I continue to be mystified as to how Microsoft has not managed to create a backup system as seamless and straightforward and efficient as Time Machine for OS X. The software is, however, not without its faults. As is usual with Apple software, Time Machine becomes quite frustrating and unwieldy when something goes ever so slightly wrong.

When it works, it works very well. It is unobtrusive. You have hourly backups. It is as technology should be: serving you.

At the beginning of the year, I... [More]

X-Men: First Class (2004) — 9/10

Possibly the best of all of the X-Men movies so far, with Jean Grey coming from the dead as Phoenix and fighting with Professor X himself for supremacy. They took out Magneto—made him human—and man was I rooting for the Phoenix to make a clean slate of things at the end. Mainstream movies always cop out when it comes to destroying the world, though. Still recommended, though, and highly recommended for fans of comic-book movies.

Kill Bill Vol. I (2003)... [More]

I was recently asked a question about merge conflicts in source-control systems.

“[…] there keep being issues of files being over written, changes backed out etc. from people coding in the same file from different teams.”

My response was as follows:

tl;dr: The way to prevent this is to keep people who have no idea what they’re doing from merging files.

Extended version

Let’s talk about bad merges happening accidentally. Any source-control worth its salt will support at least some form of... [More]

Guantánamo is a war crime. It’s illegal by both U.S. and international law. And now, in the article Amid Hunger Strike, Obama Renews Push to Close Cuba Prison (New York Times), we hear that President Obama wants to try closing it again. Does he mean it this time? But what does he mean by close it? And why now? Should we believe his high-minded though glib reasons? Or is cynicism once again more justified than hope?

Why is he trying again? Why now?

As even the article states,

“Mr. Obama made his remarks... [More]”

The Swiss voted overwhelmingly to include a provision in their constitution to, as the campaign stated, “stop the ripoff”. The exact text (in German) can be found at Eidgenössische Volksinitiative gegen die Abzockerei. Rather than try to reformulate the result in a hyperbolic way, I’ll perform the service of just translating the relatively clear amendment to the Swiss constitution.

The letter of the law

See the link above for the full text; I include the original German for the parts I think... [More]

A friend asked me for my advice on buying a Windows developer machine. In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

What about a desktop?

I’ve got a desktop at work. It’s easily the fastest machine in the office. The hard drive’s a bit loud though. I’m being upgraded by my vigilant crew to an SSD in the near future, though. Otherwise, if you don’t need portability, you’ll get the most bang for your buck in a desktop.

You’re also more likely to be able to find something... [More]

1. Blade: Trinity (2004) — 7/10
2. The Prestige (2006) — 10/10
3. Skyfall (2012) — 6/10
4. Flight (2012) — 8/10
5. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E09) (2012) — 10/10
6. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E10) (2012) — 10/10
7. The Bourne Legacy (2012) — 7/10
8. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E08) (2012) — 10/10
9. Ghost Rider (2007) — 5/10
10. The Big Lebowski (1998) — 10/10

Blade: Trinity (2004) — 7/10

Wesley Snipes stars as the... [More]

Cornell West once again distinguished himself with insightful and unrelenting but respectful questioning, taking Rivlin to task for pleading for the status quo. She took offense when he said that her lofty but toothless rhetoric would lead nowhere but a shrug of the shoulders as it once again failed to have the espoused effect. She claimed that the poor were well-represented—and intimated that their representation was as successful as that... [More]

The article Time to Bury Pew Report on Wealth by Age Group by Dean Baker (CEPR) hits the nail on the head. Pew put together a report a few years ago on the wealth of various age groups in the U.S. This report has since been misused by many journalists to show that the wealthy elderly are exacting inter-generational warfare on the young. The report stated that “the median household over the age of 65 had $170,500 in net worth [while] households under age 35 had [a] median net worth [of] just $3,700”.

Though I’m going... [More]

tl;dr: If your Windows 8 is mysteriously moving your Windows and taskbar around, it might be because of your Windows Live account synchronizing settings from one machine to another.

Starting with Windows 8, you can connect your local user account to your Windows Live account, sharing your preferences and some Windows-App-Store application settings and logins.

I had this enabled for a while but recently discovered that it was responsible for mysterious issues I’d been experiencing on my... [More]

A friend asked me about the prices for refurbished Macs (Apple Store).[1] In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

Is refurbished OK?

I can’t think of a reason why a refurbished Mac wouldn’t be a good idea. it’s good for the Earth, at any rate. My initial impression is that the price advantage is negligible—you can get last year’s model (June 2012) for only a 15% savings off of the price of a new MacBook. It’s impressive how little Macs depreciate. Still, 15% is better than nothing.

Retina... [More]

Ron Paul appeared on a recent Smiley and West show. He’s a bit slippery. He generally argues for absolute liberty and that the government’s role is to ensure liberty—in other words, the goal of the strict Libertarian that he always has been. If nothing else, he’s consistent. But he very quickly gets into trouble with issues that don’t work so well with a black-and-white political philosophy—in other words, almost any issue of consequence.

