Author: hsoi

A “T”, a “T”, my kingdom for a keyboard wiht a working “”.

/ hsoi

You don’t realize how often you type the letter “T” until the key stops working.

The “T” key on my laptop is acting strange. There is a noticeable delay between when you press the key and when the “t” actually is processed. I can type over 100 wpm, so this is really irritating. To type this, I have to either slow down or press the delete key a lot because the “T” came through at the wrong time. It even sometimes comes through multiple times.

Now, allow me to retype the above at normal speed with no corrections.

The “T” key on my laptop is acting srange. there is a noticeable delay between when you press he key and when hte “t” actually is processed. I can type over 100 wpm, so this is really irritating. o ypte his, I have to eiher slow down or press he delee key a lo because he “” came hrough a he wrong imte. I teven someimes comes hrough muliple imes.

*sigh*

Going o disassemble he machine and see if i migh jus be a diryt contact or some such. If not, a leas i’s sill under AppleCare (tho only a few more monhts lef in i).

Updaetd: the disassembly guides at iFixIt were helpful, but it didn’ tpan out. Did all he usual hings oo, like PRAM zapping and so on. Blew air under he keys, nohting. Se tup a call wiht AppleCare, went htrough a few phone htings, and now I have a Genius Bar appoinmen se tup. We shall see wha comes of i.

Amazing ho how you can sill read and undersatnd all of htis… a leas, so I hope. 😉

Updated 2: Took the computer to the Genius Bar at the local  Apple Store. Confirmed keyboard problem. They don’t have one in stock so it has to be ordered and they’ll call me when it comes in. Meantime, I have an external keyboard hooked up and will get by with that for now.

Well Duh!1!!

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Come on Linoge… you should know better.

The Obama administration on Friday said the government ran a $1.42 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2009.

That made it the worst year on record since World War II, according to data from the Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

But of course, this is all Bush’s fault.

As a result, the country is very near to breaching its so-called debt ceiling, currently set at $12.1 trillion. Lawmakers, however, are expected to vote to raise that ceiling this fall.

Yeah, that’s the way we do things in America. We can’t meet the goals, we can’t work within the limits, so we just redefine them.

*sigh*

Working on a smaller machine

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

As a software developer I appreciate having good hardware. In fact, I appreciate having lots of good hardware as that best facilitates getting work done in a day.

Over my career I have evolved what I prefer to have for optimal work. I like to have a laptop on which I do “communication” work. So the laptop does email, web browsing, instant messaging, and whatever other administrata or time wasting I wish to do. Having it on a laptop is good because often such tasks require portability. I do set up the machine to also do development work, but it is not meant to be a primary dev machine.

I then like to have a very beefy machine for dev work. For instance, these days something like an 8-core Mac Pro with 10 GB of RAM and multiple internal hard drives works very nice. I also like to have multiple monitors attached to the machine because lots of screen real estate is good. Furthermore, it works better to have multiple monitors instead of one big monitor because there is often different logic that can be done based upon “screen 1” or “screen 2”, especially when doing things like debugging and needing to cope with the menubar and screen redraws.

Finally, I like having extra machines for whatever needs. These are often sandbox machines of various configurations that I can nuke and pave and do what I need to to help test, reproduce bugs, and so on.

So as you can see, I’ve found surrounding myself with a lot of machines is a daily necessity for getting my job done.

What happens when I’m forced to use a little machine for everything?

I’ve been temporarily reassigned to another group in the company that needs some help with their projects. Due to the nature of the products and the fact I like to keep very clean machines (sorry Unsanity; no Input Manager hacks here), plus given the nature of the work may require working in other locations, I requested they provide me with a laptop for dedicated use for this work.

I received one. A recent MacBook Pro.

15″.

Man, that’s small. Well, to me at least. 🙂

Compounding that is Apple changed some things in Snow Leopard to make stuff bigger. For instance, the default font in Xcode is Menlo Regular 11, instead of old Monaco 9 or 10.  I played with it some trying to pick other fonts or make things smaller, but I have to say, after I got over the initial shock my eyes do like the Menlo 11 better. But with bigger font means less content on the already smaller scren.

Then when I need to run Xcode for dev work, TextWrangler for notes and other things, Firefox to get into the bug database, and a few other apps… gah. Too many windows on that little screen. Sure I love Exposé and use it all the time, but it’s still a lot for that little screen.

So I started to use Spaces.

I toyed with Spaces before, but I just haven’t had a compelling need for it. I think it’s neat. I’m glad Mac OS X has it. But I haven’t been able to successfully put it into my workflow…. until today.

Turned it on, 4 spaces. Xcode on the main, TextWrangler “below”, Firefox “to the right” and since I prefer to use the keyboard I know the shortcuts to navigate around. Man… everything worked pretty slick. A few things were annoying, such as being on the non-Xcode space and then Xcode’s build window popping open on that space; it makes sense in a way, but it’s not what I want… I want to keep that app’s windows on that space. I wonder if there’s a way to force that.

I don’t know if I’d need to use Spaces on my big dev machine with the 2 monitors and lots of screen space. But on the little machine yeah, what a help it was.

Ruger 10/22 mods

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Courtesy of Suburban, a collection of Ruger 10/22 mods.

I like my Ruger 10/22, and my kids do too. It’s a great little rifle and I’d love to actually have a few of them to outfit in different ways. I’ve been wanting to do some mods, especially the bolt release mod. Seeing this list gives me some ideas for other things… like the extractor tuning would probably become #2 on my list.

This blog posting is more for myself, so I can find these mods easily later. 🙂

Snow Leopard mini-gripes

/ hsoi

OK…. I did finally upgrade to Snow Leopard and mostly I’m happy with things. But, some small gripes so far.

