Talamathi

As has been noted pretty much every where else, MarsEdit is now being developed by Red Sweater Software . As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I got a license for MarsEdit when I bought NetNewsWire . At the time, it seemed nice but it’s really only useful if you actually have a blog. And of course, here I am, but it does not work nicely with the new version of Blogger just yet. Right now I’m using Bleezer , but if and when MarsEdit adds Blogger support, I’ll definitely be trying it. Technorati: MarsEdit Powered by Bleezer

From ridiculus_fish : There, that’s the noisome little pitch everyone’s been spreading like so much thermal paste. As if multiprocessing is something new! But of course it’s not - heck, I remember Apple shipping dualies more than ten years ago, as the Power Macintosh 9500. Multiprocessing is more accessible (read: cheaper) now, but it’s anything save new. It’s been around long enough that we should have it figured out by now. So what’s my excuse? I admit it - I don’t get multiprocessing, not, you know, really get it, and that’s gone on long enough. It’s time to get to the bottom of it - or if not to the bottom, at least deep enough that my ears start popping. I’m still working my way through today’s post, but whenever this site gets updated you’re always guaranteed a good read. Incidentally, this seems to be one of the few sites done by someone in computer science with a mathematical background, or at least a bent towards math, that I know of (the other basically being Steve Yeggie ’s

From the BBC : Snow has fallen in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, for the first time in more than 60 years.… Housewife Manju Shrestha, 45, playing with her young children, said: “I have never seen it snow in Kathmandu in all my life.” Technorati: nepal Powered by Bleezer

This past weekend I had to finish up a lab implementing shadow maps and shadow volumes. I ended up finding a couple of useful resources for these, and thought they might be useful to someone. Shadow volumes : “ Tutorial - Stenciled Shadow Volumes in OpenGL ”. Shadow maps : “ Paul's Projects - Shadow Mapping Tutorial ”. Oh, and of course I should mention lib3ds for reading in 3ds files. Anyhow, check it out: Technorati: OpenGL shadow+volumes shadow+maps Powered by Bleezer

I have a friend who recently made the switch to a Mac, and so a few weeks ago I compiled this list of useful Mac apps that I use and thought he might. The list wasn’t really specific to him, though, so it seemed reasonable to pass this on to anyone who intends to make the jump. I’m not mentioning Firefox or Skype or other stuff that is pretty crossplatform. One thing that I think is really telling about Mac software is that there are a total of two pieces of Mac software I list that are pay-for versions (NetNewsWire comes in a great full version, and OmniGraffle is pretty limited until you pay for it. Adium : Chat program that uses libgaim to do it's dirty work. Heck of a lot better looking than Gaim , and I don’t mean that as a knock necessarily on Gaim, more how great Adium is. BibDesk : A BibTeX front end. Having tried to write these files manually for my references in TeX papers, this is so much better. Camino : Uses Gecko, but is much more of a Mac app than Firefox is. It

When I last wrote four days ago , I was trying out a blogging client called Bleezer . In retrospect, it ended a little bit more critically than I really intended it to be. I will admit, though, that I have been getting a little frustrated with blogging clients in general. Posting through a web interface is not really my thing, and I can imagine that this is true for a lot of other people. Trying different blogging clients out there has kind of left me wondering how all of my favorite blogs seem to get updated so often. Anyway, after my post Larry Borsato (the person behind Bleezer) left a comment , which was geneal enough to convince me to keep trying. Actually, I probably would have in any case, since this program does have a lot of potential. And yesterday Bleezer was updated to version 0.9.8.2 , which makes it (0.982 - 0.980) ÷ 0.980 ≈ 0.2% better than version 0.9.8 (which I was using). I guess the question is if this makes it usable for me? First off, I’ll start by saying that all

