Posted on 2004-12-21, 17:23, by aj, under
tech.
In his epic battle with Adrian over exceptions, Ben mentioned: Save your work? That’s for sissys. Use a journalling file-saving model. Save everything the user does immediately. You can support the traditional file save/load facility using checkpoints or other niceties but I fail to see why any application in this modern age of fast hard […]
Posted on 2004-12-18, 16:43, by aj, under
philosophy.
…and you can’t beat that. Or, at least, I think that was some primary school slogan we had at some point. But Google knows nothing about it, so maybe I imagined it all. Surely, there isn’t still more in the universe than’s dreamt of in Google’s eight billion web pages… I think it might’ve had […]
Posted on 2004-12-16, 20:34, by aj, under
mac.
Decided to wander into NextByte to see about getting some more ram for my nice new iBook today. I’ve been tossing up whether to go for an extra 512MB (for 768MB total) or an extra GB (for 1280MB total) — I really wanted as much as possible, since OS X is a memory hog and […]
Posted on 2004-12-13, 22:55, by aj, under
random.
Evidently Energex noticed the twenty minute thunderstorm we had after lunch today, and decided to switch to their summer policy. Hence we’ve had two prolonged blackouts this evening, so far; the current one’s stopping me from watching both the Rebel Billionaire and the West Wing. Not impressed. And why they’re happening well after the storm, […]
Posted on 2004-12-11, 18:41, by aj, under
tech.
One of the harder aspects of version control is dealing with merging issues. Normal development is straightforward — all you’re essentially doing is providing an annotated “undo” feature. darcs manages that, IMO, perfectly. And to be honest, that’s probably 80% of what I want form a version control system. But dealing with merging different lines […]
Posted on 2004-12-11, 02:12, by aj, under
tech.
One of the central ideas in Jef Raskin‘s book The Humane Interface is that the “zooming” interface — rather than 2d windows that you shift around and overlay on each other, you have a huge canvas that you can zoom into and out of, as well as move around on. Obviously your screen only displays […]
Posted on 2004-12-08, 15:19, by aj, under
tech.
Cripes. This was meant to be a quick followup note about some more quick darcs hacks. So much for that — I’ve had to write an outline for this post for heaven’s sake. (Side note: if someone wants a new title for their blog, the above’s free of charge!) So, when last we met, darcs-repo […]
Posted on 2004-12-04, 16:54, by aj, under
debian.
From this week’s LWN: Unless the Debian Project changes its social contract to allow the exclusion of packages on moral grounds, tools like hot-babe will find a home there. Well, gosh, I’m glad that’s settled.
Posted on 2004-12-03, 00:43, by aj, under
random.