1. 28 August 2006

    Backed Up

    739 days ago

    So I can’t really say how on edge I can get sometimes about my stuff. I’ve never really been bitten by a HD failure1, but I sure do goddamn worry about it. It doesn’t help that the external drive I’ve had for a bit now and use for all my music/big files/complete backup of my powerbook has been making funny noises lately.

    But I’ve had a 20GB Strongspace account now for about 6 months, and have meant to toss all my valuable digital possessions up there (outside of my music, which wouldn’t fit) for awhile now. I got to it yesterday, uploading ~12GB via rsync, and it feels good.

    While I was at it, I wrote a nice ruby script to do everything for me, and it works nice. It’s pasted up in all it’s glory. I tell it which files to upload and where, and it handles the rest for me.

    I’ve been thinking that I need another external drive to backup onto, the one I have is an old enclosure that I installed a new 200GB drive into last summer, and I think that I broke the fan throttle, because the fan is always on full, very whiny and loud. Also it’s been making what I feel are bad noises lately, and I really would rather not lose all the stuff I have there.

    1 It’s happened a time or two, the most substantial loss was all the digital photos I’d taken before 2004, which I’d mass uploaded to flickr, so I didn’t really lose them. Other then that, schoolwork – but I won’t miss it.

  2. 01 May 2006

    858 days ago

    Apple - Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads

    I’ve been in league with apple since I was in 3rd grade, and love them more than ever. Cute new ads. But I must admit, it’s hard for me to let go of my elitism – I don’t think I could deal with the all jonses using apple hardware. I guess there are two sides to every coin.

    via Kjell Olsen858 days ago

  3. 30 April 2006

    859 days ago

    Statistical machine translation live

    Google has launched it’s Arabic <-> English translation machine, which fascinates me. A computer takes two examples of the same text and analyzes them, to the point that it knows how to translate the languages. Al Jazeera’s arabic homepage translated. An excerpt:

    Thousands of people demonstrated in New York to demand the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. They declared their willingness to continue this campaign until the legislative elections in the US November next.

    Some of it is a bit incomprehensible, but overall it’s quite impressive.

    Kjell Olsen859 days ago

  4. 21 April 2006

    Leaking

    868 days ago

    Our society is a program running under the operating space of earth, and it’s always had a memory leak. We’re leaving cycles open; allocating resources and never returning them to the pool. We’ve already taken all the RAM; for the past 300 years we’ve been eating more and more virtual memory. We’re finally getting to the point where there isn’t any more disk space to spool out. We’ve got to figure out our garbage collection, or the server running humanity and everything else will come tumbling to its knees.

  5. 09 March 2006

    Powerbook at 7 months

    912 days ago

    I’ve had my powerbook since last july, and it’s getting well worn. I love it, and I’m surprised I hadn’t already capitulated and really done a good job of cleaning it. I’m usually pretty anal about stuff like that.

    But tonight I got a nice rag (Scotch Brite, High Performance Cloth) wet it, and wiped ambrose down real good. Feels great – a whole layer of dinge is gone, the whole thing has a real slick clean feeling.

    The powerbook is holding up well, save to the right of the mouse button and under the arrows. You can tell there’s a bit of peeling going on, but I’m doing better then Jon Hicks.

    Now I just need to get some really cool stuff going on the inside of the powerbook – I have a few neat projects, but nothing in a releasable state, and only a few beyond the man it would be cool stage. I’m looking to have a breadwinning project out the door real soon, and open up time for some cool playing and realizing of the ideas swimming around in my head right now.

  6. 26 January 2006

    954 days ago

    [Steve Jobs] continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”

    “Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”

    Andy Hertzfeld

  7. 29 November 2005

    1011 days ago

    Using /usr/local

    And if you ever happen to sudo cd /usr/local/bin; rm -rf *, rebuilding everything is easy, fast, and you won’t completely ruin your computer.

    via Kjell Olsen1011 days ago

  8. 15 November 2005

    Massively Multiplayer Online Soccer: The Ultimate User Generated Content?

    1025 days ago

    I really wish I could get into video games – they can be really fun.

    But games today suck. My roomate and a friend are here playing midnight racer all the time, and I can’t believe they’re still at it. It’s the same goddamn thing over and over, the same five songs repeating, just you racing around cities at night.

    I think Beattie is on to something here. I played a mud pretty obsessively for a year or two, and got really into it before I just quit one day and never went back. Around the same time I’d mastered Madden 2000 and could beat anyone I played. Now I can hardly play a game without getting bored.

    Computer games of today are the same as they were five years ago. Better graphics, but the graphics still aren’t that good. In fact, the closer virtual humans come to real humans, the worse they get.

    There needs to be something more compelling to gaming. A kid on my floor plays WoW all the time, and apart from me being all RPG’d out, I’d give it a try.

    I think that the same thing that happened with social software, the enabling of user participation, is that usable content balloons so significantly when users are enabled to participate at the highest level. Skinnable computer games enable way more creativity then static console games. So they enjoy a greater popularity for a longer time. How many of you really kept playing Tony Hawk after beating it?

    The thing I loved about that mud was that not only is it open ended, but because it’s text based you can write scripts to capture the environment of the game and do whatever you want with it.

    Games today are at the communication level of phone calls – bi (maybe tri) directional. As games begin to approach the level the internet has reached, as they begin to take on multiple nodes of simultaneous communication, I think they’ll really start to kick.

