John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
At yesterday’s SFBETA meetup, I had the chance to play with PicLens, a dynamic system for displaying images in your browser, all pulled from the APIs of various web sites.
It works as an adjunct to your existing browser, installing as a plugin (written in C++, or so the developer tells me.)
If you connect to a [...]
There’s been some changes in the way that Rails 2.0 processes forms and form interaction with Ajax. Here’s a quick write-up on how to use auto completion in Rails 2.0 without a database connection.
In my case, I was parsing an Apache configuration file and displaying VirtualHost entries, but you can use this for just about anything [...]
.. or, the de-evolution and re-evolution of communication.
Online communications has had a strange and varied history. I remember chatting to multiple users at the same time on diversi-dial services back in the 80’s. These were essentially apple II computers, filled with modem cards so that up to *eight* people could talk to each other in [...]
I just got back from San Diego. The flight was wonderful (I love Virgin Airlines!), and I spent most of the trip back playing with a free Rubik’s Cube I got from Disney. They also gave me a USB 2.0 hub, which I don’t have a use for yet.
While there, I picked up an Ardunio [...]
Currently at the Google Android talk.
They’re promoting an open development model for android, with source code for everything from the hardware to the software. I’m concerned that they won’t be able to unseat the iphone, but the openness of the platform is a huge plus over the iphone, as they don’t even have an SDK [...]
I’ve spent the last two days at ETech in San Diego, watching many diverse presentations from some incredibly intelligent people.
At the EFF Pioneer Awards, Cindy Cohn gave an award to Mark Klein, the AT&T engineer who blew the whistle on the NSA wiretapping case. It was wonderful to see Mark being honored for his [...]
You be the judge. Aside from the extra memory, the CPU performace is nearly 200% better. 10.5.2 destroys 10.4.8. There is some minor lossage in disk performance because I’m using the onboard AHCI ports instead of JMicron ports, but wow…
Leopard is on the left, 10.48 AHCI is on the right. Leopard reports this machine as [...]
Last week’s fun was getting Leopard to run correctly on retina, which is a Mac Mini, running 10.5.2. After spending many days patching Directory Services and Postfix issues, it was time to break another machine.I headed into the studio where I’ve got a dual-monitor OSX86 machine running JaS 10.4.8.
This is commodity PC hardware, running Tiger. [...]
Retina.net runs on a Mac Mini, co-located through business cable service. For the last 8 months it’s been running on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) with very little in the way of problems. Yesterday I started an upgrade to Leopard, which created many more problems than expected.
Major issues and caveats I experienced
No more NetInfo - [...]
Are you a systems adminstrator, and do you run BIND DNS servers? If so, you should be using the Secure BIND Template written by Team Cmryu. I’ve been using it for many years to lock down our production DNS servers.
Their document provides a great starting point for BIND server configuraiton, with a current, updated list [...]