my voice is my passport
{ Monthly Archives }
Baby was up at 6:30 this morning after sleeping about 6 hours. I got about 5, for the third time this week. I’m so tired I’m dizzy.
Configuring a new (used) Fedora box at work. If I was more used to Linux’s quirks I would probably enjoy setting up a new system, but right now it’s just a pain.
Jeremy and Nate had the good sense to get to bed at 1 AM (their time). Why didn’t we?
Halo 3 isn’t spectacular, just rock-solid. On a system plagued by connection issues, it hooked us up to people 2,000 miles away without a hitch. In an era where split-screen gameplay is rapidly being abandoned, my wife and I were both playing co-op (not just deathmatch) over Live. We fired up the movie editor and reviewed a game that was (automatically!) saved, and marvelled at explosions frozen in time with a flick of the pause button.
I am not a game developer, but I know enough to know these features were not easy to implement. They required careful forethought, and in some cases, intentional sacrifices in game performance. And they are great. It’s nice to see a company care about the overall quality of the game experience, rather than fitting a few more polygons into the back-of-box screenshots. I hope they license the movie, party, and lobby features as a framework, because I know other developers won’t (can’t?) do this stuff if they have to code it from scratch.
The zyps GUI is actually tolerable now - the main addition was a simple speed limiter EnvironmentalFactor. The Push and Pull actions are pretty cool, too. I also ripped out user-defined conditions, as they just made things complicated and didn’t offer much useful functionality.
The GUI actually isn’t my top priority, but it will be most people’s introduction to the library, so it’s important to put my best foot forward.
Now to get a reliable, safe dRb server (is that an oxymoron?) going before the next Ruby users group meeting. The programming challenge at Desert Code Camp showed me a shared environment for programmers to play around in, however unstable, can be a great deal of fun.
As I drove down the 202 this morning my phone buzzed, and as I answered I glimpsed Lenny’s kindergarten teacher’s name on the caller ID. “Oh, no,” I thought, “how can he be in trouble already?”
But no, she was calling for direction on releasing the Monarch butterfly, which was waiting on the remains of its chrysalis when she walked into the classroom this morning. Evidently the kids were at that moment painting pictures of the butterfly, and voting on what to name it.
Whew. That worked out well. Many thanks, Aunt Laura!
I wasn’t looking forward to re-issuing fifty “learn as open x” Enso commands on each of my machines. What I found, though, is that Enso simply stores ordinary Windows shortcuts here:
%userprofile%/My Documents/Enso's Learn As Open Commands
I was able to simply run my create_shortcuts.pl in that folder and instantly re-create all my shortcuts as open commands. That includes stuff Enso can’t create with “learn as open”, like:
rundll32.exe Shell32.dll, Control_RunDLL appwiz.cpl
Not bad. Now I’m just awaiting the ability to run Python scripts of my own design on the current selection.
Ever since using the late Jef Raskin’s The Humane Environment, I’ve been using the Windows Run menu, my “cb” (read/write clipboard) utility, and a few other scripts to do a sad, modal approximation of the THE command quasimode.
cb | less
cb | wc | less
cb | upper_case | cb
web humanized.com
Well, it looks like Enso is about to replace all that. It’s out, it’s $20, and I just ordered it straight away after watching the demo video. We’ll see soon whether I regret that decision.
…imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
-Douglas Adams
It hadn’t occurred to me previously, but… Perhaps the reason there’s so little support for colonization of other planets is that people think a higher power will save them from that catastrophic asteroid.