  9. 09 October 2005

    1062 days ago

    Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art

    Programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules. Andrei Ershov

    Kjell Olsen1062 days ago

  10. 08 October 2005

    1064 days ago

    Tactiva - Introduction to the TactaPad

    Is this even real? It’s just a movie, but a sweet demo of a totally new physical interface to your computer. I want one.

    via Kjell Olsen1064 days ago

  11. 02 October 2005

    1070 days ago

    How To Become A Hacker

    To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won’t make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.

    Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between “play”, “work”, “science” and “art” all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness.

    via Kjell Olsen1070 days ago

  12. 29 September 2005

    1072 days ago

    Computer users move themselves with the mind - Electrode cap allows users to think themselves along a virtual street.

    Called a brain-computer interface, the device detects activity in certain brain areas linked to movement, and uses the signals to mimic that movement in a virtual world.

    Could make for a kickass video game.

    via Kjell Olsen1072 days ago

  13. 28 September 2005

    1073 days ago

    How to become a hacker

    Find something to hack, and hack it.

    via Kjell Olsen1073 days ago

  14. 26 September 2005

    1075 days ago

    Secrets of lightweight development success

    ...use ruby.

    via Kjell Olsen1075 days ago

  15. 18 September 2005

    1083 days ago

    Driving Metaphor

    ...describes ExtremeProgramming’s philosophy to me. The “right direction” for the project is irrelevant. What matters is that you pay attention, and that you are constantly adjusting. If you do this, there is no externally visible difference between the two.

    Drive with one hand

    It’s like a conversation

    via Kjell Olsen1083 days ago

  16. 17 September 2005

    1084 days ago

    bramcohen: Great Programmers

    Advice on what it takes to become a great progger: unit tests, encapsulation, and the ability to conceive of good architectures to build your code upon.

    via Kjell Olsen1084 days ago

  17. 02 September 2005

    1099 days ago

    Slide 1 of 12 (3 Steps, at reboot7)

    Interesting presentation by Matt Webb on the future of computer programming in relation to the evolution of physics.

    via Kjell Olsen1099 days ago

  18. 31 July 2005

    The Pragmatic Programmer

    Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

    1132 days ago

    A great look at how to program well.

  19. 22 July 2005

    1141 days ago

    Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools | Sketchup

    I’ve had my eye on this software for a year or two, but at $500 it blatantly out of my price range, and will be for a long to to come (but I’m not knocking on wood).

    via Kjell Olsen1141 days ago

  20. 17 July 2005

    1146 days ago

    How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary

    A look at important skills and how to learn them.

    via Kjell Olsen1146 days ago

  21. 25 June 2005

    Buying a computer

    1168 days ago

    I’m finally ready to get a computer, now I just need to pick the right one and get it. Just some rumination. update: I ordered it this morning, and boy am I giddy now (and I deleted the last post because I hated it).

  22. 01 May 2005

    1223 days ago

    DISTRO.Y :: DISTRO.Y :: Commodore 64

    I absolutely need to have this shirt, but alas, I’m broke (first shirt I’ve wanted to buy in a long time!). I still have my C64, btw.

    via Kjell Olsen1223 days ago

  23. The Joys of Sharing your Computer

    1223 days ago

    So I’ve been trying to figure out for awhile now where all the free space on my hard drive went. I used to have about 16/40GB free, but all the sudden a few weeks ago it suddenly dipped to under 1GB.

    I never really looked into it until tonight, when I kept getting Your Startup Disk is Almost Full errors, but going through the disk quickly revealed that someone had copied the users folder into the applications folder, duplicating about 15GB worth of space. Well, there ya go.

  24. 29 March 2005

    1256 days ago

    Return of the Mac

    Paul Graham on why macs kick ass these days.

    And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.
    Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary.

    via Kjell Olsen1256 days ago

  25. 17 March 2005

    Adobe Photoshop CS Classroom in a Book

    Adobe Creative Team

    1268 days ago

    Wow, I knew photoshop was a nice tool – but now having a copy to work with at school and taking a lesson-book from the library I can almost do a few things with it, and it’s amazing.

  26. 16 March 2005

    1269 days ago

    Ruby On Rails Quotes in Rails

    when rails works she is like a sports car covered in hot babes. mrpotatohead (irc)

    Could you say it any better?

    Kjell Olsen1269 days ago

  27. 15 March 2005

    1270 days ago

    Speed Typing Test

    How fast can you type? 80 words/minute over here.

    via Kjell Olsen1270 days ago

  28. 27 January 2005

    1317 days ago

    mosaic_phyllo3_2700 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

    Whoa - a mondo collage of circles posted to flickr:

    This image was made by compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones. The image was produced by Jim Bumgardner using images from the Squared Circle photo pool at Flickr, the photo-blogging website.

    via Kjell Olsen1317 days ago

  29. 20 January 2005

    1324 days ago

    Apple Pro Keyboard Shuffle

    I don’t care what comes next either… I don’t want visual feedback!

    Funny bit, but I do believe the iPod Shuffle will be a smashing success, I just already have a real iPod and don’t feel the need to downgrade.

    via Kjell Olsen1324 days ago

  30. 18 January 2005

    1326 days ago

    JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language

    What javascript is really about.

    via Kjell Olsen1326 days ago

  31. 05 December 2004

    1370 days ago

    Free Programming and Computer Science Books

    Wow – a collection of books available for free over the greatness which is the internet. All kinds of interesting books.

    Kjell Olsen1370 days ago

  32. Also somewhat recently

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