Dangling Conversations

Posted 22 Mar, 2006 at 17:17 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

Picked up a new stick of memory for Titania the Powerbook earlier this week, in hopes that maybe she'll run a little smoother. (My peripheral-storage-heavy lifestyle leads to some quirks now and again, and I'm hoping to ameliorate them at least slightly.) This leaves open the question of what I should be doing with the old memory stick that used to be in there.

The guy I was talking to at the computer store this past weekend suggested that eBay was a reasonable solution; I'm not convinced that's the case, since the sale prices the guy was quoting were a little inflated. From the looks of things, if I did sell the stick (PC2700 256MB 333MHz SODIMM, if anyone's interested) then UPS would probably make more on the deal than I would, and something about that bothers me.

I have this problem with computer equipment in general, really --- too many old bits of computers, with the conviction that there's a better solution than just throwing them away but no clear idea about what that solution is. 256MB of notebook memory is just the most recent bit for the pile.

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Posted 07 Sep, 2005 at 18:26 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

Apple's just pulled off a neat sort of trick: they've introduced the iPod Nano, and it's replacing the Mini in their product line.

What's the difference? Well, the Mini was larger in terms of physical space but also in data capacity; the 4G Mini cost the same as the 2G Nano costs now. The Nano's also got a few extra features: colour display, some capacity for showing photos and videos, etc.

So there's a trade-off: less actual music, but less massive and more frills. Is it worth it?

Personally, I'd say "no". I know that the tendency in hand-held technology has been convergence to the Universal Device: PDAs become phones, phones become cameras, and so on ad infinitum. This is just of a piece with that; one could already synchronize addressbook and calendar programs on an iPod, and now they've added graphic capability. But I don't really want a single universal hand-held device. I'd much prefer to have several gadgets, each of which does a single task (or set of tasks) well, rather than one device that does numerous things half-assedly. So the extra capabilities don't do all that much for me.

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Posted 05 Jun, 2005 at 16:18 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

Prompted in part by clevermonkey's latest post, I've been reading up on some non-traditional programming languages lately. (Well, non-traditional if one feels that the mainstream of programming languages is the family tree that starts with Algol, but that's an argument for another day.)

Back when I was young and foolish (i.e. a frosh), I was a computer science major. I gave that up fairly quickly, but one thing that I sort of regret was never having the opportunity to take the fourth-year class in programming languages. My interest in this is principally anthropological, actually; I don't care about know a bunch of computer langauges so much as knowing how the different structures affect how the developper thinks about their task.

So for those of you who actually program on a regular basis & have picked up multiple languages along the way, a question: how much difference does choice of language seem to make to coding decisions? Do you actually think differently in different languages, or is your style more or less unchanged as you hop between, say, C, Java, and perl?

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Posted 11 Apr, 2005 at 15:19 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

So my institution has a somewhat overactive spam filter. We've got one or two programs that scan incoming mail and give each item a spam rating; then there's a default rule in our installation of GroupWise which shuffles items with overly high scores into a junk folder.

My first problem with this is that an inordinate number of e-mails from students seem to get high spam ratings: maybe because they're short, or don't use my full name (addressing me instead as "Professor"), or come from Hotmail, or have attachments, or any number of other things. This isn't a tremendous deal; it means that I need to check the junk folder fairly frequently, though, and wade through the actual spam that accumulates. This, I feel, defeats the purpose.

I should, you might think, be able to turn off the rule that does the sorting... or at least modify it to my own nefarious ends, right? Not so much with the nefariousness, it seems. The ability to create or modify sorting rules doesn't seem to exist in the cross-platform version of GroupWise that I, an OS X user, have access to. (I rarely use the client anyway -- it's pretty broken in a number of ways -- but I'd at least hoped that it would do this correctly.)

I asked our tech support people if there was a secret password or something that students could use to avoid getting relegated to the junk folder. I got some really quite blank looks in response, followed by suggestions that I go into GroupWise and change the rules for spam filtering.

Not, you will note, entirely helpful.

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Posted 02 Mar, 2005 at 08:51 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

If there are web pages that you want to watch for changes, but that don't aggregate via RSS or Atom, then Watch That Page may be for you. It checks a list of pages that you set up, at whatever intervals you specify, and will e-mail you a notice if anything's changed.

It's possible that this is a spam address accumulator, of course, so be cautious as always. OTOH, it's heaps better than refrshing a page a dozen times a day to see if they've put up the damned schedules yet, for instance.

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