May 2012
1 post
WWDC Preparation List
I wasn’t going to post one of these until I could say that I’m a WWDC 2012 attendee. Today, I won a WWDC Student Scholarship, so I am, so I will.
I’ve been to a grand total of one WWDC before, so I guess I have some kind of experience. At least, if you’re reading this, you seem to think so. Let’s go!
Before the conference even begins, there will be a trek to...
March 2012
3 posts
Platform lock-in, piracy, legality, morality
I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll try not to discuss the legal standpoint too much. I will make a few comments about my interpretation of the law, but keep in mind, this is not legal advice.
There’s a piece of legislation called the first sale doctrine. Generally, this protects your right to sell something you’ve bought. For example, if I buy a motorcycle from Honda, and then I...
Speak in sensible terms, please!
Miles per gallon is stupid. In superior countries (like Australia), they use a much more sensical term, liters per 100 kilometers. Of course, we would say gallons per 100 miles here.
I’ve got a tough case to make here. Everyone uses MPG so how can it be stupid? Maybe not so tough. Lots of people use Windows, too. But seriously: When I buy a car, I don’t want to envision myself on an...
Self-driving cars
So it begins. Nevada has laws regulating self-driving cars, and California is about to become second. With work from Google, along with others, self-driving cars are about to become a reality. There are several clear benefits:
Cars drop you off and park themselves.
Your car can return home to drive your kids to school.
Cars can negotiate and communicate more directly than humans.
Protocols can...
February 2012
2 posts
Open letter to Verizon Wireless
To whom it concerns,
I was a US Cellular customer for several years. I feel they had the best value in regional post-paid wireless. When the iPhone 3G launched, I became interested in app development and took courses at my school. Eventually, I needed to buy an iPhone in order to build production applications. I bought an iPhone 3GS but AT&T had no service at my house, so I returned it. When...
The cost of an intern
I’m taking an Android development course at my college. Today, our teacher showed us an internship opportunity he’d been emailed about. The opportunity was to build an app for data collection in an ecological project. It sounded like the intern would be the sole developer on the project (it was indicated that scheduling was flexible), and commitment to the project and reliability were...
January 2012
3 posts
“Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your...”
– Jonathan Coulton is wise.
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/
(via neil-gaiman)
Silly article about AT&T's data prices
Slashdot ran an article today, titled “AT&T Caps Netflix Streaming Costs At $68K/Yr”. The title immediately reaches for net neutrality fiends, but really, they’re not capping anything.
The summary says that streaming Netflix for 24 hours straight will consume 2.81GB. I’m not about to dispute that. However, it also says that can result in charges as large as $68,376. In...
You guys will get mad at anything, won't you?
AT&T announced new data plans for smartphones. You can read the story on MacRumors.
The new data plans are:
250MB for $15 (iPad only, $0.06 / MB)
300MB for $20 ($0.067 / MB)
3GB for $30 ($0.01 / MB)
5GB for $50, plus tethering ($0.01 / MB)
The old plans were:
200MB for $15 ($0.075 / MB)
250MB for $15 (iPad only, $0.06 / MB)
2GB for $25 ($0.0125 / MB)
Reading the discussion threads on...
December 2011
4 posts
Clean install of Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X
I’m going to buy a Mac Mini today, and this is the process I’m going to follow to make a clean install of Ruby on Rails. I’ll refine these instructions as I walk through them.
Install Xcode from the Mac App Store. If you have Lion, it’s a free download. Xcode comes with all of the code compiling utilities that allow us to build our rubies (“rubies” are a...
“XML is like violence. It doesn’t solve anything and shouldn’t be...”
– Inspired by: “XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.”
November 2011
4 posts
A response to Matt Gemmell turning off comments.
acreek:
First.
Fixing World of WarCraft's legacy set item storage
With every World of WarCraft expansion, they introduce new storage bags that allow characters to store more items. These are generally two or four slots bigger, and if a character has six bank slots and four person slots, that’s 20 or 40 more items. But with the introduction of Void Storage, it seems like they’re looking for ways to save on database storage. I say this because when you...
Re-launching my blog
Amazon EC2 has hosted my blog for the past year or so. It’s been an enjoyable experience, and I liked having my own virtual private server in case I needed to do some Linuxy stuff, but it cost $17 per month and I wasn’t really interested in paying for that anymore. It looks like Tumblr is pretty simple to use, and bringing my domain name over here wasn’t too much of a pain, so...