Archive for October, 2008

The iPhone SDK, from a Windows developer’s perspective

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

I’m a PC. And now I’m trying to write software for the iPhone. Nothing serious, mind you, just some little toy apps. I did some Carbon development a few years back, but these days Cocoa is hot, Carbon is not. So I’m trying to grok Cocoa. Here are a few fun facts I’ve learned along […]

A Few Fall Photos

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

A few recent photos: Setting up the change huts for skaters on the Rideau Canal: First snowfall: Snow in the back yard: More snow in the back yard:

EC2 and Windows

Monday, October 27th, 2008

EC2 is Amazon’s “computing in the cloud” infrastructure. Curious, I found this Getting Started page that documents how to bring up a machine in the cloud. It’s a bit like rocket science. Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure, their own cloud computing infrastructure. I expect Microsoft will nail the tooling part and make it dead simple […]

I’m Not Watching a Movie Right Now

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

I would be watching a movie right now (rented from the iTunes store), but: “The iTunes Store is unable to process Gift Certificates at this time”. I have credit in my iTunes account from a gift certificate, and it’s not able to use it for some reason. And there’s no option to not use it […]

Momentus 7200.4

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Seagate has announced a 7200rpm 500gb 2.5″ notebook hard drive. Assuming they didn’t break the form factor (as some other 500gb notebook drives have done, using 3 platters but making a drive that’s slightly taller than the form factor allows), this will be a nice update for the 160gb drive in my MacBook Pro. There […]

Upgrading Rails broke my site

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

My web host, Dreamhost, recently upgraded Rails to 2.1.1. This broke my Recipes site. It’s fixed now, but unfortunately it was down for a few days since I didn’t notice right away. The way I got it working again was surprisingly easy: I created a new Rails application from scratch (“rails recipes”), I copied my […]

Palin on SNL

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was on SNL last night, and it was the strangest guest appearance by a politican I’ve seen. And I’ve been watching SNL a long time. SNL is a tough gig because it’s Live TV and some of it is improv. John McCain was on SNL a few years ago, […]

Apple TV Impressions

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

“Apple TV is syncing with iTun…” That about sums it up. This is the message that comes up on your TV while Apple TV is syncing with iTunes on your PC or Mac, and because the box for the message is just a bit too small, the product name is abbreviated to “iTun…”. Apple TV […]

VP Debate

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

I watched the US election Vice Presidential debate last night, and wanted to post my thoughts before reading what other people thought. Sarah Palin did better than I expected. From the Katie Couric interviews, my expectations were pretty low, but she seemed like a solid candidate. Joe Biden did better than I expected. I was […]

headline.sub(/ on .*/, “”)

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

“Most Asian markets recover on hopes for US bailout” == “Most Asian Markets Recover”. “Banks lead Europe stocks higher on US bailout hopes” == “Banks lead Europe stocks higher” See? The first part is a fact, the second part is a guess. The title of this post is some Ruby code that will fix up […]