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February 9th, 2010
07:11 pm - Sarah Palin Palm Notes, Part II
I had already mentally moved on because notes during the speech are not a big deal -- I didn't even consider them a big deal when I was cheating on tests in grade school -- but ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) skyknyt made a stone-cold great reply to my last post:
Those notes are so obviously a "hey check me out I'm so folksy and just like you that I have to take notes on the back of my hand" that any attention to them as "legitimate" is just reinforcing the viewpoint she's creating. That ivory tower liberals hate on non-intellectuals, when they are just tryin' to get by.
Her constituency loves that she writes notes on her hand instead of using a teleprompter - they always did that in school, and they never had a teleprompter. I mean all her fucking hand notes need is a backwards "S" to appear even more rustic "budget tax cuts" i mean honestly Maybe. Probably. I don't know? It raises an interesting question. Exactly what the fuck was she doing there? The fact that she criticized Obama's teleprompter in the same speech makes no sense.
If people were supposed to see her so-folksy-it-hurts crib notes, why complain about Obama's teleprompter? A teleprompter is not okay but handwritten notes are okay? Even as a straight-up this is how fucking folksy I am, you fucks kind of ploy, that's kind of contradictory. A photo op of you kissing a baby or eating sandwiches with blue-collar factory workers, it surely is not.
Like, that's her concept of impressive? Still having prepared notes for a speech, except in a different way? Maybe it really was a totally unplanned thing. I guess I'm tantalized by the morbidly thrilling possibility that she really isn't just dumb; she's thaaaat fucking dumb. You know she might be President in three years, right? We could soon be mourning the loss of the days when we had ivory-tower intellectuals like George W. Bush in the White House.
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01:15 pm - Sarah Palin's Crib Notes
There's nothing wrong with needing notes for a speech. Few people, if any, can get in front of hundreds or thousands of people and speak without them. I can't, and I don't expect Sarah Palin or anybody else to be able to.
Notes are a problem if:
- You've just criticized the President for using a teleprompter. Like, in the same exact speech in which you're reading notes off of your hand.
- You've written your notes on your hand in an attempt to make it look like you're speaking without notes.
Buy a pack of index cards next time, you amateur.
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February 8th, 2010
05:34 pm - Flash / HTML5
To summarize my feelings about the Flash/HTML5 stuff from last week:
As pragmatic developers who have a vested interest in the future of the web, we ought to help steer that future towards a future of open standards, one that's not dependent upon Adobe or any other company.
We do that can by using HTML5 instead of Flash whenever possible.
Naturally, of course, pragmatism dictates that we continue to use Flash when it's the only way to get the job done.
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03:07 pm - Batman Learning
I think men tend to favor the "Batman" style of learning.
I was never into comics into a big way, but everybody knows the story of Batman, right? He didn't have super powers, but his parents were killed, so he just singlemindedly threw himself into self-training until he was an awesome badass.
That's how most guys like to learn, right? Possibly minus the slaughter of their parents and the part where they wear a cowl?
Current Music: Let The Music Play - Shannon
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February 7th, 2010
09:01 am - Recent Tweets
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February 6th, 2010
01:52 pm - Snow Snow Snow!
Hard to tell because of the drifts, but I'd say we got about two feet of snow! Pictures soon.
Honestly, I don't quite get why some people treat snow like the apocolypse. It's just about my favorite thing. I even love shoveling.
We walked down the hill to Main St. last night for drinks. On the way back home there were snowballs thrown and snow angels made.
Unfortunately, the snow angels came at a price: when we woke up this morning Steph realized she'd lost her iPhone. But even that turned out nicely. Somebody in the neighborhood found it and kept it safe for us. It hadn't even gotten too wet.
There really are some nice people left in the world. She was so nice that she thanked us for trekking over to her house to pick it up, as if she wasn't the one doing us a favor! I thought handing her money might be tacky so we gave her a bottle of wine and a bottle of lambic as thanks.
And the 20-minute walk to her place was nice. The neighborhood looks so amazing in the snow. All those old row homes and dogs playing and everything. Only thing that could have made it better is if there were kids playing. On the walk home Steph and both decided we were glad she'd lost the phone!
