Overooped

Real time tracking — this is absolutely fantastically...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:56:08 +0200

Real time tracking — this is absolutely fantastically great! No real-world markers or in-system knowledge about the surroundings beforehand, only extrapolating point-by-point the surroundings and using recent points as the basis for new points. I can’t wait to use this!

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:29:35 +0200

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer: Actual headline. Just can’t resist reblogging this; there’s just so much wrongness in it. One thing: apparently Vista *redirects* writes to a sensitive folder to *another location* on the system. This wouldn’t have *that* bad, if the alternate location wasn’t as sensitive as the first! I don’t have the details, but the article says the drivers were still active, which implies that wherever Vista redirected the files, they were still loaded at that location. Actually, it *had* been that bad: how does it make any sense at all to not just write-protect the folder instead? Oh, old installers would stop working then, you say? But apparently those that would’ve stopped working then are those that aren’t compatible with Vista anyway! Urrgh, I can’t stand it.

Stump The Experts 2008 (Audio only)

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:45:24 +0200

Stump The Experts 2008 (Audio only):

I recorded the Stump The Experts session at WWDC 2008 with my MBP. I missed the first ten minutes or so, unfortunately.

Adding a player here as soon as I’ve uploaded the audio in mp3…

lol.via boxbrown

Wed, 28 May 2008 13:18:03 +0200

lol.

via boxbrown

“My God. Whoever created this has won the internet....

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:21:33 +0200

“My God. Whoever created this has won the internet. Forever.” And I can’t but agree.

Weekend Hacking

Sun, 18 May 2008 20:12:00 +0200

I had a lot to do this weekend and decided to do none of it, and instead ported sfxr to Cocoa, with a native UI and proper save/load :) My version’s called cfxr (as in “Cocoa sfxr”) and is available at http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr . I’m not saying it’s better than sfxr, only different and more native. If you’ve got a 10.5 Mac, check it out and let me know what you think :) It’s basically just an experiment to learn Core Data and Bindings (Thanks, Scott!), and a reason to make save/load work better on the Mac.

The sfxr code (more specifically, the sdl port), when I first saw it, seemed like the worst mess I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s a quick hack, but not even keeping state in a struct? OMG. But after working with this code for a weekend, it’s surprisingly good for what it is! “Porting” it to Cocoa was as easy as finding out which globals were properties of the sound (that is, attributes), and adding “sound.” before all accesses to those, and #defining objc syntax as C syntax for the four major playback methods. I guess I could’ve #defined the sound attribute accesses as well, making an upgrade as easy as a copy-paste, but I felt I had already done enough code generation for one day :P (Check out the legacyAccessors.m in the source to see what I mean :P Not very good looking code but it got the job done.)

It’s a rough 0.1 and might need some work. I was also thinking about making the playback part an AudioUnit or VST (just for fun) to make the playback more flexible. It works pretty nice as it is though, so do check it out :)

Lazy Man's Logging

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:40:10 +0200

file_put_contents(…, FILE_APPEND) to log is a bad idea and you know it, but it’s sometimes good enough, or you just don’t get paid enough to make something serious. I just let you make it a tiny bit more serious, a whole lot more dependable, and still just change a single line of code.

  /// Creates a table called $table as (id, when, message) if none such exists, and inserts a row with $message in it.  /// If no connection details are given, it uses the current database connection. Same goes for $database and $when.  ///  /// @returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.  ///  /// @example mysql_put_contents("orders", "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?", "mysite", NULL, "127.0.0.1:3306", "mysite_user", "secret") or die(mysql_error());  /// @example mysql_put_contents("guestbook", "Longcat says: I'm loooooooooooong") or die("Errorz!");  function mysql_put_contents($table, $message, $database = NULL, $when = NULL, $host = NULL, $user = NULL, $pass = NULL) {    if($host)    mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass);  if($database)    mysql_select_db($database);  $qry = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `$table` (             `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,             `when` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW(),             `message` TEXT NOT NULL           );";    $result = mysql_query($qry);    if($result === FALSE)      return FALSE;          $qry = "INSERT INTO `$table` VALUES(NULL, ".($when ? $when : 'NULL').", '".mysql_real_escape_string($message)."');";    $result = mysql_query($qry);    if($result === FALSE)      return FALSE;          return TRUE;  }

"The simple fact that most or all of [Apple’s] competition haven’t really comprehended..."

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:41:34 +0200

“The simple fact that most or all of [Apple’s] competition haven’t really comprehended what Apple’s advantage is yet - it’s ascribed to design as in “pretty”, strong brand as in “luxury” and customer loyalty as in “Apple users are fools”. This cluelessness has given Apple a head start unlike a common technology arms race, and frankly there’s no sign that their competitors are about to “get it”.”

