October 31, 2009 – 11:54 pm
In between trick-or-treaters I spent today finishing up the repairs to my new/old laptop. The first optical drive I ordered was DOA, so I had to order a new one. Did the swap today. Took a little testing and such, but I now have a fully operational system, (which is nice). In the end, a [...]
September 24, 2009 – 5:45 pm
My laptop has been a bit long in the tooth for a while now. It’s a 12″ Mac Powerbook G4 circa 2003. It actually runs OS 10.5 pretty well, which is impressive considering it originally came with OS 9 (that’s — count ‘em — 6 operating systems ago). The most noticeable issue is that it [...]
1995 – Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the [...]
January 26, 2009 – 10:01 pm
I found a rather interesting (and amusing) quote in my recent reading: In March 1949,[...] an article in Popular Mechanics, describing a state-of-the-art computer called the Eniac, speculated on what lay beyond: “Where a calculator like the Eniac today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs three tons,” the writer predicted, “computers in the [...]
September 3, 2008 – 10:13 am
Just trying out Google’s new browser, Chrome. The admin back end for WordPress (that is, the page I’m working on as I type this) is blazingly fast running on Chrome. Faster than Firefox, IE or Safari — as in: No Contest. Google set out with a specific goal: to create a browser that is designed [...]
I’m amused by how many really good questions are prefaced with some variation of the words “This is a stupid question, but…” I think my all-time favorite was when a non-techie asked me: “This is a stupid question, but what is a byte, anyway?” (Short answer: a bit is a one or a zero represented [...]
It seems that Apple’s OS X is getting a new filesystem with its upcoming release of version 10.5. They’re reportedly moving to Sun’s ZFS. From that link: ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, [and] eliminated [...]
January 15, 2007 – 12:40 am
Steve Jobs has a secret, and he waved it right in front of you for an hour or so. Did you notice?
