Software Archive
Suboptimal iTunes video downloading
0 Comments Published by Eric August 23rd, 2008 in Customer satisfaction, Mac OS X, The Suboptimal WayI was just watching some of the “Get a Mac” advertisements on the Apple web site yesterday. They’re quite entertaining.
Before I went to bed last night, I told iTunes to download a bunch of the iPhone development videos. After the first one had finished downloading, I watched it while others continued downloading.
I just [...]
Suboptimal iPhone “Sync” and “Back Up”
0 Comments Published by Eric August 16th, 2008 in Gadgets, Mac OS X, The Suboptimal WayOver the past week I purchased several iPhone applications through the App Store, including Super Monkey Ball, a Rotary Dialer, and a few others. I also downloaded some free applications.
Today I connected the iPhone to the Mac Mini for the first time. I had to update iTunes, but that was relatively painless, other than dealing [...]
I’m just starting to learn about printing in GTK+. The documentation provides a good API reference, but is a bit intimidating, and I didn’t find much in the way of sample code. There’s a sample called “printedit” in libegg, but it is somewhat out of date. I updated it for renamed functions [...]
I’m still making progress towards a new release on Nonpareil. Sometimes it seems like the more work I do, the more I find that needs to be done.
The suboptimal way to expand a filesystem online
0 Comments Published by Eric April 12th, 2008 in Linux, The Suboptimal WayI used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]
Suboptimal new computer experience — privacy vs. Mac OS X
1 Comment Published by Eric April 10th, 2008 in Mac OS X, Nonpareil, Privacy, The Suboptimal WayI just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]
Turing Machine in Bare Bones
0 Comments Published by Eric March 3rd, 2008 in Bare Bones, Computer ScienceThe most recent release of my Bare Bones interpreter made identifiers case-insensitive, and added an optional peephole optimizer that recognizes a common idiom:
while N not 0 do;
decr N;
incr X;
end;
Such a loop adds N to X, clearing N in the process. Without the optimizer, this is has time complexity [...]
Bare Bones interpreter
0 Comments Published by Eric February 11th, 2008 in Bare Bones, Computer ScienceOver the weekend I finished the homework assignment for the “Theory of Computation” chapter of Computer Science: An Overview, Ninth Edition, by J. Glenn Brookshear. Brookshear defines a very minimal programming language called Bare Bones, in which variables may contain arbitrarily large non-negative integers. The only operations available are:
clear var; — set a [...]
I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission, Dave.
0 Comments Published by Eric January 20th, 2008 in Blog/website/news comments, SoftwareUniversity of East Anglia researchers have received a grant of half a million dollars to develop lip reading software. [h/t Slashdot Science]
New software development methodologies
0 Comments Published by Eric August 24th, 2007 in Blog/website/news comments, SoftwareScott Berkun points out that the software industry invents an amazing number of new development methodologies, and proposes a few new ones. Actually he’s just documenting existing practices. More are listed in the comments.
