I’m proud to announce the release of PictureWindow1.1. Besides some general code clean-up, this new release adds the ability to select a folder other than ~/Pictures/, which increases its usefulness about 1000 times. Download and enjoy.
Been a while since I’ve updated. My apologies. But I have excellent news. I’ve written my first full-fledged Cocoa application. PictureWindow is a very basic image viewing program for OS X. In its current state of development it will only browse your Pictures folder. I’m working on changing that so you can select the folder you want to view. The code is pretty decent, in my inexperienced opinion, for a newbie. I plan on keeping this application in active development, unlike the other programs I’ve written, so if you try it out and think something is lacking, let me know and I’ll try to add it. It’ll be a good learning experience for me. Any feedback is, of course, welcome. Just shoot an email to aj [at] this domain. It uses the MIT license and the source code is included in the .zip file. Finally, I’d like to thank Max Williams for the great job he did on designing PictureWindow’s icon. Significantly better than anything I could have come up with.
What a completely shitty week it’s been. On Monday I found out that Robert Anton Wilson, a man I’ve studied and admired almost my entire life, is not only dying, but is pretty much destitute. Bob’s writings have been one of the single greatest influences on the way I think about and interpret the world. On Wednesday I found out that “Digital” Bill Douthett died suddenly in his home in Florida. Bill was one of the nicest geeks you could ever talk to and was one of the first to get in on the whole podcast craze. His singular wit and boundless wisdom will truly be missed. I never got the chance to meet him in real life, and now I never will. Finally, this was my friend John’s last week at work. John is hands down my closest friend at work, and he’s leaving for another company. I really don’t know what I’m going to do without him there.
Fortunately, there are two bright spots for the week. My friend Andrew made it to Colorado on Tuesday. And thanks to a veritable army of donations, Bob Wilson has managed to raise $68,000 in just a few days to help pay his rent and medical bills.
I’m not a very emotional person usually, but this week has been a rollercoaster for me. I’m glad it’s the weekend.
People may laugh and point, but I love my Newton. I love it so much, in fact, that I was quite bummed when I realised there was no way to connect it to my Macbook Pro; Newton Connection Utilities only works on Windows and Classic Mac OS, which the Intel Macs can’t run. I tried using Parallels and Windows XP, but the driver for my USB->Serial adapter consistently crashed XP. So what’s a brother to do….
The answer, it turns out, was Bluetooth. And thanks to Adriano Angelillis and Eckhart Köppen it works perfectly. Adriano has been graciously providing the Newton community an easy way to purchase compatible PCMCIA Bluetooth cards and Eckhart is the mastermind who implemented the Bluetooth protocol stack on the Newton. It’s fast and, so far, very reliable. It amazes me how the Newton community has managed to do such incredible things with such dated hardware. So until next time, Keep It Green. 
I only paid $3/gallon for gas the other day. And I was excited about it. I remember when I first got my license $10 would fill up my entire tank.
In other new I saw an article about acid rain. In China.
I know I said I was taking a break from tech stuff and I know that many more people have discussed this topic much more eloquently than I. But someone on IRC posted this link; to an online Ruby tutor. I clicked, mainly out of curiousity, and went through the entire thing. I’ve been reluctant to give Ruby a fair shake because of my Python bias, but I think after my self-imposed tech moratorium, I’ll try it.
This morning I did a test between Python and Ruby. It is, admittedly, contrived.
#!/usr/bin/env python
class Fucker(object):
def __init__(self, string1, string2):
self.string1 = string1
self.string2 = string2
def fuck():
print self.string1 + ” fucked ” + self.string2
# alternately:
# print “%s fucked %s” % (self.string1, self.string2)
>>> f = Fucker(”Sid”, “Nancy”)
>>> f.fuck()
“Sid fucked Nancy”
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
class Fucker
def initialize(string1, string2)
@string1 = string1
@string2 = string2
end
def fuck
puts “#{@string1} fucked #{@string2}”
end
end
>>> f = Fucker.new(”Sid”, “Nancy”)
>>> f.fuck
“Sid fucked Nancy”
The two examples do exactly the same thing in very similar ways, but each language’s approach has certain appeal. I really really dislike Ruby’s use of end statements. Python’s required indentation [it's a feature!!] makes them unnecessary and thus makes the Python code shorter. On the other hand, I’ve always despised Python’s class initialisation method. While it’s better than having explicit getters and setters, the self thing always bothered me. I think the Ruby way is superior in this regard. Overall I prefer Python because it doesn’t use weird looking syntax like #{variable}, but I realise that’s Ruby’s Perl influence shining through. In the end, I honestly hope I do like Ruby. I think there’s room for it alongside Python in my head.
I’ve known my friend Andrew since I was probably about 3 or 4 years old. He was always an adventurous kind of guy, whether it was building something wonderfully neat with scavanged parts or climbing big rocks like El Capitan. I always admired his courage, no matter how crazy I thought he was for doing some of these things. Now he’s doing something so crazy I can’t even fathom it; he’s biking across the country. But it’s not just because he feels like it, he’s doing it for a good cause: raising money for the American Cancer Society. This is something near and dear to our hearts here at CoaIJ. Steph’s grandfather [who she was extremely close to] died of cancer and my grandmother [who I'm pretty close to] is currently fighting it off. His blog has all the details.
First being [obviously] a new look. Call me sad and pathetic, but I’m really excited about this new theme. I think it’s slick and professional. On to change number two. I’ve decided to take a break from reading nothing but tech-related books. On Saturday I picked up a novel [Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for those inquiring minds] for the first time in probably close to two years. Once I’m done with that one, I think I’ll read another. I may even start writing again. For all my self-proclaimed mediocrity, it’s something that I enjoy and haven’t done in longer than I can remember. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get around to writing the rest of those honeymoon posts.
in every bloggers life when he has to ask, “Is anybody reading this?” If you are, drop a comment to this post. Even if it’s just to say “Your blog fucking sucks.” Of course, more constructive criticisms would be much more helpful. 
Why should we, the geeks, who the Internet was made for/by be penalised just so some Georgia redneck can download his Rush Limbaugh faster?