Quick note… personally, I’m coming to see that good programmers need also have some measure of designer in them. While there is a sense of art in the constructs of the code, tonight I’m talking on a purely visual level.

Most of the time, my little hacks are command line apps, without much flash. But lately [...]

So my little project while I’m bored at home is PumaCreed — a poorman’s Google MapReduce. (astute hunter-types will notice the anagram name)

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an [...]

A quick note before I make another post about why the other day was awesome:

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; [...]

http://www.unsanity.org/archives/haxies/leopard.php

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one. You [...]

tar -cvvf /Volumes/BARAKPOD/backup.tar michener/

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works [...]

A few days with it and everything seems to settle in a bit.

Network card works better (maybe when it got the updates something clicked) but the network is SLOWER. I dunno what they did wrong, but my Samba NAS takes forever, until I read this: http://jamespo.org.uk/wp/archives/190 — This seems to make it work fairly [...]

So tonight I took the plunge and installed Vista. Initial thoughts:

UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate) Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, [...]

Wow. That works too well.

In my news cycle this week was this article on Improving your photography through classical art. I took the time to try it out today (and by “time”, I mean “five minutes”) and applied the first colorful art piece I could think of offhand, Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island [...]

More 164 rantage:

So today I woke up and rewrote my crappy parser from scratch, having had a showertime epiphany about not only how to write a good one, but write one with features we’ll need for the next part of the project.

In the end, I came out with exact same linecount. So I was +0 [...]

Drinking a beer Listening to The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible album

This is thanks to Jyte’s observation that 8 of the top 10 Last.fm tracks are from this album

Messing with photonzero.com

In such ways as my new 404 page for anywhere that doesn’t exist This was inspired (and made possible in part) by BeOS’s old browser, NetPositive Playing in Markdown [...]