/dev/random

I haven’t written about my cats for a while, so it’s time for a cat post.
This afternoon Cody snuck out for his first trip outdoors (not counting rides in a pet carrier to the vet). Since he doesn’t have claws I always avoided letting him out. I was afraid he’d freak out being outdoors [...]

[Read more →]

Earlier this week, USA Today had an article about Absolute Software, and today there was one in WSJ.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Absolute Software in USA Today & WSJ”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/29/absolute-software-in-usa-today-wsj/” });

[Read more →]

18.75 %

My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.Does your weblog own you?
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “/dev/random owns 18.75% of me”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/27/devrandom-owns-1875-of-me/” });

[Read more →]

Mike Berman posted this list of why Buddhism is better. I’m not officially a Buddhist, but I’ve been interested in Buddhism for a long time.
As most readers probably know, I dislike religious dogma. The reason I like Buddhism is because it’s not dogmatic and doesn’t tell you that you have to believe a certain [...]

[Read more →]

After my first full day with my MacBook Pro, I love it. I was concerned about the “whine” some people report, but this one is absolutely silent. On the rare occasions when the fan starts up, it’s still much quieter than the PowerBook. I haven’t seen any of the other problems people mentioned and the [...]

[Read more →]

My MacBook Pro arrived this afternoon. The first thing that struck me was how small the box is. It’s about half as thin as the box from my PowerBook G4. The MacBook Pro itself is slightly slimmer than the PowerBook.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “MacBook Pro”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/24/macbook-pro-2/” });

[Read more →]

We had a sudden heavy rainstorm this afternoon. After the rain stopped, I found most of the plants in my garden knocked down & flattened. A little before 6PM we lost power for about 20 minutes.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Sudden Storm”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/23/sudden-storm/” });

[Read more →]

Via Trail Mix: When Senator George Allen addressed a town hall meeting in Culpeper, VA on Tuesday, 16-year-old Tully Satre pressed the potential presidential candidate to ask why he withdrew his past support for hate crimes legislation and why Allen supported an anti-marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “I, as of now, do not have [...]

[Read more →]

Via MetaFilter:
Remember HB 1215, the bill banning almost all abortion in South Dakota? Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, has a solution: “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State [...]

[Read more →]

Justin Watt received a cease-and-desist letter from Exodus International for posting this image.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Question Intolerance”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/22/question-intolerance/” });

[Read more →]

Several times I’ve had to rename a group of files, usually to change extensions. I usually ended up using a shell command such as ‘for f in *.xyz …’, but thanks to the comments at this blog post, I discovered two very nice batch rename utilities. Renamer4Mac is very nice, free GUI utility. There’s also [...]

[Read more →]

Via Minipundit: A study has shown that “whiny, insecure” children grow up to be conservatives, while “confident, resilient, self-reliant” children grow up to be liberals.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Whiners grow up to be conservative, study claims”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/20/whiners-grow-up-to-be-conservative-study-claims/” });

[Read more →]

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “It’s going to be a LONG week”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/20/its-going-to-be-a-long-week/” });

[Read more →]

I ordered a MacBook Pro from PowerMax with a trade-in of my 15″ PowerBook G4. I also bought that machine from them, trading in my 12″ PowerBook G4. I should have it next week. This leaves my G4 minitower as the only PowerPC system for testing & development.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “MacBook Pro”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2006/03/16/macbook-pro/” });

[Read more →]

I’ve started learning Python, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. One thing that always bothered me about it is that whitespace is significant. Unlike most languages where blocks are delimited by begin..end or {…}, in Python a block is delimited by all statements being indented the same amount. Am I the only [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve run into a puzzling problem that’s kept me stumped for several days. I have a command-line tool that simply can’t be debugged. I’ve built it with optimizations turned off and debugging symbols enabled, but it won’t stop at any breakpoints, even if I put a breakpoint at the first line of main().
Someone suggested adding [...]

[Read more →]

Text editors are like religions, inspiring bitter rivalries. The most intense rivalry is between vi & emacs. Although vi was the first Unix text editor I used, I soon discovered emacs and became an emacs fan. I feel at home in emacs and I instinctively use emacs keystrokes everywhere, which most Mac applications support.
However, I [...]

[Read more →]

Thanks to this tip at MacOSXHints, I discovered a great utility in OS X 10.4 that I didn’t know existed: textutil. It can easily convert files to plain text, html, rtf, doc, and other formats. To convert a .doc file to html, you can just do: textutil -convert html file.doc.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Great text utility”, url: [...]

[Read more →]

I picked the first tomatoes from my garden today. Unfortunately some animal or bird got to one before I could pick it. I ended up with 4 good ones. It looks like two eggplants will be ready soon, and I’m now on the second planting of lettuce.
I always enjoyed gardening, but this is the first [...]

[Read more →]

Hearing about Dana Reeve’s death from lung cancer made me think about my mother’s recent death, also from lung cancer. Until now I never realized that lung cancer progressed so quickly. Although she was having progressively worse trouble breathing for the last year, her cancer was only diagnosed less than 3 months before she died. [...]

[Read more →]