Older blog entries for amars (starting at number 299)

President Bush: Can we please stop wasting so much money trying to kill foreigners, so we can afford to send people into space safely?

After two years of holding back, i now may have the opportunity to spend the next two years paying for what will soon be mine.

<evil laugh />

Ignore my last post, I know I said I wouldn't post again for awhile, but right now there's an issue I'd at least like to address.

mglazer says a coward is "Someone, not willing to defend their convictions;" yet he's done nothing but talk.

mglazer: until you personally do something (anything) about what you talk about here, according to you, you forfeit any value to your believe. Please, do us all a favor and join the army, and do everything in your power to make sure you're the first pawn in this impending, unjustified war against Iraq. At least then we won't have to put up with your FUD. Until then, you are a coward, hypocrite and a fool.

Consider this my last entry. For awhile at least.

I think I am going to enjoy this semester. I'm finally taking some classes I can really take an active interest in and i've finally gotten past that calculus hurdle that had been holdng me back for so long. Despite the hectic schedule associated with having two jobs and going to school full-time, it feels like i'm under alot less pressure.

Last night, i started writing my own image gallery script, i'm calling it spectacle. I don't really have any plans for distributing it. It's not as automated as one would want, but it works quite well for someone like me who works really well in the command line. Everything is handled by dotfiles. For example, .galleries lists all the galleries within a folder, .title has the title of the current gallery, .desc has the description associated with the gallery and .images lists all the images within a gallery. index_dir.php (PHP shell script) with the help of imagemagick will create a thumbnail for every image in the current directory and add the image to .images, index.php (with the help of spectacle.api.php) reads the dot files and displays the information accordingly. I can also limit access via htpasswd and the apache directives. It really wouldn't be hard to add a web based admin to allow uploading/deleting images, modifying the dot files and creating new galleries but i'm busy doing other work at the moment. In all it's about 300 lines of code, which isn't much, but was a result of one sitting last night while avoiding work.

Spectacle could use a few more features, like having multiple page galleries for when there are too many thumbnails to display per page or support for remote files or some kind of navigation mechanism. But i'll have to save those for another time. I'm not really interested in adding comments.

Posting this from Safari. Apple really has hired a bunch of really smart people who obviously know what they are doing. I noticed Safari has the ability to add to the bookmark bar the websites that people in your address book have listed as their URL. So, there's a menu I can pull down that has a list of names of people for whom i have a web page on record and can go directly to their sites.

Safari still has room for improvement, but it's looking good so far. Some people criticise it for not including support for tabs. I live and die by the tabs in Mozilla in Linux and consequently in Chimera in OS X out of habit. Though, in the case of Safari, I can understand if they leave them out. Tabs are an application level support for multiple document interface. Including tabs in an application that (because of the GUI) already has support for multiple-documents is almost redundant. I will still continue using tabs in mozilla and chimera, but won't complain too much if Safari doesn't have them in the future, since OS X/Aqua is already friendly in that respect.

Classes started today.

Finally got around to watching the keynote speech for MacWorld. Lots of exciting things coming from Apple at the moment. Shameless Apple promotion follows...

I didn't realize until today how totally awesome iCal is. As naive and insignificant as it may sound, given widespread adoption, it could really revolutionize alot of what I and others do. In a collaboritive environment, the ability to share and subscribe to calendars is really convenient... yes i know iCal isn't the first, but apple has made it really convenient and easy to use. I'm tempted to undertake the personal role of maintaining a iCal version of my school's calendar, because i've never liked the way our academic calendar is handled and it would be nice to have it at my fingertips integrated into an environment i'm comfortable and familiar with.

The good news is the format iCal uses (iCalendar) is an open spec (RFC 2445) and Mozilla's calendar app has support for it, and i'm sure Outlook does as well, but i have no way of testing. I make that assumption because one of the people listed in the RFC represents Microsoft.

Apple has answered every complaint i've had with the iBook in the form of a 12" powerbook. It has everything the iBook is lacking. Namely, a G4 processor, DDR ram, proper dual display support and more storage space... and some additional goodies like the new 802.11g wireless stuff and a slot loading superdrive. It's only a matter of time before I have one, depending on how quickly i get paid for work. I went to the Apple store to see if i could test one out and ask some questions but they won't be around until the end of the month.

I tried out Apples official x11 offering (beta). It integrates surprisingly well.

Aside from recent hardware and software offerings, it's worth mentioning and re-emphasizing how developer friendly OS X is. I truly want to believe that there will be a developers revolution and mass-migration to the Mac OS X platform. Apple and OS X has a few major, very significant advantages in their favor.

First, the financial barriers to entry as a developer on the OS X platform are not has significant as many make them out to be. Many criticize Apple for making their hardware too expensive, but from a developers standpoint, compare the costs associated with that of Windows. One must purchase the OS ($100-$200), the compilers/IDE (Visual Studio $1000-$1500), the code library, APIs, documentation, resources, etc (MSDN subscription $200-$2800). After the hardware, a deveoper can spend $3000 easily, just for the software tools necessary to do their jobs. Apple on the other hand provides the developer tools for free with the operating system which comes free with the computer. In addition, many of the developer tools are open source and based on open source technologies.

Second, OS X is based on UNIX standards and technologies. This dependance upon and integration with UNIX opens up a whole new world to many experienced developers. UNIX programmers can now easily write for and extend their talents to the Mac platform with very little effort. Employers and business focused on the Mac platform now have a significantly large pool of experienced talent to draw from.

Third, NeXT history aside, OS X, Cocoa specifically, was designed from the ground up to be as friendly, powerful and easy to use and learn for developers as possible.

So... the financial barriers to entry are relatively low, there's a wealth of talent already available and the platform is literally made from the ground up to be developer-friendly. With these present conditions, more applications will come... either by individual hobbyists, students, academia, and businesses. With more applications available to the end-user, the Mac platform becomes more and more attractive to the end-user.

This is completely disregarding the reputation that Apple has for the design, music, movie, and even gaming industry.

My two cents anyway. (and yes i'm avoiding the Linux issue, maybe one day i'll write an article which addresses both GNU/Linux and windows)

I'm back from Mexico. Great trip. Pictures soon. Back to work. Forgot how to type. Crap.

Some interesting quotes from a book I started reading that I think at least one person that frequents this site (who will remain nameless) should take note of.

"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

and finally...

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind of his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbors shoulder or fly at his throat."

-- Eric Hoffer

Some food for thought anyways, given the current international political climate.

I think i'm glad I waited to buy a powerbook or ibook. I'm definitely getting one of those new 12" powerbooks as it solves every problem I had with the iBook i.e. dual display (not mirroring) and higher resolution. I'd have somethign small enough to carry around with me but powerful enough to use as a desktop. If i get any of the contracts I recently submitted bids for, i'll have enough cash flow to pay for one. If i don't have one in the next 6 months I will have failed myself.

What in the hell kind of Piece of Shit (TM) e-commerce package produces invoices without the date of the transaction. It's a 10 line HTML edit in invoice.php. Screw contributing. It's so trivial it's worth letting them A) do it on their own B) leave it out. Have I mentioned that I hate OSCommerce?