Brandon's Blog

5/4/2008 #

Mac-ified

Never would have thought I’d be saying this, but I’m enjoying my new MacBook.  It wasn’t pure indulgence; my Windows laptop bit the dust after five valiant years.

I also would never think I’d parrot the commercials so accurately, but I literally imported digital video with a few intuitive clicks and made a vacation video in a matter of minutes.

I have web programmed more productively than within my typical Windows environment, and iCal syncs with my Google calendar flawlessly.

I’m listening to a podcast (on iPod headphones, no less), and I’m wondering where all my old biases have gone.

The separated-key keyboard is also pretty darn nice.

The biggest challenge for me is keyboard shortcuts, which is a pretty big hurdle for someone so engrained in the Control-Alt-Shift patterns.  I’m finding that Command does Windows Control stuff, Control does old-school Unix-style Control stuff, Alt/Option does stuff that doesn’t work when I try Command, and fn saves the day when the laptop keyboard appears to be missing buttons (Home, End, PgDown, PgUp).

Would I use Mac for everything?  Emphatically no.  Will I much prefer Mac to do my own day-to-day work?  Emphatically yes.

5/4/2008 #

As It Stands

In the future…

I hope that every application we use is enclosed within a private virtual machine and is given one or more cores out of an extremely multi-core system.

The host application will expose a “storage service” that provides an extremely secure, ACL-based inroad to a “My Documents”-type location, which is likely mirrored silently over two or more volumes.

Too much tech reading…

4/11/2008 #

Git

The page design and copy text would likely bring a smile to Linus’ face, as it does to mine.  Git is pretty fun (and somewhat confusing for a newb) to use; it’s currently managing the source for the CMS, where it is very under-stressed as a branchless, one-user installation.

I did branch once as an experiment.  Branching in git is akin to making a “lazy copy” of your program, which gives me another term to define.  What I’m aiming at here is that when you copy something, it originally takes up virtually no space.  The space requirement of the copy only expands when changes are made to one copy and not to the other.

So, with git, you pretty much say “make me a branch/copy of what I have right now and switch to it.”  If, later, you issue a “switch back to the original branch,” your original code will show up, which you can also change.  Then, when you have changes on both branches, git will help you merge them together and resolve conflicts.

It’s pretty nice, but the user-facing side is pretty complicated.  I’m getting used to it, though.

4/4/2008 #

Tradeoff

It certainly won’t grow any hair on your chest (probably a near-universally good thing), but Stephen Speaks is pretty darn good bongo-and-acoustic-and-piano more-outwardly-Christian-than-Vertical-Horizon music.

4/4/2008 #

Children of Dune

Sounds like someone is shopping around for a screenwriter for yet another film adaptation of Dune.  Lynch took a stab at it (and was more successful, in my humble opinion) than he got credit for.

I was trying to imagine what an Aronofsky Dune would look like.  Could he compress the complex cultural and political relationships in a coherent manner (perhaps the weakest point of Lynch’s attempt)?  Could he convey the whole inner-thoughts conversational motif so well handled by Lynch?

It would probably end up being a two to three hour Clint Mansell and Mogwai-infused philosophical, impressionistic portrayal.  It might be good, but I doubt it would do any better than Lynch at capturing the book’s real intent, which was deeply involved with telling a massive story within a massive world.  These types of things defy visuals, which would be painful for a director so brilliant with visuals (hello, end of The Fountain!).

4/2/2008 #

Looking Ahead

This may certainly mean that, in a number of years of waiting for widespread adoption, web development could finally be fixed for good.

The idea is that web layout has sucked ever since the invention of the web, due to HTML’s inability to provide a sensible means of putting these beside each other without (1) using a data grid without borders (which misuses the original intent of the object) or (2) hacking together something “proper” that doesn’t work.

4/2/2008 #

Have You Ever...

… noticed a person’s initials are J. C. and then wondered if their existence is Christ imagery?

… and then realized that The Red Badge of Courage completely ruined your life?

4/1/2008 #

Here We Go

Learning (or at least learning about) a new programming language is not generally what you want to do when you’re on a mad dash to finish a long-term project (the CMS, in this case).  But, I’m starting to break down and finally learn a LISP dialect, namely Arc.

This is especially a bad idea when working on a PHP project, because PHP is such a filthily effective, pragmatic language.  But you feel a little dirty using some of those built-ins you know shouldn’t exist, as well as wrangling all the data type issues.

Anyway, better stop improving myself and get on to the office.

3/31/2008 #

Oh, Slashdot

I love it when Slashdot comments just manage to sneak up on me in that hilarious way.

Oh, and welcome back, self, to our blog.  You have been remiss.

3/28/2008 #

Cluster Is Repaired

My assumption of the root cause of the Cluster glitch appears to have proved out: Textile (at least the version embedded within Cluster) does not like Word’s beloved “Smart Quotes,” because it prefers to create them on its own from straight ASCII (note how they are created from standard quotes to appear curvy in the quoted text above).

Word also smashed up an ellipsis into a single-character triple-dot.  However, the ultimate blame lies with PHP’s inability to consider strings as true literals.  Or at least I think it is.

If it gives more troubles I’ll try some kind of re-work.