Al Hoang

Cocktail is a neat application that provides a nice GUI to many of the features most CLI-afraid users want to do but don’t want to use the Terminal for.

Stumbled across this link from Cincom SmallTalk’s blog. Needless to say as a rather ignorant American on geographical borders I ended up making about 30+ mistakes placing the countries in the right place. But at least I learned a bit from trying to match up the countries to the right spot.
I think my saddest moment is completely botching up which continent Libya is on. But I won’t make that mistake again.

I found the following blog post interesting. Here’s a story of someone overengineering their project then finding the thing creaked along and spending lots of time learning how to optimize and cut away unnecessary things that were built. I’m sure there are many other anecdotes of people building gigantic amounts of infrastruture for something that really doesn’t need it. How did that saying go? Using a sledgehammer to swat a fly?
Personally, I like building small things first and observing them before I start committing myself to gigantic projects.

I just tried downloading and installing the SVG Viewer that is supported under OS X in the hopes that Safari might support it but no go. *sigh* C’mon Adobe update the viewer so it runs on other browsers for the Mac already.
I wasted more time fiddling with SVG to work than actually viewing the content I wanted to see. What a waste of time. I ended up viewing the JPEG version since it was:

• 1/3 the space of the SVG File
• Works under Safari
• Who cares if I’m using a rasterized format that can’t scale to incredibly silly dimensions, I just want to look at the image already!!!

It seems that from the end user standpoint there is only one way to work with anything that comes out of the W3C. Wait at least 3-4 years before things actually start working rather than hearing tons of excuses on why it isn’t widely supported. I can think of another example where I watched from the sidelines for years and now it’s finally actually in widespread use.

The New York Times has an interesting artcle on Solar
Panel Usage in Japan.
Seems the Japanese government has put in the right conditions to
get consumers more warmed up to installing them in their homes.
Wish the U.S. would get its act together on this issue but I don’t
see that happening anytime soon. I’m pretty sure the standard answer
is ‘Let the Market Decide’