Another semi-useless spot on the web…
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 14th, 2006
Every now and again, I tend to look at the equipment I have on my desk and think about how long I’ve had it. The oldest piece of “equipment” is a pair of Apple Design speakers that I got in 1996 or 1997. They still are in use and work quite well. The second most [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 10th, 2006
I think that it’s great that companies like Apple put out sample code to help developers write code without having to resort to figuring it out themselves or doing something in a way that will break. Several years ago I wanted to add my application (NotifyMail) to the login items/startup items for a user under [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 7th, 2006
One of the hardest aspects of writing code is debugging it when it doesn’t want what you expect. In one of my past jobs, I was given the task of making a server stable which meant finding a bug buried in thousands of lines of code that I really didn’t understand. No one gave me [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 5th, 2006
It seems that people I work with have Internet problems a whole lot more often than I. I feel quite lucky that my cable modem provider, Time Warner Cable, has been pretty rock solid for the last 6+ years that I’ve had them. There have been a few issues in that time, but nothing that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2006
I’ve been working at home for about 6.5 years and have been self employed for almost 3. When I tell people I work at home, they usually respond that it must be nice. Well, it takes a certain kind of person and attitude to work at home. My first experience working at home was when [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 30th, 2006
I restored my PowerBook’s hard drive to the state it was on Saturday before it crashed using the most excellent SuperDuper!. If you aren’t doing regular backups (daily), then you are asking for trouble. There are 2 kinds of computer users; those that have lost data and those that will.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 28th, 2006
One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I’m a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, “this isn’t a problem as my backup is 2 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 26th, 2006
Autorelease pools are extremely convenient for not having to worry about memory allocation and freeing the allocated memory, similar to the Newton days with its garbage collection. A problem that I’ve been aware of with autorelease pools, but promptly forget all the time is that if you are in a tight loop and keep creating [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 25th, 2006
I think that open source software (with license agreements that let me use it in commercial applications even if it means contributing my changes back) is great. We use it extensively in my work and have contributed back our changes as required in one component. Another component we use has proven to be a constant [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 25th, 2006
I picked up a new 17″ iMac running the Intel Core Duo today to do testing and development. I didn’t realize until I got home that I had the wireless keyboard/mouse model which wasn’t a big deal as it was only $60 more (the box doesn’t indicate this…not even the label, unless you can decode [...]
