January 2012
27 posts
Taking Note of Note Taking
To follow up on yesterday’s post, it isn’t just reminders and tasks that I need to remember about, but also random pieces of information. As such, I like using note-taking software so that I can quickly write down stuff that I have to remember. As with tasks, lots of cellphones come with some rudimentary note app. Again, with iCloud on the iPhone it all gets backed up and...
Effective Reminders, or Oops! I Already Broke My...
It seems like I completely forgot to post something Monday. Technically speaking, it means I already broke my New Year’s resolution. If only I had set a daily reminder to post something each day… We now have several ways in today’s phones to set up recurring reminders. Many phones come with built-in software to do recurring alarms and task lists. On the iPhone and using a free...
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Redline
Redline, the Japanese animation by Takeshi Koike released in 2010, may be a juvenile car racing movie in a pseudo “Heavy Metal” world, but is a great piece of art and a joy to watch. After having done a short animation piece for the Animatrix, Koike spent the next 7 years or so on this movie. It reuses similar themes and style of racing, speed, and visuals with those bold dark lines....
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Harry Potter 5 and 6
Starting with the fifth movie of the Harry Potter movies, David Yates consistently directed the rest of the series. I say “consistently” because they do feel alike in style, a reprieve compared to the changing styles introduced by the third and fourth movies. Also, unlike the nearly direct scene per scene adaptations of the first half of the series, your can feel the struggle to fit in...
Selling Out?
In a move that reeks of hypocrisy, I bought a season pass of the current season of “30 Rock”, knowing full well that its producers, NBC, was behind the crafting of SOPA and PIPA, both that I thoroughly trashed earlier this week. Why then? Should I had just pirated the whole season? Or protest even harder, since “they” shut down megaupload, by not watching 30 Rock at all? ...
Why You Should Use Mercurial
OK, I’m pretty tired today, at least enough to make it difficult to write anything, so I’ll post something “obvious”.If you want some simple version control for your code, or event or a few plain text and binary files, then you should use Mercurial ( http://mercurial.selenic.com/ ). If you’re using a centralized version control system like CVS or Subversion, or worse...
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Book: The Big Short
If you want to have a proper and entertaining explanation of why there was an economic crash in 2008, then you have to ready the book “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis. Even though I’ve finished reading the book a month ago, my bad memory of names make me unable to remember the various actors in this recollection of events. The narrative centers around a few investors that...
About SOPA / PIPA
A few major web site, noticeably (for me) Reddit, Google and Wikipedia publicly displayed their opposition to a set of bills that were on the verge to be passed into law in the United States. I won’t go too much into the detail of those bills (Reddit did a good job here: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html ), but in short what were supposedly be bills...
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iPhone 4S cases
I’m a bit torn between using my new iPhone 4S as-is or buying a case. For the past few months I used it “naked” with no case whatsoever, and I can say that it has much better grip than the 3S because both surface sides are flat and a kind of glass that grips easily. I’m still worried about two things though: accidentally dropping it, and battery life. So the first case I...
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Minecraft Adventures, January Update
If you don’t know, Minecraft is a “sandbox” adventure game, meaning that while it has an adventure mode with many goals, the game engine encourages free-form playing and exploration. The game is centered around crafting objects and tools out of existing materials, and mining to find such materials. Each world that is generated is different, making each play-through a different...
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Harry Potter 3 and 4
I’ll now review both the third and fourth Harry Potter movies (Prisoner of Azkaban and the Globet of Fire, respectively) because they are highly contrasting. The third movie is now directed by a new director (Cuarón), and both the story, art direction and movie direction are excellent. The plot introduces many characters to the series and is more complex than the two previous movies, and...
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Nearly Offline
Today I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to post anything. First, my Internet connection slowed down to a halt (well, I still had the normal 3Mbps upstream, but downstream I could barely get 0.5Mbps). Also, Posterous was down for a few hours today ( https://twitter.com/#!/posterous/status/158266563584196608 ), which may explain yesterday why my post’s email seem to have been ignored,...
The thing with Netflix and lists
The Canadian version of Netflix was their first foray into a pure-streaming version of their service, that is without the whole thing with mailing DVDs and so on. In a way, it may have been a test to see if a streaming-only service can be a success, even with a very limited selection of movies compared to its American counterpart, which culminated with this “Qwickster” atrocity. But...
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Setting up a new iPhone or iPad
No matter how easy it is to use an iPhone for the first time, I can understand how overwhelming it can feel to learn how best use it beyond simple telephone use. Actually, I suspect a lot of people use it as a plain phone for quite a while before gradually starting to use it to its full potential. A lot of its potential is through apps, but again it can be difficult to be directed to the best apps...
Catching up on CES
I’m really busy at work these times, so it’s a bit difficult to catch up on all that’s happening at the Consumer Electronic Show this week. So what do I do to catch up? I listen to the podcast Tech News Today ( http://twit.tv/tnt ), a daily show of tech news that is reporting live each day at CES at 5:30 PM EST and lasts around an hour per episode. Now I can’t listen to...
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Movie: Clue
By any standard, the movie adaptation of the board game Clue is not a big comedy. It feels like a small, amusing play that may not be worth the full $20 movie admission (hopefully it was cheaper back then in the 80s), but as a late night movie you catch on syndication TV or streaming on Netflix (as I did) you don’t feel like you wasted your time. The cast is pretty good (with one notable...
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Moving to Instacast
As I mentioned last Wednesday, turning on iTunes Match on my iPhone turned off the ability to create my own custom playlists for podcasts. In the short term I used SpeedUp since it supports creating your own playlists from any item in your music library, but two annoyances remained: First, I had to manually mark as read all the episodes I listened to, and I still remained dependent on syncing with...