- Arru in the comments to Moonwatcher’s Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

(Adium 1.2.5, when sending a file to a meta-contact (someone in...

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:17:53 +0200

(Adium 1.2.5, when sending a file to a meta-contact (someone in my contact list who I have multiple accounts on))

Eh. Very nice, Adium. Classy. I like the unique identifiers. Thought Adium was above bad UIs :P

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:27:00 +0200

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

What I got out of this article is (and yes, I’m going to ruin the punch line now), if the US tv-watching population got up and wrote a few words on wikipedia every time ads came on, and wikipedia was started, completely from scratch, on Friday night, the entire history of wikipedia — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — would have been completed by Sunday night. One weekend. Just the time spent watching ads during one weekend. That completely boggles my mind.

(video version, via gruber)

"The men who program in C are Real Men. The women who program in C are Real Men too. You can spot a C..."

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:54:00 +0200

“The men who program in C are Real Men. The women who program in C are Real Men too. You can spot a C programmer from their testosterone fueled swagger, and the unbelievable amount of contempt they inject into the phrase Java “programmer”.”

- Urban Dictionary: C++ via @violasong

PHP: Timeout on file_get_contents

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:30:29 +0200

Since there doesn’t seem to be a single piece of documentation or example on the use of the context option for file_get_contents, and everyone’s actually setting the PHP app’s ini value for timeout (euugh) instead of doing it right, I thought I’d feed this to google:

$ctx = stream_context_create(array(
    ‘http’ => array(
        ‘timeout’ => 1
        )
    )
);
file_get_contents(“http://google.com/”, 0, $ctx);

The unit on the timeout argument is seconds as a float; that is, it is possible to use fractions (e g set timeout to 0.1).

My girlfriend will love this. (Viajonic).

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:34:35 +0200

My girlfriend will love this. (Viajonic).

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:53:00 +0200

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy: These were not really things that I didn’t already know. Stated so boldly, however, the facts really shock me. I get the sudden urge to build a bunker powered by solar cells, and prepare for the inevitable war for our dwindling resources. (Video, audio, transcript)

“So no matter how you cut it, in your life expectancy, you are going to see the peak of world oil production.”

Trouble in Rails Land - order_id is null

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:31:00 +0200

Trouble in Rails Land - order_id is null : Can someone please explain to me why this is fails? I’d be very, very grateful. I must be missing something very essential, and I thought I had begun to grok rails by now… It worked great for a while, and then suddenly stopped working.

Location bar autocomplete in Safari rocks.

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:35:33 +0200

Location bar autocomplete in Safari rocks.

Re: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:32:00 +0200

I agree with everything that Gruber writes about in his latest article. A friend of mine went majorly goddamned-mac-zealot on me and his article (had to explain not once but *twice* that Gruber wasn’t saying “FF should be exactly as Safari” but “Safari beats the Mac port of FF on a number of points” :P) All is well and good though, as he found a fix for the most annoying UI element of FF3 for me: single-click-selects-entire-URL. I almost screamed from frustration from just trying to edit the URL a few days ago. Here’s how to fix it, though:

Go to about:config (type it in the location bar and type enter)
Filter on “clickSelects”
Double-click on the row that says “browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll” to set it to false.

Now when you single-click in a Firefox location bar, it’ll place the caret in it; double click will select word; and triple-click will select the whole line, just like in a Mac app.

Addendum: Okay, so Voxar tried to convince me that Safari’s location bar was idiotic and illogical (of course only from reading Gruber’s article and not trying it out, even though he has a Mac on his desk :P), and challenged me: if Safari always highlights the first autocomplete entry when you type an url, wouldn’t it be VERY cumbersome to enter e g “http://daringfireball.net/2008/” when the only URL in your history is “http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3”? The answer is of course, no :) In Safari, you type “da[right-arrow]2008[backspace][enter]” and you’re done with it. The same scenario in Firefox would require you to type the entire URL in by hand, since the autocomplete would be completely useless (even the AwesomeBar would be stumped!). Now I remember why I love Safari :) (Watch It In Full Motion.)

"Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun’s big honchos would know that...."

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:27:13 +0200

“Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun’s big honchos would know that. However, when you realize that J2EE is a huge pile of steaming manure weighing down the people unfortunate enough to be using it, I guess it makes sense to shout “but our arithmetic is really fast!”.”

- Earth to Sun

Human Computation

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:36:00 +0200

Human Computation: This data set could be really, really, really useful.

build_hd_index is evil.

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:26:54 +0100

build_hd_index is evil.:

An old blog entry of mine about my arch-nemesis build_hd_index. I once disabled it by chmod 000’ing the file. I have now learned that this is a very bad idea. The 10.5.2 Server updater has a new version of this file. When Installer tries to install it, it fails. However, it does not rollback, which means that your system has just been screwed.

Target Disk Mode and Pacifist are my very best friends.