Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

A leopard don’t change his stripes

Monday, November 5th, 2007

But Leopard is spotty in its overall effect, according to Computerworld. As I’m not a Mac power user yet (my Windows background still keeps getting in the way), some of their kudos and critiques don’t mean much to me, but I’ll certainly keep them in mind. There are links in the article to more in-depth articles about some of Leopard’s features.

By the way, the post title is a quote from Oscar.

Starting from scratch

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

I’ve gone all-Mac at home, replacing my broken WinXP laptop with a MacBook Pro (as I mentioned earlier). I’ve also put Leopard on both systems, but I didn’t wipe the iMac before I did that. Maybe I’ll do that next time. However, for the laptop, LifeHacker has a post on what to put on a bare Mac.

Your Code is Suboptimal

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Suboptimal

This relates to Eric Sink and SourceGear, makers of what are, no doubt, fine software tools … I just haven’t been able to evaluate them. If you need configuration management/revision control software, check them out. We’re in the market for it at work, and have already evaluated some competing products. Currently, I’m waiting for sufficient space to be made on our Windows 2003 Server system so we can start evaluating SourceGear’s products.

I can’t quite pull off the Evil Mastermind threatening glower, though. Perhaps if I had my own personal disintegrator …

Quack, quack

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

Jeff Atwood talks about Baby Duck Syndrome and why it restrict people from using different applications. It’s why I’m still more comfortable with WordPerfect than Word, among other things, and why I’ve installed Eclipse three or four times and deleted it each time.

It probably accounts for a lot of the “we’ve always done it this way” attitudes, as well.

Well, maybe they can, but I sure couldn’t

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

And, continuing on the subject of toys from the last post, a team of scientists has proven that you can solve any Rubik’s Cube configuration in not more than 26 moves, beating the prior record by one move.

I used to be able to solve Rubik’s Cube when I was younger (and playing with it fairly regularly), but I couldn’t do it now without help. I remember the first computerized Rubik’s Cube solver I ever saw – it was a program for the Apple ][. You would enter your configuration and tell it to solve the cube. A short time later, it would come back and tell you that it had solved it, and how many moves it took.

What those moves were? Who knew. The program wouldn’t tell you. Why they expected anybody to buy that program, I’ll never know. I’m just glad that programs came in baggies and without activation codesĀ  back then. Because of that, there was no problem getting the people at the computer store to open a baggie and run a program so you could see it in action.

Worrisome for Mac owners

Monday, May 7th, 2007

MacLockPick.

Via Bifurcated Rivets.

Can they be any worse than Microsoft?

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

I suppose they could be. I mean, after all, if a hacker stops providing support for malware, who you gonna call?

Want to learn LISP?

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

I keep thinking about it, and I’ve acquired a few books here and there, but I’ve never actually devoted much time to it.

If I ever decide to, I’ll go here and here for learning materials.