Technology – Page 25

I have seen the future, and it runs OSX

It’s a phone. It’s a PDA. It’s an iPod. It’s a widescreen video iPod. It has zero physical buttons, rather the whole front is a multi-touch-screen. I’ll leave the rest of the raving to the many other sites doing a great job of that.

The real innovation of this new device is the OS. Apple has an answer to PalmOS and Windows Mobile (CE): run their real desktop/server OSX, with Unix inside, on the phone. Today’s handhelds have much more computing power and storage than desktop PCs of a decade ago, and there are enormous benefits to running a real, common OS on such a device. I’d been saying since I bought my first Palm (a Handspring, actually) than within a decade the handheld OS’s would go away.

Apple has gone first. How soon will Microsoft follow? Will Palm and RIM make to the new era at all?

(Update: Yes, the title of this post is slightly in jest. I’m serious about real OSs in handheld devices, and the iPhone looks fantastic, but Apple is very unlikely to dominate the phone market in the way the iPod dominates the tiny-media-player market.)

Math Drill – for your 1st..4th grader

Here is a simple piece of software I wrote to help my children practice basic arithmetic facts. Of course there are no doubt already a thousand or more similar programs out there; but in a few minutes of searching I didn’t find one that did quite what I wanted. I ended up tinkering with this for several hours, and even wrote documentation and made an installer. Free download and screenshot below.

MathDrillSetup.exe (free)

Math Drill screen shot

I’ve also published the source code over on Github: http://github.com/kylecordes/mathdrill/tree/master

This software is written in Delphi, and though there is some chance that I am the only developer anywhere using both Delphi and git, hopefully this will be wrong, and someone will fork and offer their improvements.

$200 -> Rubinius

I’ve been using Ruby sporadically for some time, including in a bit of production code (in which it is running well), but the apparent lack of progress toward a more modern VM for Ruby makes it harder to get more deeply involved. On the one hand, today’s Ruby interpreter/runtime is sufficiently good to build very successful services on (37Signal’s Rails-based services, for exampel); but in my own testing for the kinds of higher volume data handling I often need to do, it’s among the slowest I’d used. That matters little for populating a web page, but matters a lot for things like OLAP ETL.

So today I joined Geoffrey Grosenbach in supporting Evan Phoenix’s rubinius project, by sending $200 to help sponsor the work. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I believe in “putting your money where your mouth is”.

This isn’t the first time I mentioned Geoff; earlier this year I took him to task for his choice of music for the Ruby on Rails podcast, which has changed since then to something more suitable.

Published in 1987

Rummaging through old books (giving many away, selling others, discarding others) in an attempt to lighten the load I carry through life, I came across a rather weak book from 1987:

… in which I appeared in print for the first time. One short (1.5 page) chapter therein is from a submission I wrote for a contest for Compute! magazine at the age of 13. I didn’t make it in to the magazine, but was included it in this compendium, for which I earned total royalties of around $1. Some editing error (on their end) caused a few lines of text to be dropped from the middle. Click on the book above, to enjoy my 1.5 pages of fame.

Java Scripting Talk – Code, Notes, and Audio

Last night (9 Nov 2006) at the St. Louis Java User Group, I gave a talk on “Scripting Your Java Application”. As I mentioned, there were no slides, but rather a handout, the text of which is pasted below. You can download the handout (a tight, one page PDF), the code, audio of the talk (WMA), and audio of the talk (MP3, larger). The audio was recorded with my Olympus WS100 Digital Voice Recorder, so the quality is bearable but not great.

Update: As an experiment, I also had CastingWords prepare a transcript of the talk. It’s somewhat tedious to read (I didn’t edit it at all), but it is available as Google fodder rather than trapped only in audio.
Continue reading “Java Scripting Talk – Code, Notes, and Audio”

Overwhelming blog spam, and Thunderbird vs. POPFile

Kylecordes.com has become popular with blog comment spammers recently; though because I have moderation on, so far only I have seen the spam (in the WordPress admin interface), it hasn’t reached the public site.

In the last week, the quantity has grown enormously, to the extent no longer practical to moderate manually. I’ve installed Akismet, and am eager to see how well it works.

On a related (spam) note, I’ve been very disappointed with the spam filter built in to Thunderbird; it’s real-world performance for me has been awful compared to POPFile. With the latter, I get vanishingly few false positives, and only a small handful of spam messages reach my inbox each day, out of many hundreds that arrive. WIth Thunderbird, even after many, many clicks of training (dutifully identifying both Spam and Not-Spam), it still misclassifies far more often.

Update a few weeks later: Akismet works very well – the comment spam problem is, for the moment, completely solved.