Author: Pat Skinner

I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.

Categories
Technical

Format C:\ Now?

Now that the inevitable Windows reformat was, shall we say, hastened, I find myself perusing Firefox’s extensions list all over again. Fortunately, it’s much easier having already tried many of them. This guide I keep mentioning will be up before the end of the week. In the meantime, browser junkies should check this out.

So anyway.

Format C:/

Hard drives, being a myriad of high precision bits of electronics working perfectly together, are inevitably prone to failure. I find the prevalence of finger pointing from victims of such failure at least a little humorous, because so many extrapolate their individual anecdotal experience into a justification to condemn an entire company’s line up.

Everyone has a particularly bad horror story, so I’m going to be all high road-like and avoid the blame game. These two Western Digital drives I’ve got have both been running nearly 24/7 since October 2003. Props to them for making drives that last as long as they did.

Here’s to hoping Western Digital RMAs the kaputtness.

A few days ago Windows kept randomly erroring, claiming I should format C:\. “That’s pretty cool!” I said to myself. “I heart hard drives!” A restart only revealed massive filesystem errors, and Western Digital’s own diagnostic software simply threw up its virtual hands, claiming the drive was too broken to even read from. The SMART threshold for read errors was pretty extreme.

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By the way, when did you notice that this post was written sdrawkcab?

Categories
General

New Precedent

I wrote about Google Maps a while ago, but this guy got creative. Any other gems that slipped through the “gray area” net? I’m sure at least a few people in the government are less than amused that Joe Googler can look at everything in the country with a click (at pretty decent resolution too).
Fun experiments include finding:

  • The most boring and repetitive suburb?
  • Who owns the biggest mansion in America? A celebrity? Bill Gates? Al Gore?

Other ideas?

Firefox just broke the 50,000,000 downloads mark. It’s definitely no longer relegated to underdog status. I’m glad its catching on so well. My guide to cool extensions is almost done, because it seriously makes an already great browser get even better.

Categories
Design Interface Technical Visit This Site

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In another excellent entry to his collection of Mac OS X commentary, John Siracusa today posted a review of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. The most interesting part of the article was the description of the UI subsystem, Quartz.

I really appreciate a lot of things about Mac OS X. Well thought out enhancements to usability (Expose, working drag and drop, a hierarchical menu bar) have been among my favorites. However, Quartz has been a most egregious of offenders, so much so as to keep me from even using my old PowerBook for nearly a year. As someone who uses a computer every day, interface responsiveness is about as critical as it gets. OS X, unfortunately, has the slowest (most resource hungry) GUI of any operating system I’ve ever used. Even OS 9 was faster. Just try resizing a window and watch your CPU peg at 100%.

Siracusa nicely details (with pretty flowcharts) why OS X has suffered from what I’ll dub a molasses complex since Aqua was at Day 1. Regardless of how fast the actual hardware inside is, just using any G4 Mac felt slow [IMO]. The bandwidth of the data paths between hardware required to render things to screen (CPU, RAM, GPU) was being eaten faster than a fat kid at a candy store.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better. I have yet to use Tiger on the requisite hardware, but if the block diagrams Siracusa shows correspond to real-world UI speed gains, I’ll happily be back in the Apple camp once more.

That is, if Apple would nicely explain to me why my <1 year old iBook G4 can’t even support this and most of the other whiz-bang features Tiger brings to the table.

Categories
RIT Visit This Site

And Now, the Ollie Williams Discipline Forecast

Oh mah Bezebel have I been working. I finished my major project and worked on lots of school work in the past week or so…it’s that time of year again when Burnout Factor™ is nigh, and summer is blindingly close…

So of things interesting to read, documents written about you or your major but for hiring managers are high on the A list. A list of such documents from RIT can be found here if you’re so inclined. See how cool your major is compared to the rest of em.

He gonn’ get it!
Glad they’ve still got it..

Categories
Technical Web Design

OSX on a website. No, really.

JavaScript has certainly come a long way.

In between the innumerable midterms I’ve had in the past two weeks I’ve been learning a bunch of web technologies, including PHP, MySQL, and CSS. A cool trend I’ve noticed has been the consistencies between all of these languages and things I have already learned. PHP has classes and functions, just like Java/C++, and CSS has a very straightforward, logical structure. Programming is definitely a difficult skill in general, but things like this help.

Since my first major project idea is unacceptable to CSH, my second idea is happaning instead. Simply stated, it’s going to be a Major Project database where people can log in and edit the projects they own or view a list of upcoming projects. I hope its up to par in time…its already taken forever and a day so far just to learn the skills necessary.