Snow Leopard is out.
Macworld has a video showing off some of the nifty features… some hidden, some not so hidden, and all quite welcome.
Month: August 2009
The Bill of Rights – Amendment 6
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Source: The National Archives and Records Administration, “The Charters of Freedom” exhibit.
Front Fiber unfixed
Since I had to fix the fiber optic insert on my front sight, I tried using the green insert.
It didn’t pan out.
It just didn’t show up bright enough. Not enough to “draw my eye” to the front sight. After a few days of dry firing and working with it, it’s just not working to grab my eyes.
So I just changed it back to a red fiber. Much better.
That said, this isn’t me advocating red as better than green. My understanding is it’s truly a personal thing depending on how your eyes work. Some people work better with green, some better with red. So I’m glad I used the opportunity to figure out what worked for me, and it seems my eyes like red.
Equal furor
Lest ye readers think I’m anti-Obama and thus some sort of Republican-lover, read this.
This position is so obviously unhinged from any concept of Republican “principles”. It has become clear for some time that, while a few Republicans have suggested some real reforms, Republicans believe their best strategy is simply to oppose whatever Obama proposes
I agree. Republicans and Democrats these days both suck, just in their own special and different ways. They’re both for more government, they’re both more taxes, they’re both drunkenly irresponsible. Something to the effect of: Democrats want to legislate compassion, and use my money to do it; Republicans want to legislate morality, and use my money to do it. Libertarians want to do neither, and I get to keep my money. I don’t perfectly mesh with the Libertarian party, but it’s about as close as I can get if I must label myself.
Subtle bias
I am at the teacher supply store (yea iPhone!) waiting on Wife to finish shopping for some teaching supplies. While waiting I wander around looking at the teaching aids and workbooks. I happen upon the book section on social studies and government. Oh cool! A workbook on the US Constitution. I flip through it. There is a section on the second amendment. It has a brief discussion of the “controversy” of 2A. Then the question section:
On the lines below, describe one argument for and one argument against gun control.
Why not for or against the right to bear arms? for or against the right to defense? for or against the abridgement of a fundamental right?
Subtle bias?
The weather rock
Do you know what a weather rock is? It’s a fantastic device for telling you what the weather is. Quite accurate too, far better than those weathermen on TV.
Linoge tells of his weather-rock like story.
I have a similar one.
Wife loves to follow weather. She knows all about the science of it, can even decently predict things. She’s kept an accurate count of how many days have been over 100º in Austin this summer. She really digs weather.
But whenever it looks like rain, she must go look at the radar. Either the dedicated radar channel on the cable TV, or pulling up a web browser and looking at a website with a radar feed.
I just look out the window.
So it’s a fun little joke between us… she can’t confirm if it’s raining or not without looking at the radar. I confirm it by going outside and getting wet or not. I might be the technology geek, but sometimes old-school techniques work just fine. 😉
Snow Leopard cometh
Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is due tomorrow, August 28, 2009.
Macworld has a series of articles discussing the new OS version.
As a Mac software developer I have to keep up with such things. Frankly, the Snow Leopard update isn’t all that sexy for end users. You’ll see there’s no massive nor major feature list upgrade, which is a change. Every upgrade of Mac OS X so far has been a big step forward, so this is the first small step. Frankly what that points to is a maturing of the OS, and I think that’s welcome. We don’t have to be chasing the latest thing all the time and plunking down a lot of money to do so. Well, at least end-users don’t have to be… what Snow Leopard really brings about are a lot of under-the-hood changes that affect us developers far more.
Still, I have people asking me if they should upgrade. That’s up to you. Some people like to have the latest stuff, so if you like being on the cutting edge, then by all means be there at midnight when it goes on sale. One big feature for end-users is built-in support for Microsoft Exchange. If you have to work in an Exchange-based environment, you may find this quite welcome.
