it doesn’t buckle as an entire unit as I type. I’m not so much loving the glossy screen, though — while the picture does look [...]
Apple’s new MacBook looks very very nice. But, while upgrading it from 512MB to 1GB costs a mere $90, going to the full 2GB is $450. That’s twice the memory, four times the price. Hello, third-party RAM…
[Edit: Also, the only difference between the white and black superdrive models seems to be [...]
Yesterday evening I finished writing a universal Turing machine simulator… in object-oriented Ruby. (You might think that “OO Ruby” would be redundant, but some people can write Pascal in anything.) I didn’t even bother using hashes where they might’ve made sense, so the next-state function will have O(n) performance rather than constant-time… yeah, [...]
If you’ve ever tried Skype, odds are you’ve already been spammed notified about this, but: Skype is now offering free calls from your PC to any phone number in the US and Canada. Deal’s good for the remainder of 2006 (or they buckle under the load). Time to bust out the USB [...]
I miss my sweetie. Fortunately, her plane is scheduled to arrive in 24 hours and 8 minutes.
Windows XP’s Automatic Updates feature is currently offering to download and install the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool.
What is this tool, you ask? Well, according to the install details:
“The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be a non-genuine, the [...]
But quite sweet: Getting Around: How I Discovered My Wheelchair Wasn’t A Chastity Belt. Definitely personalizes the issues faced by disabled people. (Link via Broadsheet.)
While poking around programming blogs and avoiding real work, I ran across a reference to a feature in the next version of Microsoft Office: it’s a little pop-up menu that half-appears when you select stuff. Could be OK, could be annoying, but what do you call it? Turns out that the (former) [...]
I just watched MirrorMask. (Since fawnapril is out of town, I put a few things in the Netflix queue she wasn’t interested in.) I quite liked it, even though mostly it kept reminding me of other things: most obviously, Labyrinth, Sandman, and Coraline, but also American McGee’s FPS game Alice and Clive [...]
Portland International Airport totally kicks your ass. We have free wifi; you, in contrast, have two competing for-pay wifi systems — one $8, one $9! Even the Long Beach airport (don’t sneeze, you’ll miss it) has free wifi, and they don’t even make you click through any ignoreware agreements. (So I guess [...]
We spent this weekend in Orange County visiting family, attending a wedding at a golf club (and in case we forgot, all the doors had “DRESS CODE” on them — very classy), riding Segways, and eating a lot.
Finally got back from the airport about an hour or so ago. Flying is getting harder and [...]
Twenty-six hours, six minutes.
I’ve been saying so many lovely things about Ruby and Rails that y’all are probably sick and tired of hearing it. So instead, I’ll take a quick moment to say that Subversion rocks mightily.
I was making a small change on my laptop while I waited back on a helpdesk ticket, and when that response [...]
How come nobody told me Brookhaven created a microscopic black hole back in March?
Stephen Colbert is my new hero.
For those of you not already aware of what I’m so impressed by, a quick linkfest:
thankyoustephencolbert.org
YouTube clip of a particularly juicy section of the speech
Transcript of the speech from Daily Kos
I don’t know why anybody would’ve thought inviting Colbert to speak at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (with George II [...]
Never, no matter how juicy a straight line he utters, speak to That Guy in your CS class. A response will be treated in about the way you’d expect a styrofoam beer cooler to be treated by a drowning man…