Unit Testing
I prefer UPS, Pepsi, and McDonald's despite never shipping, drinking soda, or eating fast food. Somewhat related: I hate unit testing, not in theory but in practice, where it stands in for basic engineering competence.
Topic
tech
A collection of 201 posts
iPhone OS on the Apple Tablet?
iLounge says the rumored Apple Tablet will run the iPhone OS instead of a real version of OS X. If true, that means App Store lockdown and a developer license to run your own code. Sigh. Maybe someday Apple ships a second good product after the Mac.
Time Trials
By the time I made peace with paying that much for 160GB of SSD, prices had jumped 75 percent. But the numbers don't lie: login dropped from 74 seconds to 3. One step closer to my purely solid-state desktop dream.
VPN
I spent all night trying to get Snowy Leopard's built-in Cisco IPSec VPN to talk to my new RV042 router, only to find their supported auth modes don't overlap at all. IPSecuritas, OpenVPN, Openswan: pick your poison. I'm sick of it for tonight.
A Moral Obligation
I ordered a Dell to run Linux on, and it's arriving with an unwanted copy of Windows. Do I destroy the disc, pass it off to someone with a taste for sullying computers, or claw a refund out of Dell? Haven't decided.
Click to Flash
ClickToFlash might be my favorite browser plugin ever, though admittedly the competition is nonexistent since it's the only one I use. Embedded Flash now waits for a click. Now I just need plugins to stop animated gifs and autoplaying audio.
Where Is Curtis
Ahead of my Grand Canyon and Collegiate Range trips, I dusted off some XSLT books and rebuilt whereiscurtis.com: a Perl script pulling Spot locations from IMAP into XML, SFTP uploads, and an embedded Google Map. The XSLT took freakin' forever.
Postgres, Timestamps and the C API
A surprise from libpq: pass "1" for binary results and a Postgres timestamp comes back as a 64-bit count of microseconds since 2000. Here's the arithmetic to turn 303,687,735,731,339 back into a date you recognize.
Burglars Beware
Found another use for my webcam, which last guarded my apartment while I was in Alaska. It's now saving a 950K image every minute, building toward a week's worth of footage and a time lapse of my amazingly interesting driveway. In theaters soon.
The Colorless Green Ideas Slept Furiously
I've resurrected my Random Sentence Generator project by cracking open the grammar books I bought years ago. The author writes English structure so formulaically she might be a programmer. Now I just need a good name for the thing. Ideas?