June 2005 Archives

Working on a crossword puzzle with ink means two things: you find yourself more conservative, (You wait until you are fairly confident before committing to something.) and when you inevitably make a mistake anyway, it gets messy to patch things up.

Software development is the same way. No matter how carefully a developer proceeds, at some point a mistake will happen, and if the erroneous code has gone out the door, you have a messy situation that needs patching. At that point, software can begin to look like a badly scribbled-out crossword. Depending on the location of the error—whether it's in a fundamental API or just an implementation detail for instance—external developers can be affected as well, making their code messy too.

-- Micah Dubinko, Life After Ajax?

There is a commercial running for Pepsi One where the cans spin and morph like a kaleidoscope. For all you wondering about the music behind it, the track is called Exploration by Karminsky Experience. Incidentially this is yet another track from the Thievery Corporation's DJ Kicks album which I cited as the source of numerous other commercial music gems.

via A Full Belly

J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata.  "Father, don't be so severe! If I can't drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

In his O'Reilly weblog post Safari Sucks Memory, Roger Weeks writes:

The killer problem that I just noticed today is that Safari positively EATS memory. I was working in Cacti, and noticed that my system had really slowed to a crawl. The browser window took forever to update, and I had a lot of disk activity. I fired up top and WHOA! I only have 2M of free RAM and the system is swapping like mad.

Safari was taking up 216M of RSIZE memory in top. That's half of my system total! Again, this is a single web site. I have a single window open, at this time displaying a list of 25 graphs which I was editing one at a time.

216M of RAM! What on earth are you doing to me, Apple?

Tell me about it. I had a similar experience and called Apple support before I noticed the memory sucking power of Safari. My Powerbook was burning up and absolutely crawling. This behavior was exactly how my last Powerbook before it died on me one New Years Eve.

I know I just need to switch to FireFox, but old habits die hard. I'm also a slut for esthetics which Safari still does better then FireFox.

Hopefully Safari 2 will do better when I finally get around to installing my Tiger upgrade that's been collecting dust.

Ad critic contributor David Keifaber lays into Ben Stiller.

About a quarter of the way through [Dodgeball], it hit me: He was playing the same self-absorbed fitness nut he played in Heavy Weights, with a bit of his dumbass Zoolander character thrown in, and was basically wearing his Anchorman costume. Stiller’s comedic delivery has gone unchanged for years now. From now on, ads for Ben Stiller movies should simply describe his character as a composite of everything he’s ever done. That way, fewer people go home disappointed, and his hard-core fans will be relieved that he isn’t trying anything crazy, like developing as an actor.

Ouch! And that is from an ad critic. I wouldn't be so harsh. I kind of think of him as the Woody Allen of our generation.

Speaking of Ben Stiller, Make magazine points to a DIY guide to creating Zoolander's impossibly small cellphone. Nice!

Alex Bosworth has announced an interesting social networking/wiki project called Swik.

A common complain about Open Source is that it's hard to find out how to make it work. I don't really think this makes sense: if Open Source has any strength, it's strength in numbers, and if there are many other people figuring out how to use software, they should be able to pass that knowledge along to everyone else.

Unfortunately, life is not always that easy for users of Open Source yet. That's why SourceLabs is developing Swik, a web service for letting information about Open Source software flow from user to user, in a free and open way.

Swik is a wiki for any open source project. It's a set of CreativeCommons pages that lets anyone share tips, links, definitions or instructions.

Sounds promising. I'm already doing enough documentation in with my current projects load, but potentially having a respository tech how-to akin to Wikipedia is really quite appealing if it works.

Checking one of my inboxes I found an interesting email message from ActiveState announcing commercial Perl support for Mac OS X.

ActiveState is pleased to announce the immediate availability of ActivePerl, ActivePython & ActiveTcl for the Mac OS X platform. More importantly to this list, we are very excited to announce our plan to release Komodo for Mac OS X later this year. We expect to offer a beta release in August.

To keep up-to-date with our Mac OS X progress, betas and
announcements, we invite you to join our new mailing list:

osx-announce@ActiveState.com

BTW, the free downloads of ActivePerl, ActivePython & ActiveTcl for Mac OS X are available here:

www.ActiveState.com/Languages

I've been fairly pleased with my standard Perl distribution running on Mac OS X with BBEdit for writing code. Before I switched, I used Komodo and their version of Perl for Windows. I kind of liked it though I can't say I miss it – perhaps that was because of all of the Windows baggage I left behind. As I dive deeper in standard command-line tool shedding my all GUI past, shedding a slick Perl development app like Komodo seemed appropriate no matter what the quality.

I think this is a win for Mac folk in that ActiveState had a nice installer and a more sensible distribution of Perl. ActiveState windows installation included must-have modules such as LWP, XML::Parser and others that the standard distribution lacks. The lack of support to highly popular function in Perl like XML parsing or Web interfaces has always been a great mystery to me. That's why I'm glad to see a company like ActiveState pushing that notion.

It will be interesting to see what effect a commercial entity like ActiveState will have in the adoption of Perl (and Python) on the Mac.

I finally got to see George Lucas's final Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith last night. I may be the last person in the blogosphere to finally see it, but I did and I can now comment.

After seeing it and reading a few posts by others I must agreed that it was much better then the previous two. That isn't saying much though because I thought they were rather poor. I wasn't as enthralled as others though. It was fine, but I don't need to ever see it again.

The action made it more interesting to watch and made up for the poor script we've all come to expect. It was just so anti-climatic knowing how everything should end. I was just there for the details and a sense of completion. Well – I had hoped to be pleasantly surprised, but I wasn't.

Driving home from the theatre I commented to my wife that if George wanted to tell the fall of Anakin Skywalker so much he should have taken a cue from his friend Francis Ford Coppola and created movies with the characters we all know and love while flashing back to the past like in Godfather 2. That would have been tremendous.

Yes people are going in droves to see the movies and yes George is making a ton on promotional marketing of nearly everything you can. However I have to wonder what the these movies would have been like had Lucas not be been such a megalomaniac and instead acknowledged the fans as having made him what he is and made the films for them.

Looking forward to the summer movie I really wanted to see – Batman Begins.