A Mouse
New computer, no trackpad, so I need a mouse. My requirements: laser preferred, Bluetooth if wireless, not a Microsoft mouse, and ideally not from a company that uses serial commas in its product literature. Thank you for your help.
Topic
tech
A collection of 201 posts
Software is Hard & Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline
While I wait for FedEx to deliver my new computer, two articles worth saving: "Software is Hard," which calls software construction the most complex thing mankind has attempted, and "Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline."
Counting in English
While archiving old projects I found EnglishCounter, born of a friend's interview prep to count to a million in English. Our make-shift contest graded speed, lines of code, and time to code, so today I rewrote it in C and got a million numbers down from 23 seconds to 0.15.
iButton Part II
The iButton temperature logger, USB reader, and capsule arrived. I had to dig through the example source to access the logger (the authors are idiots), then naturally tossed it in the freezer. The battery is rated for four years at -40C; my GPS's AAs lasted twenty minutes.
iButton
I ordered an iButton temperature logger that can record for over forty days on a battery rated to last a decade. Paired with an external GPS antenna (so last year's super-cold AAs don't die mid-climb), I should get a merged altitude-and-temperature graph from Denali. Number-fun.
GPS Stagnation
Hand-held trail GPS units peaked with the Garmin GPSMap 60csx. Mine writes every location to a 1GB microSD card I couldn't fill in a lifetime of walking. The pretty touchscreen Oregons and Colorados still cap you at 10,000 tracklog points. Such a shame.
Words
I parsed every iChat log back to 2005: 291,640 messages, 2.5 million words, 911 days. After a brutal fight with backslash escaping into Postgres, I ranked my top 100 words against the people I chat with. They talk about themselves, and about me, more than I do.
Years of POP3 then a rough IMAP transition left me with thousands of duplicate emails across hundreds of mailboxes. So I wrote mail.pl: it matches Date (to the second) and Subject, then moves one copy aside. Local mailboxes only. Use with caution.
iChat
iChat reorganized chat logs by date but never fixed the old ones, and years of multiple machines on AIM left me with two-way and one-way copies of the same chats. Here's a Perl script that merges everything into a single archive and dumps the duplicates. Use with caution.
Check This Action Out
I added a PostGIS-enabled Postgres database with location and tracklog tables, seeded with McKinley's camps, the summit, and home. As Spot beacons arrive, PostGIS finds our nearest point of interest, so you can tell which camp we're at. Next: a Loopt-esque iPhone app.