rudd

I use Google now, but I used to use a custom-made start page. It had:

  * an auto-focus search bar linked to Google
  * a bunch of links to my most-visited sites
  * the current snapshot from one of my university's webcams
    (which will auto-refresh if you hovered your mouse on it)
  * a little area for a note to myself that I could edit with a password

You can see the page at http://mrzwolinski.com/start/ if you're curious.

Of course there are excuses. It's a big hassle to upgrade a computer. There's the time involved, so if you can't spare a block of a few hours to be dedicated to your computer while not being able to use it, then that's a big incentive not to upgrade. Also, there's the worrying that it can cause that if something goes wrong, you're going to either lose all your data or have to load it from a backup if you have one.

For something that offers only some speed improvements and no big new features, I have very little reason to upgrade. I wonder what gity is using that makes it 10.6-only.

I'm currently using the 30-day trial of WriteRoom to write my NaNoWriMo novel. I had been thinking about buying the program, but wasn't sure if it was worth $25. I recently decided it was, so was going to buy it when my free trial was up. Then this comes up...

I like the software enough that I might decide to buy it even though I can get it for free now. I know I'm not going to buy any of the other software from Hog Bay, so that seems like it might be the right thing to do.

I wonder if I was the only one who saw "40 years ago today..." and thought of Sesame Street (thanks to the Google logo of the day).

I don't think that's the main market of GPS navigation. Everyone I know uses them just to help get them to everyday new places. A store you haven't been to before, a weekend trip to another town, etc. No matter how small Switzerland is, I know that no one I know would ever be able to make our way around the entire thing without help.

I actually saw this yesterday when I was trying to download the video for later watching when I was offline. It surprised me a little to see it on a production website, but I was thrilled to see it. It even has that "Quicktime X" look in Leopard, too.

I'm pretty sure it is using some form of browser detection. In Safari I get a <video> element, and in Firefox, I get an <object> with an <embed>.

I haven't personally seen any cases where foreign keys improve performance; their benefit is the fact that relationships between tables are correct. However, I have seen times where foreign keys have seriously degraded the performance of some queries. If you are doing a lot of inserts into a table with many foreign keys, all of those constraints have to be checked on every insert.

Realistic headline: New study attempts to refute old study whose results were interpreted by some to disprove free will; succeeds according to some but not to others

Readers attracted by realistic headline: 0

I like the story about premium Gmail coming soon: $25 for 6 gigabytes of storage. Instead, now I get 7+ gigabytes for free. I love living in the future.

I think this is the first time I've understood some of the path to profitability for the iPhone App Store. It's not about making a great app and keeping it up forever. It's about having a hit, milking it for all it's got, then moving on to another app. Even if your app barely took off at all.

For another example, look at Tapulous. They started off with a bunch of small apps, and one of them, Tap Tap Revolution, took off. They've turned that into quite an app with numerous versions. Note that it's not just updates to the app but a bunch of more limited, artist/genre-focused apps. This kind of stuff is the key.

I wonder how this affects programmers, who ostensibly think of things in a series of steps. When I explain programming to someone who doesn't know what it is, I liken it to instructing someone to do something they don't know how to do, e.g., make a sandwich. You have to tell them to walk to the fridge, gather the ingredients, place them down, work with them one at a time, etc. If programmers spend all day thinking like this, I wonder if that doesn't do something to their world view. I know that I personally find a lot of everyday activities very tedious, but maybe that's because they really are.

You can also specify the app to open using the -a flag and specifying the full name of the app (with correct spacing and capitalization), e.g.:

    open -a 'TextEdit' foobar.txt
    open -a 'TextMate' foobar.txt

Note that you can bring your mac's gamma up to 2.2 right now without upgrading: Open System Preferences, Go to "Displays", then the "Color" tab, then click "Calibrate". This will give you the option of setting your gamma to 2.2.

I'm trying it out myself right now. Seems very different, not sure which gamma I like more.

There's so much interesting stuff here to read that on an HN story voted up over 100 times, there's less than 10 comments. Everyone's too busy reading. Speaking of which, goes to read.

Thank god they changed the name. This is truly a great editor and I've seen it used many times, but I always felt uneasy saying it out loud or even typing it to someone who had never heard of it. It's just awkward. The new name has no (blatant) bad connotations.

The weird thing about this is that to make it bigger you drag the corner, which would be hard to accurately "click" with your finger. Also, if it's to be used widescreen, it takes up almost all of the screen, much more than the iPhone's keyboard (although similar to the widescreen keyboard on the iPhone).

To me, it seems more like they are just doing what they should do and making it resizable like everything else, and putting it in a more findable place.

Huh. GMail is down for me, but GMail's IMAP is still working. I didn't even notice.

The CSV file is wonderful. Now I know (among numerous other things), how many people took the survey before me.

My line in the survey can be defined by surprisingly few fields.

Not exactly a gap. It's just trying to be a domain-specific site. There're plenty of examples of this. For example, you could view HN as a domain-specific digg or reddit, for tech/startups. Even though you can make a subreddit or similar.

Perhaps they felt there was a lot of bad quality for HTML/CSS question and answers on StackOverflow, so they built this. I don't think so, but it's possible that the creators do.

Yes, I'm pretty sure charset support in Postgres is at the database level, not the table level. See here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/multibyte.htm...

It's not particularly bad advice. Perhaps for someone who hasn't worked with databases long enough, it's dangerous to tell them "don't worry about normality." But denormalizing certain groups of tables can certainly cause a significant performance gain.