I must admit that I’m still a bit of a hold-out from converting fully to Apple’s own software. I still use Microsoft Entourage for my email because frankly it’s been the best Mac email client for a number of years. I have moved my calendaring to iCal (tho ToDo’s remain in Entourage because iCal’s doesn’t cut it), and with the purchase of the iPhone I have to use the Mac’s Address Book a lot more (thankfully Entourage can sync between its address book and Address Book.app). But with the massive amount of email, folder organization, rules, automation, and other such things it’s just tough for me to make the transition… probably take me a day or two just to try to get it all set up, and when I’ve attempted it in the past I discover Mail.app just isn’t quite there. But now with the Exchange support built-in, there may be more feature parity and it may work out. So I’ll probably reevaluate it at some point. The reality is, you do get further on the Mac working with Apple’s technologies because things like Address Book, iCal, Mail, etc. are all well-integrated into the system. They mesh with your iPhone better. Plus since developers can have access to such things (e.g. the Address Book API’s) the greater user experience can be enhanced if you’re taking advantage of what Apple provides. While some people don’t like this “monopoly-style” approach to things, it’s actually what makes the Mac such a great end-to-end experience. Instead of lots of disparate parts that don’t really hook together well causing the end-user a lot of frustration in accomplishing simple tasks, you’ve got parts that integrate well together from the hardware level through the OS lower layers to the higher layers to the end applications, and with everything hooking together, things can “just work.” User experience is so important and that’s what really differentiates Mac from other platforms.
So we’ll see. For me the key is being able to get my work done in a day with minimal-to-no hassle. So far so good, so it’s tough to want to change unless I can see improvement in that area.
But being a developer, I have been using Snow Leopard for a while and find that it’s just another upgrade. Being a “minor” upgrade for users, the impacts to me as a developer mean that I’ll still be supporting Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” for some time. Believe it or not, users are still using Tiger a fair amount. I can’t say why, but one possible reason is Tiger is the last version of the OS to include “Classic” support. If people are still relying upon Mac software from years gone by that was never rebuilt to be Mac OS X native, they would want to stick with Tiger. Trouble is, it’s going to be harder and harder to maintain that. Snow Leopard itself is Intel-only: PowerPC-based Macs are officially heading off into the sunset. Still, there’s not a whole lot at least in the work I do that would force one of my products to be Snow Leopard-only, and while I’m certainly working on a few Leopard-only things, so long as Tiger users exist and continue to buy software while holding out on that 4+ year old OS well… we’ll keep supporting Tiger users. Of course one potentially limiting factor will be Apple’s developer tools. Snow Leopard’s version of Xcode 3.2 does not install things for targeting 10.4… you have to do a custom install to get them (seems to be SDK 10.4 and gcc 4.0.x); so the writing is on the wall even from Apple: move forward.
Frankly, that makes sense for Apple. You see, at the heart of it all Apple is a hardware company. To make things like Mac OS X, iWork, and other bits of software, that’s really only done to make the hardware functional and useful. Macs, iPods, iPhones — it’s all hardware. The family iMac is a PowerPC G5-based iMac. It’s long in the tooth, no doubt. I’ve been wanting to replace it with a new Intel-based iMac for some time, but I have a rule with hardware purchases. You see, everyone always wants the best and wants to minimize obsolescence. There will always be something bigger, better, faster, cheaper somewhere on down the line, so there’s really nothing you can do about it. So you use what you’ve got as long as you can, push it until you truly cannot wait any more… not just desire wait, but some larger need. Then buy the best you can afford. So now that PowerPC is officially dead to Apple, eventually the family iMac just won’t be able to cut it any more. It should last a bit longer, but push is coming to shove and a new purchase is in the wings. Works well for Apple’s bottom-line, doesn’t it? 🙂
The Bill of Rights – Amendment 5
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Source: The National Archives and Records Administration, “The Charters of Freedom” exhibit.
Some thoughts on socialization
Heather, the Swiss Army Wife, points out an interesting article in Psychology Today magazine.
Here’s a direct link to the article.