All in all, a great day. And now we spend the rest of the day watching movies and drinking hot cocoa and coffee.
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February 3rd, 2010
10:18 am - Stuff You Use
Do you ever get caught in one of those cycles where you spend more time dicking around with your "setup" than actually using it to accomplish shit?
Maybe that's unique to certain sorts of occupations. Programming, which is still in its infancy, has got to be the profession where it's easiest to fall into this trap, because of the sheer breadth of options and the pace at which software and hardware evolves. I'm sure painters have some pretty strong opinions about which brushes are best but brushes haven't really changed much in the past century, much less the past year. They can try a few kinds of brushes and settle on the one they like.
I'm a little tired of the "new software" treadmill. I'm a fan of Visual Studio, but I don't want to learn a Whole New Thing every year or two. I want to learn how to use my tools to make cool things, not learn how to use my tools.
As I get a little older the Unix-y way of doing things appeals to me more and more. Everything is centered around text and the text editor, which remains fairly constant throughout the years. Even if you're learning a totally new programming language, you're not learning a totally new environment.
This particularly appealed to me:
I've had my current desktop for a little over two years. I want to continue using it for another 20. I mean that literally: this computer, this keyboard, this mouse, these three monitors. 20 years. There's no technical reason the hardware can't last that long, so it's a matter of whether there will be useful software to run on it.
I feel like I'm finally zeroing in on something close to an ideal setup for me. Even he author of that quote admits that 20 years is a little unrealistic, but I think it's a nice goal to shoot for. Stability.
Current Music: Don't You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds
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09:01 am - Recent Tweets
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February 2nd, 2010
09:26 pm - This Is Great, But I'm A Little Stalled
I saw this as a kid in 1981 or 1982 and instantly got the concept of dimensions, which I think is extremely good for that age. However, I've been trying and failing to understand hypercubes since then and I've made zero progress in like almost thirty years.
I know by rote that a hypercube is a three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional cube, but I don't understand why.
I even get the idea of three-dimensional shadows of four-dimensional objects[1], thanks to Sagan's example of how the two-dimensional slices of a three-dimensional apple would look to citizens of Flatland. But I don't get the hypercube thing.
Maybe when I'm 60 or 70.
_______
[1] Nerds: If you'll recall, one of the angels in Evangelion was a three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional object. That actually wasn't technobabble; it was a valid mathematical concept.
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09:07 pm - Richard Feynman, Explaining Magnets. Or, Well...
What do you think about this? Is he being a dick or is this awesome?
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07:09 am - "When Will SSDs Actually Be Affordable?"
Probably late this year or early next year, because that's when Intel and Micron shrink down from 34nm to 25nm transistors for their flash chips, at which point the rest of the industry will have hopefully at least made the transition from 50nm to 34nm transistors. That's roughly when you'll start to see prices get a little more reasonable, though they'll probably never be as cheap as traditional hard drives.
The whosit? The shrinking whaaa?
Quick primer on the economics of silicon chips, like CPUs and flash memory.
The chips are created on large round "wafers." Each wafer contains many chips. Each chip is made of millions of little switches called transistors.
See the round shiny thing in the picture below? That's a wafer. See the little squares etched into the wafer? Each one will be a chip once it's cut from the wafer.
The overriding factor in chip economics is that each wafer costs essentially the same amount of money to produce, whether there are twenty chips on it or two hundred chips on it. So....
The smaller the transistors, the smaller the chip. The smaller the chip, the more they can cram onto a single wafer. The more chips on a wafer, the cheaper they can sell them. (Or, the more transistors they can cram onto a single chip for the same price.)
And that's why it's a big deal when you hear about crazy dudes in a lab somewhere creating smaller transistors. The chip industry essentially depends on these ever-smaller transistors to move forward.
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06:08 am - "Begin The Off-Think"
Kind of like every interaction between genders I've ever seen at a gaming or anime convention.
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February 1st, 2010
02:04 pm - So Tell Me Again Why HTML5 Can't Supplant Flash?
Have you checked out Chrome Experiments lately?