My biggest gripe? The loss of the ability to control how desktop pictures are handled. That is, it’s now “just a picture”. There’s no more ability to tile. Long ago I collected a bunch of small tilable images (a distribution called Propaganda) and I love using those as my desktop pictures but they do require being able to tile. I can’t do that any more. *sigh*

I do not like how Activity Monitor always launches with its window visible. It did not do this in prior OS versions. I like to have the Activity Monitor always running and showing the CPU history in the Dock icon, so the app is set to launch upon login. To have it always launch and the window display is not sound. I reported this as a bug to Apple (RADAR 7158817) but they came back and said this is not a bug but is consistent with the interface guidelines (I’m curious just which guideline this is). To cope with the window? Apple says to set the app to be hidden upon launch. Of course, that then makes the Dock tile dimmed, which isn’t ideal either.

I do like that finally, after all these years, you can show the date in the menubar next to the clock. Finally.

I need to get my contextual menu plugins updated to function in Snow Leopard. Apple changed the architecture so they have to be fully rewritten. I don’t blame them for changing things, just until I get the time to rewrite them I will miss them.

Finally Upgraded to Snow Leopard

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

Finally was able to upgrade all of my Macs to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6).

You see, as a software developer I can’t always jump on the latest bandwagon. Sure I might have new OS versions running on partitions of other machines, maybe even pre-release versions. But I can’t primarily change things around because we might be in the middle of something. If I’m working on a release, to change things like the OS or the toolset could bring about big delays or other troubles. The rule is to settle on the toolset and environment, make the release, then you can upgrade stuff. And so finally I can upgrade, tho I have been using Snow Leopard in various capacities for some time.

I am enjoying the little refinements in the OS. I’m glad Apple took the approach they did with this OS and working on refining what they already have instead of having to cram a gazillion new features in. Make what you have really good.

One thing I got the most kick out of was seeing a lot of disk space reappear. My MacBook Pro was down to only a couple GB free and I was starting to look at buying a bigger replacement hard drive. After installing Snow Leopard, I regained almost 20 GB of disk space. Of course, I know exactly why this change came about, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful. 🙂

Cheap blog fodder – Gun miscellanea

/ hsoi

It’s always fun to respond to stats.

shotgun choke home defense

Some would say you want as open as possible to scatter and increase chances of hitting and damage done. Others would say you want a tight choke to manage spread over distance and ensure all pellets hit the intended target (and some don’t stray to hit unintended targets). Me? I’ll take a tighter choke because my home defense situation could go up to 25 yards so I need to mind the spread. I don’t want any pellet to not hit the intended target. And I’d like to increase my chances of the shot going where I want it to go, not being spread about in non-vital areas.

Some articles on choke and spread: here and here.

Bottom line however is it’s not as simple as the choke. It’s the shotgun itself, it’s the choke, it’s the ammo, it’s the skill of the shooter, it’s the conditions it may need to be shot under. There are a lot of factors. You should figure them out and know them. Take the shotgun to the range, take different ammo, take all the chokes, try it at different distances and see how it all performs. There’s no simple formula, you have to do the work.

is a ruger sr-22 an assault

I assume “rifle” or “weapon” was lopped off the search string. Is it? Depends who you ask. Ask Paul Helmke, yes it is. Ask me? Nope.

iron sights vs optic for home defence

Whichever works best for you, your abilities, your conditions of operation. The key is to be able to hit your target and have a reliable system. If your optics run on batteries, are you sure they are fresh and working so when the fur suddenly flies the optics will be functional? This is one reason I’d prefer an Aimpoint, because they have incredible battery life. Turn it on, leave it on always, change the batteries once a year.

what is the best automatic rifle

The one I use, of course.

For those that don’t know the joke, ask someone what the best of anything is, and the answer will be whatever I use/choose. It’s a bit of a biased or loaded question, because I’m not going to use or do anything that is the worst, right? So naturally all my choices are the best. Or maybe this isn’t that widespread of a joke… I know it’s one in the martial arts world: what’s the best martial art? Why the one I study, of course!

150 or 168 best in m1a rifle

Hey, I just updated that posting.

is hornaday a good ammo

No, but Hornady is.

9mm handguns for women

They all come in pink and have lacy frills.

Folks there’s no such thing as a gun for a gender. There are things as guns based upon the size of a person’s hands, the strength of a person, and so on… but these things are gender independent.

is snubnose enough

For what?

what does the acronyms, acp,+p,fps means

ACP – Automatic Colt Pistol

FPS – feet per second

+P isn’t an acronym. It means the ammunition was loaded to “above standard pressure” levels, typically 10% higher but maybe, maybe not. Here’s an article.

KR Training October 2009 Newsletter

/ hsoi

The KR Training October 2009 newsletter is now posted.

One gem was a link to this video of an encounter between a robber and a private citizen. Prevents the robbery, prevents possible injury to 3 adults and 1 child.

Ammo for an M1A – updated

/ hsoi

My Ammo for an M1A posting is one my more popular blog postings.

Some questions recently arose regarding the use of Hornady TAP in an M1A. The original listing in my post said to avoid TAP, and that directive was (supposedly) coming from Springfield Armory themselves. However, a lot of people were saying TAP shot just fine out of their M1A’s. My take was if SAI said don’t do it, then don’t do it; or if you do do it, the results are your responsibility. Just because it shoots fine doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. For instance, some folks hunt with soft point bullets in their M1A but this will cause lead to shave off and eventually gum up the works… maybe a few rounds through won’t matter, but over time….  But for all of that, it was still odd that you couldn’t shoot TAP because they are such high quality rounds. The lack of explanation didn’t sit well.

Since the list was called into question, I contacted Springfield Armory about it. I showed them the blog posting and received useful response. I have updated my posting with the latest information. Note that TAP is not only usable, but recommended for best accuracy!