Mon 27 Mar 2006
Ruby on Rails 1.1 is set to come out soon, and a patch I submitted five days ago is going to be included! The patch is adding the ability for Selector (and $$) in Prototype to select based on attribute selectors. This should allow for much easier application of behavior to, say, all text fields. In addition it gives a boost to event:Selectors.
Sun 19 Mar 2006
As I sit on my mom’s new sectional and look around her house, I start to wonder how I’m going to get home since I forgot my wallet…
Windows Vista is coming soon and with it a reevaluation of my choice to switch to the Mac. I very much doubt I’d choose to switch back, given the phenomenal power and beauty of OS X. Yet here are the things that, nearly three years later, still irk me:
Roughly 15% of the video content on the web that I encounter is in WMV format, usually v9 or greater. This presents a challenge that I haven’t quite conquered. Had the percentage been closer to 50%, I’d probably have figured out a way to play these files. Which I actually just did - Flip4Mac plays at least one file that I tried to play before. Problem solved.
This isn’t a Mac problem per se, but the effect is the same. Many website operators still think that they can just ignore that part of the population that doesn’t have IE5.5+. They can choose to do so, and I can choose not to use their website even when I have access to IE.
I mainly experience this problem through others, like my mom. She works for Kaiser, and Kaiser’s intranet assumes you are using IE for certain things like accessing Lotus Notes. Creating (or supporting) a monoculture like IE on Wintel is just begging for difficult and expensive IT maintenance.
Perhaps they’ve run the numbers and determined that they’d have greater support costs trying to support other browsers (i.e. Firefox) than a reduction of the usual IE/Windows problems would cover. If that’s the case, so be it. That’s just not a company that I’d want to work at.
Incidentally, my company, j2 Global, does a good job of allowing a heterogeneous set of browsers and OSes to be used in-house. Kudos.
I don’t frequently play games, and the ones I did before (Diablo II, StarCraft) actually do run on a Mac. My current game is Counter-Strike, which I’ve picked up again after a long break. I’ll probably stop playing it once I get a social life, but until then it’s fun sometimes. It only runs on Windows, so I have to devote part of my PC to Windows.
Why the choice of OS should be such a hot-button issue I don’t know. You are not your OS, and an attack on it is not an attack on you. I have to remind myself of this sometimes whenever someone starts saying bad things about Macs. Usually the speaker is part of the anti-Mac bandwagon whose ideas are not based on fact but on hearsay, but not always - its the latter type that I try to listen to and respond in kind. With the former sometimes they are unwilling to listen to reason and prefer their version of reality where Macs suck just because, but many aren’t so far gone and will listen when I put the facts to them in a non-threatening way.
Needless to say, this position of having to justify my decision over and over gets tiresome. The desire to take the blue pill and go back to sleep sometimes floats by my peripheral vision, but it’s easy enough to avoid.
Turning my attention to Windows now, I think it’d be interesting to take note of the things Microsoft would have to include (or exclude) in Vista to make me switch back, or at least to actually want to use Windows for anything other than gaming.
CMD just doesn’t cut it. It’s not so much the shell itself as the lack of utilities for it to make it a useful place to do something. Where are grep, sed, awk, less, ssh, gcc, wc, etc? I could use cygwin, but that would only have some pull if the other issues I have with Windows were fixed. In this respect, MSH looks somewhat interesting.
NTFS is fine, a big improvement on FAT and FAT32. However I want the UNIXy goodness of symbolic links, arbitrary mount points, or good substitutes for these. Screw Windows’ drive letter convention! I’m pleased that Vista will at least be minimizing the focus on drive letters.
Command+tab in OS X allows me to use the arrow keys and the mouse once it’s up. Windows could take a cue from this. Exposé is another feature that Windows could use to manage its many windows.
Mac OS X has the dock which, while being basically a launcher, also shows me which programs are running, lets me open a file with a specific app, and more. That said, I don’t really use the dock. I use QuickSilver, and there is no good substitute on Windows (AppRocket doesn’t cut it).
Mac OS X has global spell-checking and an easily accessible Address Book API. These two are worth quite a lot to me. Mail, Adium, and many other apps use the Address Book to find contacts. The experience is just nicer.
Mac OS X has a concept of bundles, or packages. It basically is stopping to ask the question of why file name extensions should only apply to files and not folders. This allows awesome things like single-file application installs and the ability to just try out an app without copying it to /Applications.
Windows has either installers or zip packages that need to be copied somewhere (e.g. Program Files, a kind of absurd name). Installers usually just get in the way, and don’t actually let you configure anything for most smaller apps.