I was particularly impressed by the HTML+Javascript version of Another World that uses <canvas> tags to render polygons and runs at close to 100 fps on my computer.
I was also impressed by this original game. The game isn't very good, but as a tech demo, it illustrates that you can do Donkey Kong Country-level graphics and animation in pure HTML+Javascript.
Stepping away from Chrome Experiments, you also have a NES emulator written almost entirely in Javascript. I say "almost entirely" because if you enable sound output, it does rely upon Flash for the sound output. :) You can play sound in HTML+JS, but not dynamically-generated sounds. Thus the need for Flash.
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10:36 am - Flash on the iPhone/iPad
Flash is harmful to the web because standards are good for the web.
If everybody follows open web standards, anybody can build a web browser or a web-enabled device. And anybody can create a web application that will run on those browsers and devices.
That's good for everybody.
From a shortsighted perspective, Flash is the best way to do some things today. You can build applications with rich functionality that can't be accomplished with HTML4/5 + CSS + Javascript.
But has everybody forgotten where the web was just a few years ago? Internet Explorer 6 was king. Companies and individuals coded their sites specifically for IE6. If Microsoft didn't make IE6 for your platform or you preferred not to run IE6 due to security concerns, you were often out of luck.
And that's where we're at today with Flash, except the situation with Flash is worse in some ways. If your bank's website required IE6, it was often fairly easy for a semi-technical user to fool the website into thinking they were running IE instead of Firefox by changing the user-agent string. That's not the case with Fiash: no user-agent hacking is going to make a Flash binary appear out of nowhere for your platform.
Flash authorship is equally problematic. When IE6 was king, you could at least create web pages on the platform of your choosing with a simple text editor. Again, not so with Flash -- you need Adobe's expensive Flash authoring tools, available only for Windows and OSX.
Compounding the situation is the fact that Adobe has yet to prove they can build a competent Flash runtime for any platform other than Windows. The OSX build in particular is notoriously sluggish and crash-prone. And now we're supposed to trust Adobe when they say they're committed to making kick-ass versions of Flash for all kinds of different platforms, especially mobile platforms far more alien and resource-constrained than the developer-friendly OSX?
Shame on you if you're fooled by that.
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09:00 am - Recent Tweets
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January 31st, 2010
08:08 am - Oh, This Week
Well, the big thing this week was the loss of Obie. We take animals seriously and made the hard choice to take Obie back so that he could find a better home.
There were a few reasons, the biggest reason being that one of our cats -- the one that's sitting on my lap and purring right now like he did nothing wrong -- was very violent towards him. Obie is a tiny cocker spaniel, smaller than the cat, so that was a problem.
Just wasn't fair to either Obie or Choco, who spent the first eight years of his life sans dog.
We were heartbroken. Obie's training was going well and he was a good little dude. I really loved him; before we agreed to get a dog I'd accepted in my mind that this was a little guy I'd be responsible for for the next 10, 12, 15, whatever years.
I guess some other stuff happened, but it hardly feels worth talking about.
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January 30th, 2010
09:00 am - Recent Tweets
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January 29th, 2010
10:40 am - Today's BASIC
How does anybody learn how much fun programming is today?
On the first personal computers, you booted them up and there was a BASIC prompt right there. You could either type in BASIC commands, or type LOAD blah blah blah to run something from the disk or tape.
You were dropped right into a programming development by default, and a lot of people discovered the joy of programming that way.
Would I have discovered I liked programming if I had to take an extra step to install some other package just to write that first line of code? I don't know.
We really have an embarrassment of programming riches these days. Once you take that first step of installing a programming environment, the amount of programming fun and power at your fingertips is fucking retarded unbelievable. Everything's better, except that first step.
But why would you take that first step if you didn't know you liked programming in the first place? How many talented coders are we missing out on because they never found out how much fun it is?
Current Music: Tally Ho - The Clean
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10:28 am - As If Anybody Was Interested In The First Thoughts
Final thoughts on the iPad. No interest in buying one. Too closed. I really want one for my dad -- because it does everything he needs and I'd like to play with it -- but would the fonts on the screen be too small for him?
( Blah blah iPad )
Current Music: Killing In The Name - Rage Against the Machine
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