http://ricardo.strangevistas.net "No. Not even in the face of Armaggedon. Never compromise." Tue, 06 May 2008 02:43:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So Apple finally releases Java SE 6 for the Mac, with its huge speed improvements, and now I can't edit any single input field on either of the Java applications I use (including Moneydance and IntelliJ IDEA) because the fields show up greyed-out and are read-only. No, rebooting did not ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/java-se-6-on-os-x.html I've been experimenting with git for version control of my document folder, before I use it professionally. It has several things I like, particularly the blazing speed and the fact that there's a single .git directory instead of a myriad of .svn all over the place (which made it ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/git-add-before-commit.html I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/clay-shirky-on-cognitive-surplus.html Lately I've been reading Joe Armstrong's Pragmatic Programming in Erlang, learning a couple new tricks. In chapter 8 he proposes a problem: Write a ring benchmark. Create N processes in a ring. Send a message round the ring M times so that a total of N * M messages get sent. ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/pragmatic-programming-in-erlang-chapter-8.html There's a comedy coming out called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, about a guy directing a Hamlet adaptation to the horror genre, written by a vampire. Just in case you thought that the Gary Oldman movie and Shadow of the Vampire weren't meta enough. Here's the trailer. http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-undead.html Speaking of which, I'm keeping a development blog at my company site. I'll continue to publish the Grails plugins and any other code I create over there. Enjoy! http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/development-blog.html Thunderbird kept crashing on me on Leopard, at least three out of four times that I launched it. At first I thought it was Enigmail, because it seemed that the crash was if I attempted to view an encrypted message while it was still loading mail from the servers, but ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/thunderbird-crashes-on-leopard-fixed.html So what have I been up to? Working. A lot. Getting a regular dose of Wii with Vero. And reading. A lot. One of the books I've recently gone through is The Medici Effect, also available as free PDF from the author's site. I'm glad I ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/the-medici-effect.html VMware server has been in beta since November, 2007, and you can try it out for free by going to their site. Don't. It's unstable and has performance problems - I had to manually reboot our machine at least twice a week because the virtual servers became unresponsive. ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/vmware-20-beta-server-performance.html If you're using CentOS hosts on a VMWare server, you should read this. http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/centos-and-vmware-server.html I'm reading Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, one of those hip this-changes-everything books, this time detailing how remix culture and digital technology is forcing the market to either adapt and compete with those it labels as pirates for modifying their intellecutual property, or die attempting to fight a distributed, faceless ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/the-pirates-dilemma.html I've just received my copy of the Leopard upgrade, and while it has significant improvements (the storage format for FileVault is more compact and easier to backup, Time Machine), it's given me significant grief. Here are some tips: Back up everything first. Use an external ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/leopard-upgrade-hardly-painless.html TED Talks are almost always engaging, and Daniel Goldman's 13-minute talk on compassion where he ponders why aren't we emphatic more often, is no exception. http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/daniel-goldman-on-compassion.html I got a divorce almost four years ago. Recently my ex-wife contacted me via IM and mentioned that she was moving to Panamá. A few years ago she had mentioned in passing that she had a spot of trouble getting a civil status certification - I didn't ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/adventures-on-the-costa-rica-civil-service.html I read this page a few weeks ago and I don't agree with a lot of the things the author seems to pine for, like paddling kids, but the examples he uses of the "current alternative" would be amusing if they weren't so appallingly likely to happen. For instance: ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/hope-for-the-future.html I was reading up about Amazon's e-book reader Kindle (how could I not, with it being both a new toy and book related!) and ran on an interesting bit on a review: Kindle gives you access to an experimental and free service called Kindle NowNow, which is ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/age-of-the-focused.html A few days ago I released version 0.1 of my Grails ImageTools plugin, based off some work that I've done on personal projects. It provides functions for: Image loading Image saving Cropping Masking Scaling The ... http://ricardo.strangevistas.net/grails-image-tools-plugin.html