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Movie: Harry Potter 1 and 2
In the past few weeks I’ve watched sequentially and for the first time all the Harry Potter movies, never having read the books. In short, after all the hype died down, I finally, and at a reasonable cost of money and time, wanted to see what was the big deal about those children books. The first two movies I’ll review together because they were produced and directed back to back as a...
Descriptive vs Prescriptive Desktop Publishing
Last week I was trying to explain why for so many years word processing software like Microsoft Word, Open Office and even Apple’s Pages annoy me so much. There are two basic ways you can approach desktop publishing. The first is to augment to your base “text flow” with additional semantics and maybe some direction about how it should be rendered on page, and then you let...
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The Problem With Akira
As Anthony Carboni mentioned in a tweet ( https://twitter.com/acarboni/status/155148902088179713 ): “They halted the live action Akira. Apparently there aren’t enough white people in the world to realize the director’s vision.” I don’t think that this is the whole story. Even though the latest leaked synopsis is short on detail, it essentially paints a series of...
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Wrapping my head around C unit testing...
Today I started using for the first time some unit testing libraries for C and C++ (CUnit http://cunit.sf.net/ and CppUnit http://cppunit.sf.net/ , respectively). What I’m still unsure about is how those fit in build and test process. For example with Java and JUnit, the compiled classes are compiled in a separate directory, and running the tests simply involves adding those to the...
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iTunes Match: Is it worth it?
I subscribed to iTunes match within days that it was available in Canada, and went through the pain of uploading roughly 10 GB of independent-labeled CDs to Apple’s servers. I know that by re-downloading music files, you can upgrade your matched songs to 256 Kbps AAC, but I haven’t yet bothered doing so. Was it worth the trouble and cost? Setting up you iOS device to iTunes...
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Movie: I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)
Note: I won’t spend too much time on the synopsis when writing movie reviews. You can easily look at a trailer or IMDb ( http://www.imdb.com/ ) for that. As weird as it sounds, this movie is a kind of romantic comedy between Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor about the real life story of a con man (Steven Russell) that fell in love with a fellow inmate in prison (Phillip Morris). I won’t...
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Init Process
So, as I mentioned yesterday, here are the tools and process I’ll use to make it possible for me to post one blog post per day for a year. I’ll use email as my primary interface to post. This if for two reasons. First, email clients (Email in iOS and Gmail) aggressively save and synchronize automatically email drafts, this minimizing the risk that I’ll lose a post I’m...
Reboot →
Another year, another wave of resolutions that will be broken within a month… In my case, I see that as an opportunity to embark on some short-term project that will practice my neglected writing…
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Reboot
Another year, another wave of resolutions that will be broken within a month…In my case, I see that as an opportunity to embark on some short-term project that will practice my neglected writing skills. I’d often embark on writing a lengthy document for my web site (http://benad.me/) just to let it sit there for months, because A: the article deals with such “deep” matter...
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November 2010
3 posts
Downloading 10.6.5 combo update is absurdly slow....
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Installing VMware vSphere 4.1 client: "Installing...
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The iPad's battery indicator must be lying to me....
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October 2010
12 posts
OK. I'm not even at the end of CD1, and Dave...
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iOS devs: When parsing date strings, not all...
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Just realized that Linux supports HFS+ read/write...
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OK, I promise I'll listen to Bit.Trip FATE's...
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Apple's Java VM's now deprecated. Maybe that's for...
I may be stuck running OpenJDK in X11, but let’s be honest: Apple’s port was pretty crap. I still have nightmares of its horrendous performance in the PPC days, and endless list of Mac-specific glitches. The best would be for Oracle to step up and make a port themselves, but since OpenJDK is open source and works right now I’m not too worried. Posted via email from...
If your IDE + development framework generates...
I’m sitting here trying to make sense of about 30+ Java files generated by some GUI IDE hack. I’ll pass. Posted via email from Benoit’s posterous | Comment »
Just used Utilu IE Collection to install multiple...
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This seems "à propos" to the new article I just...
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benad.me Site Update
I haven’t updated my web site in a while, but that doesn’t mean I was totally idle. I tried to re-style the page with a custom font loaded with CSS3 font-face but it miserably failed on my iPad when using proper font variants (bold, italics) that would have gracefully degraded in older browsers. In a way, without an iPad, I would have never known that my site could consistently crash its...
benad.me Site Update
I haven’t updated my web site in a while, but that doesn’t mean I was totally idle. I tried to re-style the page with a custom font loaded with [CSS3 font-face](http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/) but it [miserably failed on my iPad](http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/05/experimenting-with-web-fonts-on-the-ipad/) when using proper font variants (bold, italics) that...
Google goggles just got released on their iPhone...
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Found my first spawn point in minecraft! Now I'm...
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September 2010
9 posts
Reading the replies on Netflix's blog reinforced...
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vim ~/.emacs . Ironic.
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Commitment Ordering is patented until 2014 because... →
Commitment Ordering is patented until 2014 because...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_ordering http://yoavraz.googlepages.com/DEC-CO-MEMO-90-11-16.pdf I quote: “We should also be aware of the fact that since CO and ECO follow mathematically from certain basic requirements of global serializability and DBS autonomy (as my papers show), it may be just a matter of time till discovered by somebody else. Hence, a quick patent filing is...
Seems like @BT is the new "green" iPod nano... →
Seems like @BT is the new "green" iPod nano...
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