Archive for June, 2007
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22 Jun 2007
A barfight there last weekend ended in a fatal stabbing, and it stirred up the ghost of Whitey Bulger. They've closed the fourth-least-sketchy bar in Southie. -
21 Jun 2007Neat things come in weird packages
The new faceplate I ordered for my phone came today. It took about 10 minutes to install. Now it isn't covered in pockmarks anymore!
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20 Jun 2007
I love that graph. I'm already shopping for solar panels to put on my house so I can do the same.
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20 Jun 2007
Quick hypothetical: You’re at the library, and you pull a copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell from the shelf. Before bringing it to the front desk to check out, you flip through the pages, and an envelope falls out. You pick it up, and it’s stamped and sealed and addressed to a P.O. Box one town over. What would you do with it?
Followup: Would your answer change if it came out of:
- … a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica?
- … Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban by J. K. Rowling?
- … The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism by Matthew Carr?
- … a book on the new releases shelf?
- … a magazine?
If no to all of the above, is there any case where your answer would be different?
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19 Jun 2007
The interesting thing here for me isn't the improvement from 1.5 to 2.0, but rather it's the overall speed at which the automatic upgrading system makes widespread massive upgrades.
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18 Jun 2007
Apparently GameCopyWorld is full of adware and spyware
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17 Jun 2007Left field
At the Pawtucket Red Sox game last night. It was tied 3-3 going into the bottom of the ninth, but George Kottaras hit the very first pitch of the inning for a home run and the game ended suddenly.
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15 Jun 2007
I'd frequently heard the term, but never details about the NYC cultural phenomenon. It's stories like these that make me glad I live in a little-bit-less-dense city.
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15 Jun 2007
You are officially old.
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15 Jun 2007
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15 Jun 2007
The release of a beta of Apple’s Safari for Windows earlier this week has resulted in an interesting flurry of activity in web designer circles. Nevermind the instant security bugs and the quick release of fixes from Apple. I’m talking about typography.
The day that the beta came out, Jeff Atwood asked “What’s wrong with Apple’s font rendering?” He pointed out that others had discussed this before, but it wasn’t until the difference was visible side-by-side on the exact same machine with the exact same fonts (and with presumably the exact same font libraries) that it became truly surprising. Joel Spolsky responded with the answer: Apple and Microsoft have very different priorities when it comes to font rendering, and at current screen sizes and resolutions, Apple’s total respect for the letter shapes can mean blurriness. Their diligence becomes especially impressive when you consider the work that Apple must have had to go through to get Safari to run on Microsoft’s home turf but render fonts the way it would on Mac OS X.
Dave Shea piped in with his own opinion and a caveat: I like Mac’s look better, but I think Microsoft’s is a better choice for the medium. But more importantly, he points out that as soon as higher-DPI screens are available, the whole question will be moot. Microsoft’s deference to the pixel grid will be essentially meaningless. Which brings us back to what Jeff Atwood does best: a big post with research and quotes and numbers showing how far screens have come since the release of the PC AT and Macintosh. Not far. The sad realization:
Short of some kind of miraculous technological breakthrough, I can’t see computer displays reaching 200 DPI in “a few years”. It’s unlikely we’ll even get there in ten years. I’d love to be proven wrong, but all the evidence of history– not to mention typical consumer “bigger is better” behavior– is overwhelming.
Can e-ink or OLED be the miraculous technological breakthrough we need? Possibly, but neither of them are yet ready to replace CRTs or LCDs.
[1] The always brilliant Joel ends with a great metaphor about how people usually prefer what’s familiar. He doesn’t say it, but I think he was implying that this is a big contributor to entrenchment in computing holywars: Mac vs. PC, vi vs. emacs, KNF vs. OTBS.
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13 Jun 2007Monorail sunrise
Brian on the way from the rental car dropoff to the terminal at SFO early Monday morning.
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12 Jun 2007
I'm scared. Hold me.
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10 Jun 2007Waiting for the BART
It was late, and we had to transfer trains at a cold outdoor platform.
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7 Jun 2007
Free high-quality topographical Maps and GIS data. So great.
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6 Jun 2007
My mom's blogging in delayed-real-time the story of my parents' chance meeting and whirlwind courtship 30 years ago this month.
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5 Jun 2007
I always knew that Tolkien intended Middle-earth to correspond geographically to modern-day Europe, but I could never really figure our exactly how, This map is so helpful.
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5 Jun 2007
My parents went to Ohio for the weekend, and I think they spent more time in airports and on planes than actually enjoying themselves.
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4 Jun 2007
This is quite a coincidence, considering my current work project is focusing on this exact problem.
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4 Jun 2007Camp flowers
Right before the sky opened up and dumped an inch of rain on us in an hour.
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1 Jun 2007
Inappropriate and sarcastic e-cards for every occasion.