The article is about how, at least here in the United States, we’ve built a cultural and social structure that created this thing known as the teenager. A state where they have a lot of freedoms and abilities, but yet they don’t. Where mentally and physically they are capable of many things, yet we’ve put massive restrictions and burdens upon them. As a result, we’ve created a lot of the “teenager vs. parent” conflicts and generalized teenager angst. It’s an interesting read.
One reason Wife and I choose to homeschool is because of the breadth of people our children are exposed to. Our kids are not locked in school rooms with 25-35 other kids about their same age and development level, day in and day out for the majority of their young lives. In fact, much of the time you go through each grade in school surrounded by the same people. Then many of them are involved in after-school activities, and often those involve the exact same people the kids see during the day with perhaps some specific variance but still generally divided by age/grade. So it’s really just this small slice of folks that the kid interacts with, all around the same age and development. It’s the blind leading the blind with sometimes far too often the only external guideance coming from less desirable sources like TV, movies, and other bits of popular culture. Granted you can expose children to folks of other ages and development levels, but “with our busy lives these days” that doesn’t often happen.
Homeschooling tends to lend itself to children being exposed to a cross-section of people of all ages. My children attend Daily Mass, which is mostly attended by elderly. When doing things in their 4-H program, they’re working with kids from ages 8 to 18. Even just in daily schooling the 3 kiddos are with each other, all of their different ages and development stages. There’s much to be learned from this, especially exposing kids to older folks (role models) and allowing your kids to sometimes be the older folks (role models). From the article:
Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what’s going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out.
This isn’t to say that homeschooling is the only way to get kids exposed to the right people, but it does show what homeschooling can offer, especially when the biggest concern folks have about homeschooling is “socialization”. Regardless of how your children are socialized on a daily basis (homeschooling, private school, public school, etc.), don’t worry so much if they are being socialized; if the children interact with other humans on a regular basis, they’re being socialized… even us homeschoolers let our children out of the dungeon once in a while. 🙂 Instead, concern yourself more with the quality of the socialization they are getting.
MHI – in progress
The gun blogger world is all aflutter about Monster Hunter International.
I didn’t get it (it being everyone getting so gah-gah about the release).
I guess I still don’t get it, but I guess if you know who Larry Correia is (and before this I admit I didn’t), then I guess that’s part of the fun. Plus, books like this just aren’t my thing. I’m a geek… I tend to prefer non-fiction. Subjects like in MHI aren’t totally out of the realm of things I’d enjoy, but I just really had no compelling reason to read the book.
Nevertheless, TXGunGeek loves the book and and lent me a copy.
Now I see James Rummel wrote a review of it, probably one that the gun-blog-fanboys will be all up in arms over, so to speak.
I’m only on chapter 5 or 6 (don’t remember, book is in the bedroom), or whatever chapter after Owen shows up at MHI and asks what happened on December 15, 1995 or however it all goes. I didn’t intend to start reading the book yet because there’s other things in my queue that should come first… but man, Atlas Shrugged continues to be unappealing to me. 😉
So far I’ll say the book feels fun. There’s no question Correia knows his guns and this is quite filled with gun geek stuff. The story seems to flow well enough and the reading is fine, but I’ll have to agree with James that even in the few chapters I’ve read Owen does come off like an amazing uber-hero without much of a flaw (other than maybe not telling his Dad the whole truth). I must admit, when they were reading off Owen’s history and said “black belt in two martial arts” I found myself asking “OK, which ones?”. 🙂 Still, I don’t like to get too tied up into things… suspend disbelief a bit and just enjoy the fun.
I’ll see how things come out whenever I finish the book.
Updated: Tweaked a few things in the above text, and look… Larry Correia responded to James’ review.
I will say. As I read this, I can’t help but think the book would be a lot of fun if it was made into a movie. Sure I like seeing character development, I like seeing more deeply fleshed out and realistic characters (even Superman had problems). But I also know that sometimes just mindless fun is good too. Sometimes movies without much of anything except a loose story for an excuse to provide lots of on-screen action is good stuff. Frankly, MHI (so far of what I’ve read) could really lend to that.
Stuff From Hsoi 