As everyone probably has been unable to avoid knowing, the iPhone launches this Friday. Normally, new Apple releases cause me to sit on my hands to avoid throwing money at Steve Jobs' head, but this one--eh. It's certainly spiffy, in some ways, and the data plan is $10 cheaper than one I pay now for …
Category Archive: Computing
Feb 14 2007
Physics vs Powerpoint
Unfortunately, working in Physics means giving quite a few presentations. This would be bad enough, as it takes significant time away from experiments. But, adding to this, everyone uses PowerPoint. The program is wretched for this application. For instance, say we want to display some kind of atomic structure. Atomic structures, if you don't know, …
May 06 2006
Comment spam
In an effort to combat the hundreds of spammy comments, you must now complete a simple arithmetic problem to post a comment. This should ensure that only humans can comment, and only humans who can perform arithmetic. Those of you who cannot perform arithmetic may use the calculator that comes with every operating system known …
Jul 20 2005
Things I love about Mac OS X
Word 2004 has a function to extract pictures from Word docs and save them to a folder. Word X does not. But this doesn't mean that you can't extract pictures from Word docs in Word X--because Preview, the pdf/image viewer, has a function to create a new document from the clipboard. Fancy. So you copy …
Jun 21 2005
cygwin bad, mingw and msys good
Several times in my Windows life I've wanted to compile open-source stuff. Of course, every idiot knows that the de facto tool for doing this is Cygwin, a truly awful port of a Unix-like environment. Considering that all one wants is a basic C compiler and linker, and some basic shell stuff, one wouldn't think …