Having this ability in Windows would be really cool.
Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft
Sat 18 Mar 2006
One so rarely gets to use the word “concubine” in a sentence, much less a song.
I’ve been reading a book that was given to me as a gift, “The Monk and the Philosopher : A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life”. It’s interesting that I agree, in part, with most of Buddhist philosophy and at the same time I agree, in part, with most of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. In “Atlas Shrugged”, one small character is a woman who once had partial ownership of a motor company. She and her siblings inherited the company from their father and decided to make it into a communist system.
They turned the company to shit, in other words, with the lives of its workers and their families with them. When the main protagonist of the book, Dagny Taggart, went to meet this woman, Dagny thought to herself as the woman was speaking that she should remember this moment, because she was seeing pure evil in its unadulterated form. This woman was a self-proclaimed Buddhist.
As I said, I don’t agree with either philosophy entirely. At the same time, it’s disheartening to see how sharply they disagree. It’s like you have two good friends who can’t stand each other.
Both seem to ignore certain parts of biology and its implications for human nature and philosophy. I believe that human nature is to be inherently selfish. Buddhism kind of acknowledges this. Rand celebrates this. What, then, do they ignore? They ignore the subtleties of the theory of human nature as espoused by Richard Dawkins. For example: Ayn Rand claims, through John Galt, that human nature contains no inherent altruism, and that any tendencies toward it are signs of corruption.
Perhaps Rand expects us to act against our natural tendencies, but that’s not what I get from reading her. I won’t cover Dawkins’ theory in detail, but it comes down to that genes, and not humans or other “individual” animals, are the base of replication. This means that they “do their best” to achieve their own good, with the good of the individual they reside in being closely tied, but not identical, to their own welfare. This can result in altruistic behavior, especially toward those individuals likely to carry copies of many of the same genes you do (i.e. your family, especially siblings and parents). Read more about it in “The Selfish Gene”.
If that’s the case, then Rand must make some case for acting against our inner drive to occasionally be altruistic. I haven’t read anything of the sort, but I can guess how it would go: one would be better off without acting on the pre-programmed impulses given to us by our genes, and instead relying on reason to make decisions.
Buddhism, I believe, doesn’t take into enough account the truly selfish nature we humans have. For beings such as us, letting go of our conception of “I” and “me” is very, very difficult. Even so, how are we to know that doing so will lead us to a better place than we are in now?
I suspect that the problem between the two sides of this coin is one primarily of semantic sensitivity. Rand abhors the word “altruism”, while Buddhism strives to eliminate the problems of the “ego”. Reconciling the two would be a difficult task for a seasoned philosopher, and I would love to read a book on the subject. Until such a book comes around, I’ll be forced to try to live with this apparent contradiction.
As John Galt says, there are no contradictions in the world - if you think you’ve found one, check your premises.
Technorati Tags: ayn rand, book, buddhism, philosophy
Tue 14 Mar 2006
So they’ve got dancing with Napoleon, and apparently they spurred the creation of the I-pod parody I mentioned earlier.
Great. Now just fix IE.
Technorati Tags: microsoft, humor
Sun 12 Mar 2006
When life tosses you a curve ball, you gotta stop and wonder why it insists on playing baseball.
An astute observer would say that it is I who have thrown a curve ball - to myself - and so I should be prepared for it. I wasn’t, but there’s some consolation in my belief that I don’t think I ever could have been.
When previous relationships ended it was relatively easy to go on. Well, sort of. My first was difficult to get over. The thing with this one is that I was so used to being with Sarah. It just was. Kelly told me that Jason reacted to the news of our breakup thusly: “WHAT?! Tell him to get back together! They can’t be broken up.” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was used to it.
Our history - our momentum - was what was keeping me in it near the end. It is difficult to let go. It was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t any easier for that being true. Sarah will move on and find someone better suited to her. I want to be single for a while, if only to get some perspective. And yet I find myself jealous of Hawk. Ack.
And of course j2 had to go and hire a gorgeous administrative assistant just as I was deciding this. Oh well - the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.
Technorati Tags: life
Thu 2 Mar 2006
This game, Spore, looks awesome. It uses procedural logic to figure out how to animate the characters and create the sounds. Most current games generate all the content beforehand, which is a very time and money-consuming process.
This type of game is what I’ve always thought should be developed. It will eventually allow for better realism. The video is long, but well worth watching. It’s quite ambitious.
Technorati Tags: game