Author: peteware

Fun

Guggenheim: Cai Exhibit

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We went to the Guggenheim yesterday (10 min walk and Credit Suisse has a corporate membership so it’s free). Usually I think the building ends up being more interesting then the exhibit but this exhibit of work by Cai
was really interesting.
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He uses Chinese themes to contrast the failures of both Western and Chinese cultures.
For example, this represents both the Cultural Revolution’s ruinous attempt with the great leap forward but also Western’s society’s preference for the obvious.
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Cai is into explosions as art. There were lots of videos of things being ignited and exploded. This installation is a great use of the Guggenheim. It’s a static view of a car being blown up.
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Technology

Recent additions to the Mac

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In the constant quest to have the latest and coolest toys, here are some things I’ve recently added to my Mac.
– Chax adds some nice features to iChat:
Picture 1.jpg

Technology

Time capsule rules!

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I’ve got to admit, Apple’s Time Capsule rules!
Starting off was a little slow. The initial backup was 60Gbytes or so and took
nearly 16 hours to finish. I did this over the wireless connection. It
wasn’t a big deal. I had my laptop plugged in and just left it on overnight.
The transfer rate average to be about 1.2MB/sec (~10Mbit/sec) but as you are
watching, it really drags on
My girlfriend’s MacBook got backed up as well.
So now I’ve got this nice wireless backup going on. Both laptops share the backup drive without interference.
It’s a little of a let down at that point. You start up “Time Machine” and all
you see is exactly what’s on your desktop. After that, it starts to back up
every hour. The interface took a few tries before it really sank in how it
works. I’d expected to drag and drop to get to a backup file since it provides
a “Finder” interface to the backups. Instead, there is a “Restore” button to
bring things back.
Another thing that outsmarted me is that I kept checking for when the next
backup would happen. But it wouldn’t happen. The big “Power off” letters in
the Time Machine menu didn’t click for a long time. Finally, I realized it
wouldn’t do the backup unless I add my laptop plugged in to power. Makes pretty
good sense since you don’t want a lot of disk activity if it’s running on
batteries.
In the event of a my laptop disk failing, I’m supposed to be able to have the
install disk go to the backup and recover the system to any point in time.
Hopefully, I’ll never have to find out if it works but what’s the expression:
“Hope is not a plan”.
You can check out the Time Machine features.

Technology

Gettting Grab screen writing jpeg instead of tiff files

petewareLeave a comment

By default, “Grab” on MacOS saves the file as .tiff. Why? There’s no preferences to change it. Fortunately, there’s a pretty easy way by opening a terminal window and running the command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

You need to reboot for it to take affect. You can make other choices: jpg, tiff, etc.
You can also set the “location” and read the current values

defaults read com.apple.screencapture
Technology

C#: Silly syntax hint

petewareLeave a comment

I found myself wanting to make sure a couple objects that spport IDisposable were cleaned up. I’d written

    using (DurationLogger log = new DurationLogger(s_log, "Writing CSV file"))
    {
        using (FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite("temp.csv"))
        {
             // ...
        {
    }

A simple transformation makes it much more readable:

    using (DurationLogger log = new DurationLogger(s_log, "Writing CSV file"))
    using (FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite("temp.csv"))
    {
         // ...
    }
Fun

Mama Mia

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I saw “Mama Mia” Fri night. gallery07_pics_r1_c1.jpg
We went for my birthday. It was fun but not inspirational. I’m proud to say I only knew a few of the songs.
Times Square was packed! The sidewalks were 10 people deep with no room to pass.
After that, we went to an Iranian New Year’s party. Sorry, no photos.