After MarsEdit turned out to be less than optimal with the new Blogger (for now), I am trying to find another tool that might work. I’m new to this whole thing, but Bleezer seems to fit the essential qualities of what I would like: I can actually post titles (unlike MarsEdit, for now). Like MarsEdit, it gives me the ability to see previews of what I’m typing. Unlike MarsEdit, there’s a compose mode where I can try to type a little bit WYSIWYG (From what I can tell, MarsEdit is a strange, although mostly intuitive, mix). I can ping a few sites for notification, i.e. Technorati . Again this is like MarsEdit. I can write things in Unicode, and it escapes everything appropriately. See: तलमाथि. 日本語. It did that for me. Hopefully, tags work. On the other hand, there are some definite downsides. It’s very obviously a Java application, which has the upside for the developer of not needing to compile it multiple times. Unfortunately, this makes it very unMac-like. Seriously, what’s the deal

The Macalope : “And the joke comes full circle” Quite seriously, this is exquisite. (Via Crazy Apple Rumors .)

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition , from Ars Technica: “I usually take some time to ease into these reviews, give some background before really dissecting them, but as you can already tell, Lost Planet has some issues that just confound me. I’ve never played a game that was so promising but ended up shipping with such serious and blatant flaws.” (Mostly posting this for my local affine , who is obsessed with this game despite the fact we have nothing to play it on.)

About ten years ago(!) I worked a summer and a winter for Scarano Boat Building in Albany, NY. I was just out of high school and heading off to college, so it seemed like it would be good experience. Heck, if anything, it’s a lot of fun to be able to claim I used to build boats. Of course, technically I can really only claim to have worked on one boat , the Friendship of Salem , which was to be a replica of a ship originally built 200 years earlier. And actually, I only worked on a small portion of it. Most of my work was in as a spiling planks , which for some random reason I was good at. This turned out to be great, since the other option would have been sanding the parts of the boat that had already been planked. My friend Tony had that job, and it was somewhat less than desirable. Of course, my work involved wearing a paper suit that was airtight, so that we didn't get epoxy on us. In the summer time this was less than desirable. We had to use all of the “Fast West” epoxy

I used to hear a lot of good things about MarsEdit , and since I have a free copy due to having NetNewsWire 1.x, it seemed reasonable to give this a try. That, and I've always liked Markdown . It gives me a standard way to write text files that are easy for others to read. Plus, with a little bit of work, you can modify your favorite Markdown tool and have it output LaTeX. Edit: Unfortunately, it does not seem to pass on the post-Markdown formatting to Blogger. Anyway, never mind this. I got a little annoyed with Blogger’s web interface for posting things. And now, to try some code: #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { int a, b, c; a = 2; b = 3; c = a + b; cout << "a = " << a << ", b = " << b << ", c = " << c << endl; } Should this come out nice, I expect to post a lot more. Of course, that’d require someone to read it.

Dynamic memory has turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. I mean, unless you are doing something truly trivial, such as, say, a beginner C++ homework assignment, you are using it in one form or another. It seems that any language that has come out since Java has settled on using references and garbage collection. The question is, was this the right choice? To see why references and garbage collection are so popular, it helps to see what the standard alternative is. By that, I mean the model employed by C and C++. Note to people who care: I am aware of doing things like overriding new or using a different memory allocator to get garbage collection, or the use of autoptr and smartptr and all of those things. When I say the model used by C and C++, I mean the default one. In C++, there are two main types of variables, automatic and dynamic. An automatic variable is one that is created for you, and destroyed for you. You don't have to worry about it. Consider when you want to

A couple of years ago, a friend gave an office mate of mine a calendar. This is of course not normally an event to write about, but for whatever reason this calendar involved ferrets playing musical instruments. If you check it out on Amazon , you’ll notice it even has a bit of a following. Indeed, Amazon’s still selling a calendar for 2005. So what makes this worth even talking about? Well, it turns out that this calendar really ended up bothering me. I certainly mean no disrespect towards Jeanne Carley and her ferret-loving brethren...but it did. It was quite clear that someone spent a lot of time on it. But it was also clear that someone needed to spend a bit more time on it. Should you ever get a chance, check out the month with the ferret playing the piano in the concert hall. It’s very cute, until you notice the keys being struck are completely unrelated to where the paws are hitting. And then you notice that the meager number of people around are all standing, reading the prog