Monkinetic Weblog

powerbook tags: "" tp_commentcount: "0" tp_favoritecount: "0" tp_urlid: 6a010534988cd3970b0120a5b35cda970c

Mmmm, 1 Gghz, SuperDrive, 64Mb ATI Radeon 9000 (link).

I'm trying out this little app called Ogg Drop - It encodes CD music as Ogg Vorbis files (as opposed to MP3, which has a patent/license on it), and supposedly produces smaller and better quality tracks. As soon as it's done I'm going to restart, since I've installed Quicktime 6.0.2, and the Quicktime decoder ring, er, plugin for Ogg, which will let iTunes play Ogg files.

Well, I finished Neil Stephenson's Crytonomicon. It's a LONG book - 900 pages. It took me approximately 15 hours to read it - that's actual reading time, and it's an estimate since I generally read about 60 pages an hour, or a page a minute. That's not terribly fast (IMO) but it's pretty fast.

Jodi got sucked into Survivor this season. She usually records the second half or so, and tonight she recorded the whole thing. She's watching it now, I'm in the other room with the headphones on. -) Nothing against the show per se, but I just don't want to get sucked in too. Hehe.

Brent has released a new NetNewsWire beta.

This release supports ETag and Last-Modified headers, dramatically reducing bandwidth consumption for sites that support these headers. Other changes are listed on the change notes page. (link)

Something we're learning about this year in Arizona: Winter lawns. Apparently the only thing that can survive the Arizona summer is a particularly hearty strain of Bermuda grass, which goes dormant and brown once the weather cools off. So the practice here is, right about now, to plant a winter lawn of rye grass that stays nice and soft and green until about April, when the weather heats up fries it all. I'm researching winter lawns now; I mowed the lawn as short as possible the other day, and I'm about to go de-thatch and put down gypsum to treat the soil. Then we plant.

James Duncan Davidson (Author of tomcat and ant) on Enterprise Java Beans: > [via James Duncan Davidson ]Mike Clark was just muttering about EJBs and how they can lead you over the brink of complexity. And he asks: "Where did we go wrong?" (link) I've worked some with EJBs, and they are some of the most complex component code I've seen. Oy.

If you're a Cocoa geek, you should check out the CocoaProgrammers wiki. Add your name and info, let others know where you're at!

David McCusker gave me a plug yesterday:

And folks need to go visit Steve Ivy's resume and consider giving him some work. He's a bright guy with enough imagination that I figure you can give him new stuff to do without worry. (link) I usually hate to blow my own horn, but I am a bright guy, I've got a lot of experience, and I've got the imagination to know how it can be used. If you need web development or Mac OS X programming work done, please contact me.

It would seem I'm not mistaken in my reports of problems with active FTP and my Linksys BEFW11S4 router. > Several people report the latest BEFW11S4 firmware is broken for Active mode. Here's a recent post: /forum/remark,411550.. (link)

I haven't tracked down why yet, but I think I've confirmed that software operating in active ftp mode (as opposed to passive ftp, in this case fink) is incompatible with the 802.11 implementation in the Linksysy WAP that I've got. Whenever I tried to download software with fink my wireless connection would start going up and down, then just down, until I reset the WAP. I reconfigured fink to use passive FTP and am now having no problems. I'm going to research this more a bit later and write it up here.

Ad-hocracy: A group of people thrown together for a purpose.

It's been a while since I've had myself a good fiction binge - as an avid reader, I've often blown anywhere from 2 to 30 hours straight on a good book... right now it's Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Miscellaneous h4xx0r note: PHP has a mutli-level break which I had not seen before in a language. Used normally, break will exit the current loop (while, for, etc). Using the optional integer argument:

break n will break you out of as many nested loops as specified. For example:

 10 /* Using the optional argument. */
 11 $i = 0;
 12 while ( ++$i ) {
 13     switch ( $i ) {
 14     case 5:
 15         echo "At 5
";
 16         break 1;  /* Exit only the switch. */
 17     case 10:
 18         echo "At 10; quitting
\n";
 19         break 2;  /* Exit the switch and the while. */
 20     default:
 21         break;
 22     }
 23 } 

Found here.

A new Cocoa book, Cocoa Programming, is shipping. Not sure what the deal is with the anemone on the cover though. Authors Scott Anguish, Erik Buck, and Don Yacktman are serious long-time Cocoa hackers, and the aspiring Cocoa jedi would be foolish to ignore their tome.

manual-php-manual tags: "" title: ""

Although I got the web application book for PHP, I'm starting with the online PHP Manual. It's probably the best step-by-step guide to a new language I've ever seen.

This is also confirming my long-held belief that languages are easy. APIs are hard. PHP is basically a tame perl. Nooooo problem. I bet it's going to take me a while though to get into the flow with the PHP APIs for things like database manipulation, networking, etc. That's where the book I picked up will help.

Although I got the web application book for PHP, I'm starting with the online PHP Manual. It's probably the best step-by-step guide to a new language I've ever seen.

Jodi and I made a run to the Phoenix Central Library today. I came home with Web Application Development with PHP 4.0, and Cryptonomicon.

I'm in the process of updating my fink to a version that works with Mac OS X 10.2.