Posts under ‘geek’

Steve Jobs offers up his non-apology on iPhone 4 antenna issues, and goes into full defense mode. Here’s your rubber bumper.
Memo to Steve: Fix the problem instead of offering up a workaround. And quit being a jerk.
In other news, only three weeks left to the GMAT. (Yeah, after three months of study, I’m close to burning out… [...]

18 May 1980.
Wow, 30 years since Ian Curtis died. His death was the end of Joy Division, but ultimately the beginning of New Order.
RIP.

The IT support geek as a hand sanitizer container:

As I wrote a few months back, I became a bit dismayed by Apple’s closed architecture on the iPhone, iPod, and continuing now with the iPad.
Andrew Sullivan today linked to an interesting article on the growing “MacSchism” regarding Apple’s tight control over its products, the article ending with a great observation by Umberto Eco:
Over 15 [...]

Mannequins, robots, and ringerless phones. From Wikipedia:
The band is notoriously reclusive; providing rare and enigmatic interviews, using life size mannequins and robots to conduct official photo shoots, refusing to accept mail and not allowing visitors at Kling Klang Studio. Another notable example of this eccentric behavior was reported to Johnny Marr of The Smiths by [...]

It brings back many memories, all unpleasant. Yes, it does suck that bad.

Making the rounds on the ‘net, geek film criticism at its finest, the 7-part 70 minute review of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Not to be missed, even by the non-geeks out there. Enjoy.
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

A friendly reminder that a new year is coming up and if you haven’t learned a new language yet, now’s the time to do it.

After years of buying junk, I’ve finally found a quality mount for my Garmin GPS.

It’s a locking suction mount from RAM Mount, model number RAM-B-166-GA12U. No more licking those suction cups! The locking mechanism creates an ultra-tight seal and holds up extremely well off-road. Made of heavy duty materials, it has a ball and socket [...]

It’s not really obvious how to do it on a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx, but below is a series of screen capures showing you the steps.
Here’s the Map screen. Looks kinda busy.

Press the Menu button and a menu will popup.

From the menu, select Setup Map and press the Enter button. You’ll now be presented with the [...]

Having downloaded and installed Colorado and New Mexico topo maps onto my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx, I wanted to post a tutorial on how to de-clutter the GPS display by disabling unnecessary maps. It’s a bit difficult for the reader to follow along without some visuals from the GPS, so I found a clever way to [...]

I love LaTeX, the markup language for typesetting documents, using it for everything from my CS classes, to specifications at work, even versions of my resume. Well, it looks like Microsoft Word 2010 will finally offer similar typesetting in the form of OpenType ligatures. It’ll be nice to see how that pans out, and if [...]

I love retro game articles, like this one about Rogue, the Unix classic text-based dungeon crawler. I remember playing this a lot while at Tech back in the day.

It was re-imagined at some point in a MS-DOS version called Moria, which I found even cooler than Rogue, thanks to the ability to shop for items [...]

The upgrade to Genesys 7.6 in December went off pretty much without a hitch, and with the upgrade came changes to T-Server and URS logs so I’ve been spending some time during the last quarter updating Genalyze. I’ve also found some spare time to continue with Leafpile development, both Java and Objective-C implementations.
Needless to say, [...]

Between submitting a paper to this year’s Genesys G-Force conference and some serious geeking out with respect to Linux kernel hacking, I haven’t bothered with a post in 6 weeks or so. Too busy, or too focused to bother, I guess. See, too serious:

My paper on Post-call Surveys and Outbound Contact didn’t make the cut [...]

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) debuted today, a new search engine brought to you by a few former Google employees. It’s pretty slick, presenting the user’s search results in a columnar, newspaper fashion, configurable to either 2 or 3 columns wide. It’s a nice, simple format. I really like it.
Unfortunately, it appears the engine itself might still [...]

I ran across scanned copies of the Commodore 64 User’s Guide and Programmer’s Reference Guide, in handy PDF format. Not surprising, really, that someone took the time to scan them in.
I sometimes wish I still had my 64.
Oh, and be sure to download Firefox 3. Very nice.

This nice article brought back memories of old-school copy protection, such as “enter last word of second to last sentence on page 72 of game manual” or intentional bad sectors on commercial 5.25 inch floppies in an attempt to thwart copying on the 1541.

I’m about 50% complete with the Java implementation of Leafpile but have decided to put development on the back-burner while I focus on learning to write Mac applications. In fact, why not simply port what I have now over to a Cocoa application. Mac is back in service again, and I’ve really been itching to [...]

Spotted in the wild. And yes, this version of Spam isn’t good for you either.

The Spam slot machine!

Progress has been glacial, but as of today, about 25% of the opcodes are coded and tested. I completed a “simple” console UI using Swing and the Java 2D API because I was at a point where I needed some kind of user interface to do any kind of useful testing. I don’t work much [...]

I added a page listing my all-time recommended list of programming books, guides, and references. It’s called Good Reads, and you’ll find a link on the right.

I setup a new project at SourceForge called Leafpile. The plan is to do a Java implementation of the Z-machine virtual machine used for running interactive fiction story files, (think: Infocom). There’s a very concise standard out there for how to do this, called the Z-Machine Standards Document.

Lots of Post-It notes and scribbles already.
There are [...]

I was cleaning up an old hard drive yesterday and ran across a pile of Infocom data files from their popular text adventures. They probably came from an old compilation I picked up years ago called The Lost Treasures of Infocom. I absolutely loved playing these games on my Commodore 64.
Infocom’s games ran on a [...]

If you’re doing any kind of Ajax development, I’d highly recommend getting the Firebug plug-in for Firefox. It’s been a godsend for debugging Ajax apps.