August 2006 Archives

The wonder of film scanners. I have found a whole lot of old pictures on scratched up black and white film and dusty slides and with the scanner they are coming back. I'm considering doing a "picture every other day/week/..." thing. Hmmn..

Here's a picture from New York in the summer of 19925. Since this is my geeky weblog, then let me put it in those terms: Before I did Perl.Several years before I used OS/2. Four yearsA year before my first Linux box. Years before I used MySQL.

Oh, and before 2001 - obviously.

(See also large size, or the Flickr Entry if you want to mark it a favorite).

update: maybe it was 1995 and not 1992...

Brad Choate mentioned Andy Lester's ack tool a few days ago.

It's, as Brad writes, basically a replacement for the "grep" search tool.

One of the big features (that I don't care all that much for) is that the output tries to be more helpful than the usual grep output. My habit is to grep for something and pipe it to "less" and then do more searches with that tool, so ack isn't too helpful there.

However, I do use ack all the time because of another major feature: it automatically ignores files I don't care about (files in .svn directories, binary files etc)! Brilliant. No more long command lines (or extra scripts) to filter those out.

It does it by file extension (for speed) and it could use a few more added (Andy will take patches, I am sure) for .css files for example.

I too, "got a Vox". I haven't entirely figured out how or if I'll use it, but there it is.

Wether I use it or not, having it makes me feel better about crowding this site with boring technical or geeky content. :-)

Whenever I send an invite to Vox, instead of explaining it myself I point people to Nathan's review, so there you go. Bye, dear reader. Come back soon.

I've uploaded about half of the photos from our trip Malaysia (my first!)...

I also found a CD with some old photos from the train station in 1996 and Skiing in France in 1993 (or some year close to that).

I can't figure out if I should post this sort of thing here or on Vox. I'm planning to use Vox as a place for less geeky, more personal things. If I ever write anything more personal than the usual geek-blabber here, that is.

I've had the mixed blessings of working with a few bits of new Apple hardware over the last year. My two bit review of each follows.

Another Mac Mini (G4) (not at home). With upgraded memory it's a great little box. Wish it'd take more than 1GB ram.

I bought a "quad-G5" PowerMac late last year to upgrade the aging dual 1.4GHz G4. When I got the G4, I ended up slightly miffed when the G5 (as expected) came out as the next PowerMac model. Am I miffed to get the last of the G5s? No, not at all. It completely rocks. It's super stable. Everything runs nice and fast. With effectively 4 processors there's always some spare CPU. I started out with 2GB ram, but recently upgraded to 6GB. The money for the extra memory was so worth it. The only thing I'm missing that they added to the new Mac Pro is room for 4 drives internally. Although with the simple raid system in OS X, I'm not sure how useful more disks would be anyway. :-/ The Airport/bluetooth card wasn't out yet when I bought the G5, so I got it later as a "service part". Despite what I had read it was quite easy to install.

The release of the MacBook Pro nicely coincided with my 1st generation 12" Alu Powerbook badly needing replacement, so like I got the last from a generation of PowerMacs once again, I also got the first of a generation of PowerBooks again.

Well, let's just say that next time I'll try to wait a little longer before ordering. When it works, it's great. But between ethernet problems on vlan networks (now fixed), flaky Airport, flaky battery (they recalled them, so that should be fixed) and the idiotic bendable warping aluminum, etc etc I'd rather have had a regular MacBook (and saved $1000!). Why is the power supply so big? And why did the first two I got break so quickly? The little pins on the plug got pushed in so it wouldn't charge anymore). Oh, and it gets really really hot.

Vani got one of the MacBooks (non-"Pro"). I love the magnetic hinges. The keyboard is great now (on the iBooks it was always a bit sub-standard) and the size is just about right. For everything I do, it has the same performance as the Pro version. Maybe some day I'll find a use for that ExpressCard/34 slot, but it doesn't seem likely...

Mac Mini (intel)! We got one of these to bring to Malaysia for one of Vani's uncles and the cousin there. What a nice little computer. It feels a good deal faster than the G4 version. The extra USB port is a nice touch and it can take 2GB ram now (not that we had time to get memory for it). In most cases, I can't imagine getting anything else for a desktop system.

In completely unrelated news, I am back on page 1 on Google when you search for "ask". About 5 years ago I had a while as number 3, just after Ask Jeeves. I always secretly hoped they'd call themselves Jeeves instead of Ask, but of course I'd have a better chance at winning the lottery.