little thoughts

+Aug. 5

2007-08-06T04:28:40Z

And then, about a year later, I remembered to note that in the last year I’ve read The Golden Ratio and now know that lots and lots of arbitrary ratios are within a few % of Φ. Last Year’s Point on the Subject: best when mixed with an aptly sized grain of salt.

+Jul.27

2007-07-27T15:08:23Z

Oh, hey. I made an iPhone application for tracking gas mileage. Point your iPhone to miles.jetless.org, create an account and start keeping track of the miles you put on your car. Email with any suggestions.

+Aug. 3

2006-08-04T03:24:15Z

The dimensions of the iPod are 2.4”×4.1”. That’s 1:1.7083… which is within 5% accuracy to 1.618033989, the Golden Ratio.

+Aug. 3

2006-08-03T15:02:03Z

Your daily excellent wikipediaing:

+Aug. 2

2006-08-03T01:33:18Z

For anyone who missed it, here’s a video for how to hack a Diebold voting machine (y’know, the kind that don’t create a paper print out of voting activity) and completely overwrite all the ballots cast on it with whatever sort of voter turnout you’d like. Now that’s democracy!

+Jul.23

2006-07-24T05:49:17Z

So Andy Budd made some bookmarklets that overlay (and underlay!) grids on any ol’ webpage. Best thing ever? Perhaps!

+Apr.20

2006-04-20T18:12:21Z

When your Flickr Pro account expires, your account limits itself to your 200 most recent photos no matter how many you’ve uploaded or how long you’ve been a member. They remain on the server, but I’m not so sure I approve of having my data locked away beyond my reach.

+Apr.20

2006-04-20T18:06:30Z

I am immensely excited about John Gruber’s plan to begin writing for Daring Fireball full time. DF is easily my favorite site with its brilliant insight and discussion of Macintosh going-ons. When Gruber unleashes a new one, I drop what I’m doing to read it every time. Absolutely fantastic material written by a phenomenally articulate and acute writer. Here’s hoping this plays out as well as possible!

+Apr.13

2006-04-14T00:31:20Z

How did people make charts before OmniGraffle?

+Apr.12

2006-04-13T00:52:14Z

So I really want to do contract web design this summer. I really want to do this.

And yet, I don’t know many people who need work. What to do, what to do.

If you know someone who needs, know someone who doesn’t yet know they need or are someone who needs excellent work done on a site any time in the next 5 months, let me know! There’s a link to work I’ve done before and a link to contact me at the bottom left here.

+Apr.12

2006-04-12T23:31:16Z

I’m tired of web-apps throwing “beta” in their titles. Go to TechCrunch, the ultimate in web 2.0 news, and click through to the sites discussed there. Beta. Beta, beta, beta. Even flickr lists itself as a beta site. No! You are not beta, you have been an entirely reliable and delivered product for at least a year.

Release a product that meets your well-set pre-release goals. Add features from there as your users need, request and want them. Do not tell me that what I’m using is half-baked and “ought to work”. Release a quality product and make it better over time.

+Apr. 5

2006-04-05T19:24:26Z

In iCon it is said that Steve Jobs’ goal for his return to Apple in 1997 was “to take back the computer business from Microsoft”. Consider how this has unfolded.

Apple is more an icon today than it’s been in decades. OS X is known as a beautiful OS that just works. The iPod is the cultural icon of this decade. Macs turn heads in ways that no other computer ever has. People who know nothing about computers know when Apple is having a media event. This doesn’t happen in the Windows world.

In digital music, Microsoft is an also-ran. Plays For Sure, Plays For Who? Digital video, codecs be damned, only geeks care about those and geeks aren’t the market force. If it ain’t on iTunes, it ain’t relevant.

And now, today, Apple asks why you would buy a PC when you can buy a Mac and run Windows. What better way to defeat an enemy than to take the battle to their turf and use their own weapons against them?

+Apr. 5

2006-04-05T08:09:45Z

Why do some drinking fountains have fans in them and why are they hot to the touch sometimes?

+Apr. 3

2006-04-03T22:08:54Z

Ah, the end of a semester. Manic programming sessions, late nights and early mornings. I pieced together the rest of my academic career this weekend, next semester will be theory classes I never imagined myself taking (cryptography and artificial intelligence) and the semester following will be full of gooey love (pun intended).

Let it further be resolved that there is truly nothing better to get one through a straight night of work like pepperoni and mushroom pizza.

+Mar.29

2006-03-29T23:38:28Z

Reading this article about the merging of generations between college kids and metropolitan thirty-somethings has completely and utterly convinced me that my children will be complete and utter media snobs by the time they’re 8 years old.

And yet I ask myself with pop music being what it is today, compared to what it was in, say, the ’60s does this upset me?