Happy 30th Birthday, ...
Happy 30th birthday, Ethernet. You make my world go 'round.
Topic
tech
A collection of 180 posts
iPod Nano Greatness
The new touch-screen iPod Nano, with its pedometer, FM radio, voice recorder, 16GB and 24-hour battery, is quite possibly the greatest invention since Kamen and his insulin pump. It'll be providing the tunes for the bike-across-America ride.
Facebook Madness
My location updates now cross-post to Facebook, thanks to whereiscurtis. Which gives me a fine excuse to lament exactly how much Facebook's developer documentation sucks: clean, clear, and useless if you don't already know the answer.
NAS
My 8TB Western Digital NAS arrived and got the name Fatty. But it writes at only ~15MB/sec, which has me wondering whether drive capacity is now growing faster than transfer speed, meaning I could never actually fill the thing.
Precedence Madness
Why does == have higher precedence than &? It took me forever to figure out why my masked comparison wasn't producing the expected result, until I forced the parentheses myself.
iPad Fail
My iPad's 3G worked beautifully in Seattle, then went dead the instant we landed in Atlanta. The fix passed me through AT&T, Apple, a Genius Bar and the least inspired mall-cart employee ever. Not terribly painful, but a lot of people to talk to.
Perforce Sucks
What does Perforce's read-only check-in/check-out dance actually buy you? Nothing. You still have to merge if someone edited the file while you did. And I'll be doing this hundreds of times a day. Subversion, Git, I'd even take CVS over this.
Fidelity
Fidelity in relationships matters, so I've committed to not looking at another iPad before mine arrives. Here's to testing the limits of human will power. Maybe I'll just look at a picture of one. That's not cheating, is it?
Flash
Flash is dead to me. And thanks to dedicated developers, Flash can be dead to you too, with the help of Click2Flash. If you use Safari. I'm sure there's help for Firefox as well.
Spectrum Analyzer [005]
A week of work on demodulation and still no sound, so I went back to the UI: drag the graph to adjust frequency, fading controls, mouse-tracking power and frequency readouts. The signal I assume is AM 750 isn't anywhere near where it should be. Off to Ecuador.
![Spectrum Analyzer [005]](/content/images/size/w720/2025/10/sa004.png)