Posted by Scott Hughes
Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:36:00 GMT
I followed, with some interest, the series of post by David Heinemeier Hansson (from 37Signals, creator of Rails) where he took an Enterprise Architect to task for some really uneducated comments about Ruby. Reading through the post by this guy (Jimmy McSomething, don’t want to give him anymore pagerank love than he’s already getting) it seems that he might be just a little bit retarded (and I mean that medically, not in the mean-spirited sense). There are some people in the comments who’ve posted that some of his observations are so wrong that it must be a joke. I was kind of wandering if his blog was written by a random Enterprise Architect Blog generator. Off his Blogger page, he has a couple of other blogs which follow much the same format. The big key is the random pictures that he inserts in the middle of the post (some of Rumsfeld, or other politico’s) which are neither funny nor related to the context of the post.
Today I stumbled across some new evidence. I found a trackback on one of my posts to his article. Could it be that his blog-bot is trying to increase his pagerank by trackback-spamming his article to blogs which have discussed Ruby? Even though I’ve mentioned Ruby quite a bit on this blog, the aforementioned post was not at all Ruby related… The author of the trackback is the same as his blog title. I tried to see if I could tie the IP address (72.9.234.70) back to him in some way, but gave up on that rather soon.
That just struck me as odd. Seems that successfully pissing off the Ruby crowd (or any group which is fanatical) is a good way to get yourself to the top of the google list for the keyword of your choice. For example, what if I called myself a “First-Rank Knowledge Engineer” and decided that, based on my expertise in the field, Wikipedia was absolutely the worst source of actual “facts” or “knowledge” that I could possibly imagine (worse than what a train full of brain-dead monkeys could generate)… Do you think I could rise to the top of the Knowledge Engineering index?
Posted in Technology | Tags enterprise_architect, ruby, spam, trackback | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Hughes
Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:00:00 GMT
I read about an amazing sting operation that happened here in Dallas where the police have actually captured people becoming publicly intoxicated… In bars! That is some real sleuth work. No question that the police involved deserve a raise for this masterful plan of capturing drunks in the act!
I like John Enright’s comment: “Texas Outdoes [The] Onion!”
I guess this is a preemptive strike against drunk drivers before they get a chance to drive… Where arresting a drunk driver was already a preemptive strike against them before they got a chance to crash. From my apartment, I can literally walk a little more than a dozen steps out my front door and be inside a bar getting drunk. Could that possibly be dangerous for anybody but me?
Posted in Politics | Tags bars, drunk, police, sting, undercover | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:51:00 GMT
Since posting my OneWireViewer App+Source for Mac OS X last August, I still see fairly regular downloads of it in my stats. I also still see lots of hits from google searches for “1-wire” and “mac osx”. I thought I’d let any interested parties know that we are gearing up to release our 1-Wire Public Domain Kit (C code) very soon (likely this month). I put in some effort for this release to create a specific Serial (DS9097U) and USB (DS2490/DS9490) build for Mac OS X. The release will include full source and a build file, as well as pre-built Universal Binaries of all of the example apps. Those without much programming knowledge looking to integrate 1-Wire into bigger systems should appreciate that.
Learning how to build the Universal Binaries was a bit of a chore, but once you get the hang of it it’s fairly simple. The biggest complication was building a Universal Binary for libUSB and since I wanted my libUSB-dependent app to be Universal, I had to jump through hoops to get it to work. I was able to get 0.1.12 to build an Intel library just fine on my Intel Mac (though <= 0.1.11 didn’t work for me, so mind your sources). I couldn’t get it to build the Universal binary due to it’s use of ‘ar’ and ‘ranlib’ (which, according to this tech note from Apple does bad things to Universals). I’m not a configure or makefile whiz and I got a little stumped on the parts of the makefile where gcc was being used to generate new makefiles dynamically (wasn’t aware of this feature before). Apparently when using -MT (to generate new makefile rules) you can’t pass multiple architectures along with your compile command (i.e. “-arch i386 -arch ppc”). I ended up doing things the hard way and just compiling the PPC binary on a PPC mac, and then merging the two with lipo (i.e. “lipo -create -output uni.lib ppc.lib intel.lib”). After all that, I discovered a nice pkg installer for a Universal libUSB that someone else was nice enough to pre-build and distribute for us. I recommend this installer for the easiest path to a Universal binary of libUSB.
My next task is to recompile my Java-to-libUSB-to-1-Wire solution (for OneWireViewer and the rest of the examples in the 1-Wire API for Java) as a Universal Binary. I also need to put a little effort into making it work with libUSB on Linux, so I can update the “live” WebStart version of OneWireViewer with virtually out-of-the-box support for every platofrm. The 1-Wire API for Java was scheduled for release this quarter (ending in 2 weeks), so I hope to have all this done in time to ship out the door with the release.
