Artima Interviews

Artima.com has posted an interview with Matz, creator of Ruby . I played with Ruby a bit this summer, and I liked it a lot. Now that I've done some Smalltalk programming for a course I'm taking, the parallels are obvious. Blocks rule.

Artima has ongoing interviews with James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Matz. If you're at all interested in programming languages, then I recommend adding their RSS feed to your aggregator.

Safety Photo of the Week

The U.S. Navy has a very amusing safety photo site . Two of my favorites are Dual-Action Forklift and "Can Do" At Its Worst .

CocoaTech Frameworks

CocoaTech (creators of PathFinder) have released some big frameworks as open source. These are the same frameworks used to build PathFinder. One thing that sounds immediately useful is CocoaTechTerminal, which allows you to embed a terminal in your app. It's just an NSView.

Lisa

Dilbert: Lisa . Good timing - just yesterday, Jason mentioned that one of the questions at this year's WWDC Stump the Experts was, "What date does the Lisa reset to when the battery dies?"

WWDC Debrief

Jason and I will be giving a talk on WWDC 2003 at 6pm Thursday in Hatch Auditorium . Come if you're a student interested in learning about how you can attend WWDC, or if you want to see demonstrations of technologies unveiled at WWDC. You won't want to miss the no lines of code web browser using WebKit! :)

G5 Cluster Photos

Virginia Tech has posted an extensive photo gallery of the installation of their new supercomputer consisting of 1100 Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5s. Almost cool enough to make me forgive them for getting the first 1100 dual G5s when I have one on order. Almost...

Data Alignment

Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch has written an excellent article on data alignment titled Straighten Up and Fly Right . I didn't know anything about data alignment before I read the article, except for occasionally seeing messages from compilers about structure alignment. Thanks for the article, Wolf!

Type R

Wow, I've gotta get this car . I definitely agree with this comment:

ID pimp the h3ll out of some b*tchs with that ryde its mad tught!

Groan

Foxtrot: Query Eye for the Database Guy

Apple Announcements

The new 15 inch PowerBooks are out, and they look very nice. The enclosure is similar to the 12 inch and 17 inch PowerBooks. Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and FireWire 800 are welcome additions. I am a bit disappointed that the resolution is still "only" 1280x854. At work this summer, I had an IBM ThinkPad with a 14-inch 1400x1050 resolution display, and I really liked it. Heck, Dell sells a laptop with a 1920x1200 display! Still, I think the new 15 inch PowerBook is a hit.

The new Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are disappointing. The keyboard looks good, but its $70. The mouse doesn't look very good (only one button) and it's also $70! Looks like I'll have to go with the Microsoft Bluetooth Intellimouse Explorer if/when I get a Bluetooth mouse.

OmniNetworking

A few days ago, I posted about Cocoa socket programming libraries. After some trial and error, I've decided to go with OmniNetworking . It seems to be the most mature of the Cocoa socket libraries. It doesn't support asynchronous callbacks, but it's not too hard to just spawn a thread and do blocking I/O in that thread.

Also, since I'm going to be working on the first assignment for EECS 425 with my friend Jason , I decided to set up a CVS server on my Powerbook so we can easily collaborate. CVL made this fairly easy. Besides creating the CVS repository, all I had to do was create an account for Jason, enable SSH login, and make sure that the CVS repository was readable and writable by both of us. CVL as a CVS client is decent, but I've also heard that many people like to use Eclipse as a standalone CVS client, since its CVS support is so great.

Best Dressed Billionaires

Forbes has released their list of best-dressed billionaires . The only reason I know or care is because Steve Jobs came in 5th. Still, I found the comments about Larry Ellison amusing (he tied with Steve for 5th):

He's got a current look. I would trust him with my money. He knows what's happening in the world that he's functioning in. He doesn't waste shareholders' time shaving his beard.

Pimp Juice

I definitely need to get some Pimp Juice .

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

Take this Flash quiz to see if you can tell programming language inventors from serial killers. (Via Lambda )

MVC Song

I can't believe I didn't post this earlier, but if you haven't already heard the Model View Controller song from WWDC 2003, then you should listen to it. My favorite line: "Mad props to the Smalltalk crew!"

Mail.app Images

Jason and I were talking last week about the sender pictures that Mail.app displays for messages sent from a .Mac email account. Now Dan Wood has posted a tip about attaching your photo to outgoing messages even if you don't have a .Mac account. Basically, you add a X-Image-Url header with a link to a 64x64 picture.

iSight Talk

Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on iSight for Case SIGMAC . It's at 6pm in Hatch Auditorium (in Baker Building ). I'll have two PowerBooks and two iSights. I'm going to give a brief overview and demo of iSight and some of the software you can use with it (iChat AV, EvoCam, QuickTime Broadcaster). Then everyone will have a chance to play, and we can talk about Mac news and answer audience support questions.

LISP Listing

I'm learning Scheme for my programming languages class, so I found this post over on kung-foo.tv particularly amusing.

Cocoa Sockets

For one of the classes I'm taking right now (Computer Networks), I'm going to need to do some sockets programming. We are allowed to use pretty much any programming language and framework that we want, so of course I'm going to use Cocoa. What are the best libraries for socket programming in Cocoa? So far I've turned up SmallSockets , NetSocket , and AsyncSocket . So far I've played with SmallSockets a bit, but haven't had time to try out NetSocket and AsyncSocket. Has anyone these or other socket libraries for Cocoa? If so, any suggestions?