December 2010
1 post
January 2010
1 post
Wellbeing Realizations of 2009
I spent a lot of time in 2009 thinking about factors that affect my daily sense of wellbeing. During the year I have met a number of very interesting people who have been doing the same kind of thing. Here are the most significant personal realizations of last year that have led to me feeling better everyday:
1. Reading fiction in bed has more effect on my ability to sleep through the night...
June 2009
1 post
First day with my Kindle DX
[Unboxing Pictures]
This isn’t really intended to be a full review, and it’s certainly not intended to be unbiased or helpful to all possible kindle purchasers, although hopefully my perspective will be useful to some people.
The triggering factor leading me to buy the Kindle DX was the promise of native PDF reading. Over the past few years I have accumulated a stack of PDF files...
March 2009
1 post
iPhone 3.0: Apps Connecting to Hardware is the...
At Apple’s press conference this morning, they announced that iPhone, and iPod touch applications would have the ability to control external hardware via either bluetooth, or the dock.
Oddly, most commentators seem to be intent on making a big noise about the inclusion of copy and paste, but are completely overlooking the major implications of what seems me to be by far the most significant...
February 2009
3 posts
Taro Root
I bought a Taro root a couple of days ago at the grocery store. After consulting the googles, I learned a few interesting things about it:
1. It’s poisonous.
2. If you attempt to peel it, it ejects tiny crystalline needles which cause skin irritation, and lodge in your eyes and take up to three months to heal.
3. It tastes bitter.
These issues are resolved by cooking it.
Apparently...
Ayurvedic Dal Recipe
Here is a recipe I made up today from various random sources:
Ingredients:
2 cups red lentils
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
7.5 cups water
1. Put in a pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 45 mins stir every now and then.
More ingredients:
2 habaneros
8 cloves of garlic - basically a whole garlic
1 large onion
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 inch section of fresh...
The kindle is not ready for me yet.
I love the idea of a kindle. I think it would be good for my mental health. Reading material of substance, as well as getting away from the instant crack hits of social media seems like a good thing.
Appealing as the new Kindle 2 is, it’s not ready for me because:
1. An Apple tablet would make it redundant. By Apple tablet, I mean something about 3x the size of an iphone, running the...
August 2008
1 post
Context-Aware iPhone launcher/springboard
There are too many icons on my iPhone already, and I expect to end up installing more applications and web-app links.
To make it easier to use, I’d like Apple to make Springboard context aware. Specifically, I would like to be able to choose some of the rows of the grid to show a prioritized list of icons of applications that I last used in that context.
What would ‘context’...
June 2008
5 posts
Concise description of OAuth (< 300 words)
“I’d like to give a site access to my Google contacts, but I don’t want to give them my google username and password.” OAuth solves this and similar problems. OAuth allows one website to access a users content from another website without needing their username and password. In OAuth terminology, the site that wants to get the content is called the consumer, the site that has the...
“three one-legged people working together cannot outrun one person with two legs”
Importance of spaces in scala function by-name...
I spent some time today having syntax problems with scala function by-name function declarations. It turns out that a space after the colon is critical. In the end someone on the scala irc channel at irc.freenode.net. by the name of ‘mapreduce’ helped me out (thanks!).
This session should clarify what works and what doesn’t work:
scala> def some1 [T] (interval :int) (f :()...
How to stop scala from quoting strings in XML...
robin_: hi - does anyone know how to stop scala from turning a " into an " when it's included in an XML expression?
robin_: e.g. val a = I include "quotes"
robin_: turns into I include "quotes"
robin_: and what I want is the literal I include "quotes"
dobblego: scala> xml.Unparsed("hello\" there")
dobblego: res8: scala.xml.Unparsed = hello" there
robin_: ah - nice - thank you very much
dobblego: scala> { xml.Unparsed("I include \"quotes\"") }
dobblego: res9: scala.xml.Elem = I include "quotes"
robin_: thanks for your help
dobblego: np
I’ve been using Apple Numbers to help a professor friend of mine with grade calculations. It turns out that if you import a sheet from Excel, it can often get into a state where the performance becomes unacceptable - despite the actual functionality appearing to be fine.
At one point, entering a new number into a sheet with a single table of around 2000 numeric cells and no formulae at...
May 2008
1 post
Neither Google spreadsheets nor Apple Numbers handle text at angles other than the normal horizontal. This is understandable with Google Spreadsheets since they are limited by the browser, but an odd limitation for Numbers to have.