Posted in 1-Wire, Code | Tags 1-Wire, iButton, MacOSX | 7 comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 17:21:00 GMT
My friend and colleague, Chowdary, has started a political blog covering the Indian/US/World (in that order) scene. In just a few days, he and his co-blogger have gathered up some strong opinions and filled the blog out nicely. I hope he knows that because he titled the blog The Daily Observer, we are expecting daily updates. Hope he can keep up the pace.
Posted in Politics | Tags India, politics | no comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 04:32:00 GMT
I found out about this patent via Miguel de Icaza (who found this discussion with Dave Winer). I really don’t have the patience to read the whole thing, but while scanning it I couldn’t find anything like a highlight reel (e.g. “Our patentable idea is unique because it differentiates from the way everyone else is doing it like xxxxxx”). The pieces I did read thoroughly sound no different than the way a typical news viewer (of which there are dozens of examples) does it. I found the following quote, the last section of the patent, disturbing:
[0127] It will be understood by those skilled in the relevant art that the above-described implementations are merely exemplary, and many changes can be made without departing from the true spirit and scope of the present invention. Therefore, it is intended by the appended claims to cover all such changes and modifications that come within the true spirit and scope of this invention.
So, even if we didn’t explicitly phrase the patent to cover your application, we obviously meant it and we think it should still apply. If you can’t tell that we meant it, you must not know what the hell you’re talking about..
Posted in Technology | Tags Apple, patent | no comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:08:00 GMT
It’s usually pretty tough living on the bleeding edge, but Apple has made things a lot easier with their switch to Intel. Thanks to Rosetta, you can still run just about all of your PowerPC applications under emulation. Since the emulation is obviously going to be slower, I’m trying to stay clear of any PowerPC apps if I can, especially if they are meant to run all the time (daemons). Apple created a handy logo to identify apps which are Universal (containing binary code for both Intel and PowerPC architectures), but I’ve found that there are some apps that still aren’t using logo. This means I typically have to visit the changelog of my favorite apps and search for the keyword “universal”. Optionally, you can download the app, select it in the finder, and hit Command-I to get its information screen. From there, you can see if it’s a PowerPC app under the “Kind” heading. It’ll read either “Kind: Application (Universal)” or “Kind: Application (PowerPC)”. If I find that it’s a PowerPC app, the url for it gets dragged into my “Waiting For Universal” folder in my Bookmarks Bar.
I did get bit by an app recently and I didn’t see it coming. I noticed a frustrating amount of slowdown on my MacBook Pro, especially when switching tasks. I searched for a long time to figure out which app I had loaded that was slowing me down by so much. My memory usage was extremely low, so disk swapping wasn’t the problem. CPU usage was next to nothing, so I was stumped as to what it could be. I had a 5-10 second delay when switching apps or when bringing up the dashboard, so something was definitely misbehaving. I checked my Console (Applications/Utiilities/Console.App) and I found that I had several plugins for Quicksilver and Mail.app which were throwing linker errors. The errors came from the fact that they are PowerPC plugins that got moved over via the Migration assistant. Even after removing those, I still had the noticable slowdown.
Finally I tried the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utiilities/ActivityMonitor.App). If you right-click on the column headers, you’ll see a drop-down to select which fields are available. Select the “Kind” field. Now sort on that field and you’ll see all of the PowerPC applications (those running under Rosetta) on your machine. These are the most likely to be causing slowdown, especially the daemon apps who are constantly performing work in the background. I found my culprit easily: The Delicious Library Dashboard Widget. Delicious Library was a Universal app, so I wouldn’t have suspected it. But the handy widget included with it has a separate binary component and that’s built as a PowerPC application (either that or the installer for the latest version failed to overwrite my old widget). After removing it from the Dashboard, I was again cruising at full speed. I sent Delicious Monster some feedback about the widget; seems to be an easy enough fix that I’ll bet it’s corrected before my RSS feed is updated.
If your MacBook Pro (or other Intel Mac) is experiencing slowdown (so early in its life!), I’d suggest you perform the same investigation. As an aside, here are some of the apps in my current waiting list now:
Posted in OSX | Tags MacBook, MacBook_Pro, MacBookPro, MacIntel, MacOSX | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Fri, 03 Mar 2006 14:18:00 GMT
via GeekPress:
This company will install hidden passageways in your own home, ala Batman. Be sure to check out the videos.
You have to see the videos on that site. I really like the hidden gun rack and I definitely wouldn’t mind one of those lazy-boys that opens up to a slide… That’d be a fun way to get down into your garage quickly! Prices start at $10,000 for full installation and $1,500 for do-it-yourselfers (though, they don’t hint at what you’ll get for that price).
Posted in Technology | Tags hidden_passageway | no comments
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