The sometimes updated blog of Brendon.
There’s buzz these days on sleep cycles and waking techniques that are increasingly useful to the growing number of sleep deprived/zombified Americans. Let me throw my experience on the subject of sleep into the ring. I’ve become very, very good at falling asleep in the past six months. What is my secret, you ask?
I’ve successfully connected to Google’s new instant messaging service, powered by jabber. Rumor has it they are unveiling the service tomorrow. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, server to server jabber communications are not yet enabled. If s2s gets turned on, jabber will get the shot in the arm it needs.
If you have a gmail account and jabber client, check out this slashdot story.
Just wanted to rant a second about a pet peeve of mine. Web app designers, listen up. OK, that’s melodramatic, barely any read here, but I just want to vent.
Do not ever use an email address in place of a username for system login. Yes, email addresses are easy to remember. Yes, many people only have a small amount, or one only. Yes, they are unique. But let’s face it, spam is a problem. Many people use one-to-one email systems like sneakemail or spamgourmet to prevent leakage of their real address to spammers. I rely heavily on the free sneakemail service, and therefor have addresses like 123dkjds at sneakemail.com with all my accounts. This poses a problem when I try to log into a site that uses my email address as my username. I can easily remember my username, or a variation of it. However, I cannot remember 123dkjds at sneakemail.com. As a result, I either have to check the login every time, or store all my logins in my browser form management tools. Am I OK with my browser remembering my login to some random comments forum? Yes. Do I want my Amazon login stored? No way.
One possible way out is to edit my keychain entries to hold my web form logins to sensitive sites, but manually edit the password field to hold a bogus password such as the number 1. Forms that use a typical password entry without javascript simply replace each password character with an ‘*’, so the single character would be easy to identify. It’s annoying because then Safari will also prompt me to resave the login info, to which I’ll always have to click “Not now”. I suppose that’s a minor annoyance.
I’m at Diedrich’s Coffee right now using their free wireless. It would appear that all the shops in Tustin, Irvine, Mission Viejo, and Lake Forest currently offer free wireless.
Danny is pondering what path to take on buying a new computer.
I’m not sure how an older dual G4 will compare to a single G4 1.42, but a Mac Mini might be a better investment for a Mac switcher. The higher end Mini is $599 new, plus you’d need to add 1GB of memory. Sometimes stores that have a demos will have them loaded with extra memory, so check the “About this computer” option out under the Apple menu at the top left of the screen. Take the opportunity to mess with the iLife applications in a store and see if the system is fast enough to your liking. If the memory is the ridiculous default 256, make sure you don’t open tons of applications for the test. This is the biggest problem with the stock configuration, 256MB is simply not enough. Other downsides include the fairly weak video performance, and a slower bus. However, the box is possibly the most silent desktop you will ever own. Unless you are really pushing the processor with audio or video editing applications, you barely know it’s on.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…
After enjoying OSX on a Mac Mini, but realizing it was too slow to work as my main workstation, I upgraded to a 20″ iMac. I looked at dual processor towers, but felt I couldn’t justify the processing power for the price right now. I’m not going to be doing anything rigorous on it right now. I’m just planning to use it for run of the mill internet and photo work. It’s remarkably faster than the Mini, which is not surprising. It’s a G5 vs. G4 processor, plus the bus is at 600mhz rather than 147 or so. I also bumped the memory up an additional 1GB, so it’s not starving at 256MB.
The short of it is, I love it. It’s like having the media functionality I had with windows (actually, it’s better) plus the command line an unix goodness I’m used to on my linux boxes.
