How you can tell a real engineer from a poser.
June 30, 2009
So the engineers at Parc like Bob Metcalfe maybe invented ethernet and conceptualized wireless ethernet 35 years ago, but you how you can tell they are real engineers.
They use a dynamo label maker.
The real reason copy and paste is so cool
June 19, 2009
Glyphboard is exactly why cut and paste on the iPhone is really cool. It's a way for apps to share information, no longer are they completely sandboxed off. Look for more really cool apps.
Bonus points for this one being an HTML5 web app.
Samsung Blu-Ray Experience: BD-p1600 vs. BD-p3600
June 15, 2009
So I took my first foray into Blu-Ray a few weeks ago with the Samsung BD-p1600. It crashed/locked up/needed a hard reset every time I tried to stream Pandora. It had problems playing 4 of the discs I tried. Deja-Vu broke up and crashed the player 5 minutes in (then it wouldn't eject the disc). Pirates of the Carribean locked up 1 hour in. Mad Men Season 1, Disc 1 and some other disc that I don't remember now just spit it back out and said "This disc could not be played" 2-3 times until it finally played them fine.
I tried taking it back, and the 2nd one had all the same symptoms. Since Amazon had their special on the p3600, I went ahead and ordered that one.
So far it hasn't failed to play a single disc, Pandora streaming works fine, and it's faster to boot. Whereas with the p1600 I had no confidence in it's ability to play a movie, I'm feeling pretty good about this one. Based on the internet it doesn't seem like my p1600 experiences are typical, but I don't know what I could be doing wrong when it comes to just dropping a disc in the tray.
Any rate, here's a vote for the 3600 over the 1600 any day.
Formatting XML with Emacs
June 15, 2009
I always forget this, so here it is so I'll remember. For some reason search engines don't seem to return good results here.
If you've got an ugly, un-tabbed, unformatted blob of xml, just paste it into emacs and do:
M-x xml-mode
M-x sgml-pretty-print
And will be nicely indented. Presumably this requires a modernish Emacs.
Great placement, dumb ad.
June 7, 2009
Great place for an ad, too bad it's not very good. How exactly does loading from iTunes on my Sansa cure iPhone envy (if you have it)? The cure for iPhone envy I'd think would be a similar but better phone, not a piece of software....
