NYC, Politics, and Tech
ScribeFire Blog Editor:
This Firefox extension makes it easy to highlight some text in an article and create a post. So far, so good.
ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
Judith Warner writes that saying something is a lot cheaper than actually
doing something. Why listen to a politicians words when he has plenty of
actions that reflect reality. Remember Bush and “Compassionate Conservatism”:
In real life, it’s another story.
McCain has opposed legislation aimed at helping women sue in cases of pay
discrimination on the grounds that it could make businesses vulnerable to
frivolous lawsuits. He criticized Barack Obama’s latest woman-friendly proposals
– guaranteed sick days and more family leave – as ‘big-government’
extravagances. He has voted to restrict womens access not just to abortion but
to birth control and affordable prenatal health care, and – though his own
memory failed him in recalling this last week – he voted against legislation
that would have required insurance companies to include contraceptives as part
of their prescription drug coverage.
Paul Krugman reminds us that The Onion is the only paper that really understands things. From a prescient spoof in Jan, 2001:
We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”
I’m trying out skitch. It’s trying really hard to be cute
but it’s doing good for some routing tasks like capturing a screen region and
then adding some simple markup to it.
Ran across this nice hint to make it so the Unix path shows in the title of Finder windows:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
Courtesy of a http://www.itbusiness.ca
Looks like Apple really has improved the sounds quality on calls. Both GSM and 3G.
From iPhone 3G review – Engadget:
One thing Apple was keen to talk up is the vastly improved call quality of the iPhone 3G. Those in the know understand that 3G call quality is often better than regular GSM — but it turns out Apple made a huge improvement on both sides. iPhone 3G calls made over 3G and GSM both sounded significantly better than calls made on the original iPhone. If you’re upgrading your device iPhone you may not necessarily notice it, but on a side by side it was pretty obvious.”
Nice article with some extra info on configuring the iPhone to use gmail. It has gems like:
Assuming that you have followed the iPhone IMAP setup instructions, it is now time to properly configure your mobile Mail client so that Sent Mail, Deleted Mail, Drafts, and Junk are reflected properly after syncing back between the webmail client and any other desktop clients you may have.
ScreenFlow from VaraSoftware.com is some cool screen capture software. Perhaps it’s most interesting idea is just to capture everthing and then give you the tools to edit it after the fact. Nice way to add audio afterward, too.
I was curious about some web design companies.
I’ve been working on some existing code that has a reputation for being very difficult to understand. It’s taken a while but I’m feeling pretty comfortable with it now and it’s not that complicated. Part of what makes the code inscrutable is a combination of too much indirection and control inversion (no documentation doesn’t help, of course).
Indirection is calling code that calls code that finally does what you want.
It’s great for abstraction. For example, do you really know what happens when you write
i = i + 1;
Indirection gives you more flexibility (i.e. polymorphism). It’s what novice programmers fail to do. When you see 200 line functions, duplicated blocks of code, and hardwired values that constantly need to be changed it’s code written by a newbie.
When you see an execution path like
Class1::doit() -- Class1::doit2() -- Class2::doit() -- Class3::doit()
it’s from someone that learned their novice lessons but hasn’t learned the cost of indirection.
Pete Ware 