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Friends Only
This journal has been friends only for some time now. There are still entries floating around from when it wasn't, but to see much of anything current, you'll have to be friended.
But as of 29 Oct 2007, content of more general interest and less personal nature will be made publicly available. -
Training versus Education
keith418 points to the distinction between training and education. He has at the ready here Nock and Leo Strauss, and likely many more names, words, and hours of thought and study besides. I have only my lived experience and my habit of attempting to draw meanings from words themselves to bring to bear on this topic. Worse, I write this as I think it, not ( Read more... ) -
Cross-compiling gcc-4.3.3 under Mac OS X 10.5.6
I had a devil of a time cross-compiling gcc to be able to work on MIT 6.828 Operating System EngineeringDuring compilation, it couldn't find the MacPorts-installed libgmp or libmpfr, which I installed after it complained it couldn't find them in the first place. After I fixed that, it complained about not finding libiconv during linking. So, I told ( Read more... ) -
Enums are not ints
I'd always been under the impression that enum values were interchangeable with ints. I was thus quite surprised by the behavior demonstrated by this code:
#include
#include int ( Read more... ) -
Why I don't like Java
Another reason for the unpleasantly large size of modern language [sic] is the need for stability. I wrote C++ code 20 years ago that still runs today and I'm confident that it will still compile and run 20 years from now. People who build large infrastructure projects need such stability. However, to remain modern and to meet new challenges, a ( Read more... ) -
Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google recently publicly released a beta of its open-source browser, Chrome along with a comic book explaining some of the reasoning behind the project. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only (Vista or XP SP2) right now; while Linux and Mac versions are in the works, it will likely never support PowerPC, so my old PowerBook has taken one ( Read more... ) -
For software projects, "Download" should directly fetch a usable file
Downloading software is often made more difficult than it should be. A long list of files should not be presented when users expect a download to simply begin. If a list is used, it should be short and the choices clearly differentiated. The download process should favor immediately usable downloads over source code.
Try this: pick a freely ( Read more... ) -
User Input Validation
While investigating Adium bug #9757, "User Permitted To Enter Negative Time To Idle", I discovered that Adium was not really doing much user input validation in their preferences. There are only a few places where the user is allowed to supply more input than checking a box or selecting an option from a drop down list. These all involve entering ( Read more... ) -
Temporarily escaped the .NET only to roll in the MUD
C#, MonoDevelop, and IronPython
I'm slowly crawling through C# 3.0 in a Nutshell. I think reading speed decreases roughly linearly with time already spent reading, at least when it comes to reference material. I had installed Mono through MacPorts, but I really shouldn't have bothered. The Mono site itself has a more Mac-friendly and better package ( Read more... ) -
LJ Clients
Is it just me, or do all LJ clients suck? Most of them don't even appear to be feature complete. Many of those listed by LJ have since died or are at least being seriously neglected (and it will take some digging to determine this in most cases). Every client I've ever tried has never had anything that made it better than LJ's standard web ( Read more... )