Aug/081
1984
Cover of 1984 By George Orwell
I have a bunch of commuting time on my hands these days, so I decided to start reading (well actually listening to) all of the books that I should have read in high school. This includes books that weren’t on my curriculum (but everyone seems to have read), as well as the books I was supposed to read, but didn’t since I was such an awful, awful student.
First on my list was 1984 (this one falls into the “not on curriculum” category). I’m, a long time Mac fan and have wanted to read this since first seeing Apple’s 1984 commercial, but just didn’t find the time till now.
After finishing it, I have to say it’s one of my favorite books of all time. Incredibly intense, incredibly depressing, incredibly thought provoking, and incredibly awesome. It’s classic for a reason; the writing is impeccable and absorbs you from the first moment. In addition, the narration by Simon Prebble in the Audible audiobook version is incredible.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do. If you have, take a few hours to re-”read” the audiobook version. It’s great stuff.
Aug/080
iTunes Hanging on Syncing Bookmarks
This morning, iTunes started hanging at “Syncing Bookmarks” when syncing my iPhone. Several tries yielded the same results, even when I left it syncing for over an hour. A quick Google search led me to this iPhone Atlas page which said you could fix the problem by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/iSync and ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices but warned that you may end up with duplicate data.
Instead of deleting them, I just moved them to my Desktop so I could restore them if necessary, then tried to sync again. That fixed the problem and I didn’t notice any duplicates either on my computer or the phone. After the successful sync I checked ~/Library/Application Support again and noticed that iSync had been recreated, but SyncServices was not. So I dropped my original SyncServices back in and everything still works fine.
To summarize, it seems that the problem can be solved by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/iSync, then letting the iTunes sync recreate it.
Aug/081
iPhone Webapps Directory
I’m sure this has been brought up many times before, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the iPhone webapps directory (which is bookmarked by default on all iPhones) isn’t an iPhone optimized page. Not only is it non-optimized, it’s more difficult to navigate than most. Apple is (or was) encouraging developers to iPhone optimize apps, so it just seems obvious that they would do the same for their own.
On that topic, the iPhone 2.0 API and the new App Store have kind of overshadowed the web app directory. As a new iPhone owner, I just checked it out for the first time. It contains some good stuff; you may want to check it out if you haven’t already. Just remember to do it on your desktop.
Aug/080
Twitter Developer Interview
There’s a short interview with Alex Payne, one of the Twitter developers over at radicalbehavior.com. He’s a Ruby / RoR developer (and big fan), but points out how it falls short for high traffic applications.
A few interesting quotes:
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow.
All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Ruby is a great language, but this is just further proof that you need to take a close look at your requirements up front, then pick the best (not necessarily the coolest) tool for the job at hand.
Aug/080
Rant #1
I have quite a backlog of rants (that’s actually one of the reasons that I started this blog), so it might be rough going here for a while. Bear with me.
My first rant has to do with my most recent annoyance; the wordpress.com pricing model. Specifically, how it’s all about nickel and diming for features. I know it costs money to develop software and run servers, so I have no problem paying. I just find the way they have gone about it a little irritating.
The first fee was for a custom domain name – $10 year. Ok, less than $1 a month for hosting, not too bad. The one is really annoys me is the custom CSS fee. Yes, you actually have to pay $15 if you want the ability to edit the inline CSS. I’m not looking to do anything fancy, just move the tagline down a little from the title and I’ll have to pay $15 to do it. Stupid.
Even with the CSS, I’m still only paying $25 a year. I would just find it preferable if they asked me to pay $25 (or even more) for a “package” containing the basic features instead of $10 + $15 + ? for every little thing I need.
There, we started off light. Hang on tight. The rants will get worse from here.
Aug/080
Not Another Blog
Yes, I know the world doesn’t need another blog, but I need a place to write about my thoughts, ideas, activities, rants, etc. Sorry world, I promise I won’t get too deep.