November 23, 2007
I’m a reader. Not just the internet, but actual real life books. Being someone that is interested in technology I’ve been anxiously awaiting the mass adoption of electronic books. To that end, I spent some quality time with Sony’s eReader. I found that I actually liked it better than reading a paper book. While there was certainly room for improvements with the Sony product (button placement, page refresh rates), I really enjoyed reading with it. It was actually more comfortable than holding a book. The biggest obstacle I had to buying one was that I use the local Library for much of my reading, and they didn’t have any mechanism to ’loan’ an eBook. Therefore I would have ended up spending a lot of additional money to read books.
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November 23, 2007
There have been a few minor spats regarding the move Redacted. First, the director, Brian DePalma, is frustrated with the studio (Magnolia Pictures, owned by Mark Cuban) over their refusal to include certain images in the film. There is a short YouTube Video of an press conference where DePalma and a studio rep verbally spar.
Second, Mark Cuban and Bill O’Reilly have been sparring over this film. Apparently O’Reilly feels that it is unpatriotic. The film depicts an alleged incident of rape and murder of Iraqi civilians by US Soldiers. Bill seems to feels that the film will motivate ’the enemy’. Mark has a summary of the interactions in blog posts here, here, here, and here.
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November 18, 2007
I saw this shirt on Scrubs and thought it was pretty funny:
Turns out Busted Tees sells it. I’m not sure your European friends will get it. Frankly, I’m not sure your American friends will get it either.
November 17, 2007
bThe Slashdot version of this story has the headline: “C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton’s DARPA Chances” This is sort of accurate. The issue isn’t with Microsoft’s implementation of C# or runtime, but with Princeton’s code.
Bryan Cattle has a good writeup of what happened. Essentially, objects they thought were getting garbage collected were not because there were still references held to them. In this case the objects were registered as subscribers to events. By forgetting to unsubscribe the objects when they were done with them, they ended up with a ‘memory leak’.
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November 14, 2007
Tim Bray wrote a summary of the recent RubyConf. He did have one comment that caught my attention:
Everybody had a laptop, and it’s almost but not quite a Mac monoculture.
A Mac monoculture, among developers? It isn't news that the Mac makes a great development platform for any code that is deployed on *nix. The popularity of the Mac UI on top of the *nix platform makes it idea. It has long been gaining in rodes in the Java community, but I'm still a bit surprised to see a Mac monoculture at a non-Apple conference.
This is why there was such an uproar about Java and Apple recently. Like Ruby, Java developers find the Mac platform ideal for developing their server applications. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t giving them the love back.
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November 13, 2007
Much has been written about the ongoing writers strike. As a fan of (mostly quality) scripted dramas, I’m bracing for dearth of television this year.
Several of my regular shows were already slated to start mid year. Law & Order, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost all begin their seasons in 2008. Already, it appears Lost may cut the season short. And from what I had read previously, Lost had stockpiled more shows for the spring than most shows.
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November 13, 2007
I released a new version of my iTunes Export utility.
iTunes Export exports your iTunes playlists as M3U or WPL files, allowing you to setup playlists in iTunes and use them with other software or devices.
This release is provides a few bug fixes for handling ‘*’ and ‘+’ characters, as well as songs with invalid “Location’ entries.
http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/
Don’t be afraid to suggest new features or bug fixes (eric@ericdaugherty.com).
November 4, 2007
Today, my clocks adjusted back to standard time. Unfortunately, my children did not.
October 30, 2007
Apparently Apple shipped OS X without updating to the most recent version of Java. Welcome to the joys of living in a walled garden.
As a Java fan, I’m pretty disappointed that Apple is not more supportive of Java. I’ve long believed that OS X is a nearly ideal development environment for Java with is *nix base and polished UI. PowerBooks have been taking over the Java developer market for a while, although this latest turn of events certainly won’t accelerate that process.
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October 30, 2007
An OS X BSOD, who would have thought it was possible? John Gruber outlines the issue on his blog. As a possible future Apple Fanboy (as defined by John of course) I find Apple’s products appealing, and believe that they are more stable than Windows. But, let’s not kid ourselves. Apple, and OS X, are not perfect. And as Apple’s market share continue to grow, you are going to see more and more issues with people doing things with Apple devices that Apple did not intend. The number of bricked iPhones is another obvious example.
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