December 2011
1 post
Personal
Auto-starting clips were never a good idea. They should have always been forbidden and users of the forbidden functionality publicly chastised.
This now got worse: On opening, Safari reloads all your windows and tabs that were open when you quit the application - or after a restart. This means that all tabs with auto-starting clips now start blaring.
Thanks. This is my space. I take this...
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
2 posts
Yet another package manager
After a long pause I wanted to use ghc again (for those who don’t know, this is an implementation of the awesome language Haskell - and which is allegedly only a factor 2 off in speed compared to c++, if you believe in these benchmarks). Macports created problems with libiconv and with fink I never got the gsl bindings working (through the package hmatrix).
Long story short: there is...
New layout on underoneminute.com →
September 2011
1 post
Double Tap to Zoom in Safari
I realised that today - probably long after all mac news sites have extensively covered this: If you double tap on a website in Safari on Lion the page zooms in similarly to iPhone or iPad Safari - just not to the full zoom level. On iPad / iPhone the tapped on div / block will be zoomed in fully, on the desktop version only to some extent.
This is actually really cool.
(On the trackpad you need...
July 2011
1 post
FCPX backlash
I downloaded FCPX as soon as I could — and loved it. Outside the fact that it is new and shiny (and I love everything new and shiny), the new functionality was very easy to use on my first clips — albeit with an unfamiliar interface.
But then again, I love the new XCode at home. I won’t feel offended by Visual Studio at work. I am happy to switch back to a text editor for rails...
January 2011
2 posts
Flash and battery
My new MacBook Air is a bit undecided in it’s battery display - it can easily jump from 5h to 2h and slowly creep back up again. I blame this on the small battery and the fact that it uses very little of it (resulting in a long battery life), so when you do tasks that are actually heavy on the battery it has to correct the time down significantly. Funnily enough using XCode with the...
December 2010
1 post
“-[NSAlert alertWithError:] called with nil NSError. A generic error message will...”
– Touché, XCode, touché.
July 2010
1 post
swoosh →
The software update for the magic trackpad installed inertial scrolling on my MacBook. What a nice surprise!
June 2010
2 posts
Ads in Safari 5 Reader
I am not quite sure why many people seem to think that ads will disappear from articles viewed through the new reader feature of Safari 5. Reader shows images from the articles, so if they are not identifiably unrelated to the article they should/will appear - including ads.
Anyway - I am not the only one thinking that I suppose. I just saw an ad in the reader. Here.
April 2010
3 posts
“You don’t even have to understand the concept of quitting an application — in...”
– John Gruber on multi-tasking on iPhone OS 4 and Android.
This will be a huge plus for people I know. When the (admittedly slow) 12 inch Powerbook has finally ground to something akin to a halt in modern day computing, I usually spend a couple of minutes closing 35 Safari tabs and 12 Word windows to...
March 2010
2 posts
“He says “Oh No, IBM. You cannot compete with me. I’ve got this...”
– The ever so resourceful (and exhausting to read) Richard Stallman in his article on software patents.
February 2010
4 posts
Tethered.
O2 - not the only iPhone carrier in the UK any more, but mine - has dropped prices for tethering your computer to the 3G network. The prices are still steep: 8 £ per month for something like 2GB. I don’t want to start to imagine the costs after that.
But they also have a “beginners tethering” service now. You can pay up to a maximum of 2 £ per day whenever you actually...
Coke vs. Pepsi - the vending machine story
I read the story - true or not - that the Cola wars in the 80s were decided through the fact that Coke stopped trying to increase the market share of Coke drinkers amongst Cola drinkers, but by focusing on getting more people to drink soda than before - by increasing the market share of soda versus competitors like … water. They did that by putting up Coke vending machines everywhere.
Coke...
“buildable: True”
– The installation of the haskell package hmatrix (a wrapper for the excellent gnu scientific library gsl) has given me a lot of grief in the past - it mostly refused to recognise installed versions of gsl, LAPACK, veclib while these were clearly installed. This simple hack made it possible to install...
January 2010
4 posts
“The new home cinema won’t be THX home edition and a 60” TV. It will...”
– Me. Mark my words.
PROAPIAccessing.h missing
If you are running into the problem that your system does not sport PROAPIAccessing.h any more you need to install the FXPlug SDK. That fixes the problem.
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
5 posts
Replacing C++ with Haskell →
While reading “C++ Design Patterns and Derivatives Pricing” by Mark S. Joshi I figured that most of these things could be very easily (and most probably efficiently) done in Haskell, so I started to write this up.
The link goes to the github repository - if only interested in the actual document, look at Main.pdf. All the sample programs are there as code which serves at the same time as part of...
How not to repair ghc on Snow Leopard
ghc is broken on Snow Leopard since SL identifies itself as a 64 bit OS but ghc doesn’t cope with that correctly in the standard binary. Adding
-optc-m32 -opta-m32 -optl-m32
to the script /usr/bin/ghc or /usr/local/bin/ghc makes it work again.
Update: The above works fine - unless you want to build libraries that link external libraries (from fink for example). Haven’t managed to...
“It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
– The NYT on the alleged facebook exodus. Perhaps we even stop hearing about the pathetic Zuckerberg?
Quite Bright
As mentioned in the last post - the brightness is quite impressive on Snow Leopard when you are used to the previous setting …. one thing I was puzzled about was that when setting the brightness to the lowest level (0 dots illuminated on the little grey brightness rectangle) the screen used to go black - not any more.
This was always a bit odd - on my iMac the screen went from relatively...
August 2009
3 posts
I might be the last one to realize this ...
… but I just discovered that Cmd-1 to Cmd-4 in Finder switch between the 4 different view styles: View as icons, a list, columns or in Cover Flow.
Will be checking if this still works in Snow Leopard if IT FUCKING ARRIVES OR WHAT.
Calling Haskell from Excel
I finally managed to do it - mostly following this blog post … except that I don’t have Excel 2007 and none of the files created wanted to work. I knew that xlw was working for me so I restarted from there. So here is what I did - without jumping any steps:
1 - Getting the necessary libraries and compiler
I used Visual Studio 2005 Professional (it might work with other versions)
Get...
July 2009
3 posts
Two Remotes →
Holy Shit Man Walks on Fucking Moon →
June 2009
7 posts
WatchMichael Jackson tribute “Moonwalk” Flashmob - quite an impressive number of people came to Liverpool Street Station, no actual moonwalking to be seen though.
“Im Sozialismus wurde die Wirtschaft erst verstaatlicht und dann ruiniert, im...”
– Peter Ensikat (via FAZ).
May 2009
9 posts
