WALL*E June 29, 2008

WALL*E was an absolutely surreal, intense Science Fiction movie. It’s Pixar going back to its roots, and it’s beautiful to watch. I highly recommend it.

Apple WWDC 2008 Initial Reactions June 9, 2008

Apple has re-branded .Mac as MobileMe. It keeps your iPhone/iPod touch, Mac and PC in sync — but it only seems to work for email, address book contacts, calendars, and things of that nature. It doesn’t claim to keep arbitrary files up to date, so I’m not terribly excited about it. The service seems kind [...]

Python 3000 Preview June 1, 2008

Not too many overwhelming changes are coming in Python 3000, the upcoming version of one of the best programming languages in the world. Here are the three that stick out most in my mind:
1. print() is now a function. It needs parenthesis, you can’t just “print ‘Hello, World!’” It has to be print(“Hello, World!”). This [...]

Phoenix Touches Down on Martian Soil May 28, 2008

I hope they find water.
NASA Link
 

Putting Every Other Quarter to Shame May 18, 2008

Heck yes.

 

Stain Removal May 14, 2008

I discovered a large bleach-white stain on my carpet yesterday. I don’t know how it got there, but I knew I had to remove it somehow to avoid the hefty $25 fine. At first I tried vodka, which did little to remove the actual stain, but it did make me care about it less. Then, [...]

First Day on the Job May 13, 2008

I *saw* — first hand — the servers that run NAU. I stood amid entire rows of them, stacked one on top of the other, towering above my head, just humming with electricity. The room that hampers them has industrial strength air conditioning just to stop the computer equipment from melting.
 

Pythonic Self May 1, 2008

Python is a great language, but one of its problems is that every parameter passed into an __init__ method must be manually assigned to an instance variable, like this:
class Microsoft
  def __init__(self, param):
    self.param = param
and it’s an annoying waste of time. To fix this, I have written a short Python script that goes through a [...]

Spaces: A Trial by Fire April 29, 2008

The big problem I noticed was that it was hard to keep track of what I made each space for. I tried to use the Stickies application to label each space, but windows would overlap them too readily. What I wanted was this:

But what I ended up with was this:

I set each sticky to always [...]

New Computing April 22, 2008

As a senior in high school, I got my first Mac: a modest 12″ iBook G4 that ran at 1.2 GHz and had a 30 GB hard drive. It was underpowered even for those days, but it was my primary computer for three and a half years. It was becoming a problem, and the peer [...]