Random Tidbits 24 Jan, 2006
The last time I posted something here was, I must admit, in the year 2005. It’s been 2006 for almost a month now, and I’m finally getting around to posting something for the first time.
In the meantime, there has been another World Wide Panorama event. My entry is windmills from Lubbock, TX, where I was over the Christmas break.
Intel Macs have been released, along with new versions of lots of Apple programs that we’re told still run perfectly fine on what we’ve taken to calling the “SlowBook Pro” around the office. In one swift motion, all my Mac friends are now “old-school.” Still waiting to see how this one plays out.
I lost another hard drive, this one making a nice clickit-click noise. Not the usual tick-tick-tick, but a dual tone “death noise.” I thought that was interesting.
I’ve read Joel Spolsky’s book “Joel on Software” (a good read!) and subsequently found this quote which fits perfectly with the tone of the book and my personal experience trying to find reusable php code: “php has a very low barrier to entry… consequently, a lot of very bad code is written in it” (paraphrased)
I tried to get Unicode working under OS-X and eventually had help to find out a simple export LANG=en_US.utf8 will solve it for both the built-in and Fink Python, however iTerm doesn’t grok unicode, period. You need to use the built-in Terminal.app. In the process I found this great quote: “…if it’s not, the definition of ‘will work’ changes.”