For example, the conversation turns to Hate-Crime... [More]

Disk Cleanup – Windows.old & Recycle BinDisk Cleanup – System FilesIf, instead of installing Windows 8 on an empty drive, you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the installation process retains a copy of your old Windows 7 installation in a folder named “Windows.old”. As you can see from the screenshot, this folder can be pretty big. If your Windows 8 is running fine and you have no plans of downgrading, you can safely throw away this folder.

What’s the best way to delete this folder? It’s probably protected and deleting it manually will be rife with... [More]

Opera started a public beta-testing program a few years ago called Opera Next. Whereas the stable version naturally moved along more slowly—but always rock-solid—Opera Next often had a more up-to-date HTML/CSS renderer (code-named Presto) and Javascript engine (code-named Carakan). Opera recently anounced that future versions—Opera Next Next—would be built on the WebKit HTML/CSS renderer and Google’s open-source V8 Javascript engine instead.

Why is it good news?

This is, I think, good... [More]

The paper Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism by Colin S. Gordon, Matthew J. Parkinson, Jared Parsons, Aleks Bromfield, Joe Duffy (Microsoft Research) is quite long (26 pages), detailed and involved. To be frank, most of the notation was foreign to me—to say nothing of making heads or tails of most of the proofs and lemmas—but I found the higher-level discussions and conclusions quite interesting.

The abstract is concise and describes the project very well:

“A key challenge for concurrent programming is that side-effects (memory operations) in one thread can affect the... [More]”

NBC has released a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo titled DOJ White Paper: Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force by DOJ (MSNBC). As you read through the document (or just the citations below), if you find yourself being swayed by the DOJ’s seductive logic, it is a useful exercise to turn the parties around: instead of the US claiming the rights detailed in this document, imagine that it were Israel or Russia or... [More]

Tangled (2010) — 5/10

Disney’s take on the story of Rapunzel, done in modern, 3d-animated style. The characters are unsurprising: there’s a beautiful virginal girl who sings, a young handsome rogue who sings and an evil old witch. The story is only tangentially related to the original Grimm’s fairy tale: in the original, the witch was initially the wronged party; in the Disney version, there’s no gray area and the witch is evil from the start. There were no real star voices and only a... [More]

There are some pictures of it in the article World trembles in confusion and/or fear at Iran’s fiberglass airplane by Lee Hutchinson (Ars Technica). There you’ll find over a dozen pictures with commentary. The commentary is, on the whole, not kind, but it’s also neither entirely information-free not unwarranted. They note in the picture below that the “canopy has ludicrously bad optical qualities—note the scratches and distortion.”

Plane with pilot

It’s also, well, it’s a lot smaller than I expected. Or, as Ars Technica put it, “[…]... [More]

In order to program in 2013, it is important not to waste any time honing your skills with outdated tools and work-flows. What are the essential pieces of software for developing software in 2013?

Runtime

A runtime is a given for all but the most esoteric of programming exercises. Without something to execute your code, there is almost no point in writing it.

Debugger

Programming without an integrated debugger can be very time-consuming, error-prone and will quite frankly suck the fun right... [More]

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) — 9/10

This is a documentary about manufacturing—mostly in China—about the world that humanity creates for itself and about the lives that people live in this world. The film starts with a long, slow pan along a factory floor that seems to last for kilometers. It is equal parts horrifying to think of how people can live and work in places like this and awe-inspiring to think what gigantic structures man has created. The documentary also acknowledges its own... [More]

Firstborn (2007)

by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can imagine, flitting from topic to topic and seeming to hurry through the story. It’s quite inconsistent in the way that they kept shuttling people all over the solar system when that’s obviously such a... [More]

1. Joe vs. the Volcano (1990) — 8/10
2. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E03 (2012) — 10/10
3. Crude (2009) — 8/10
4. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E04 (2012) — 10/10
5. A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) — 6/10
6. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) — 8/10
7. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E05 (2012) — 10/10
8. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E06 (2012) — 10/10
9. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo... [More]

Skype for the Mac is kind of a CPU hog, so I’ve been looking for another solution.

I recently used Google Voice/Chat/Hangouts, which is kind of low-fi, but worked pretty well. The browser plugin is quickly installed. Although it didn’t work in Opera, it naturally worked in Chrome. It offered the UI that we’ve all come to expect from Google: bare-bones and adequate.

When everybody involved has an Apple device, FaceTime seems like a logical alternative to Skype and Google Voice. So what kind of... [More]

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/se) — 8/10
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — 6/10
3. Paprika (2006) — 9/10
4. Your Highness (2011) — 2/10
5. Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010) — 7/10
6. Waiting for Armageddon (2009) — 8/10
7. C.S.A. – The Confederate States of America (2004) — 8/10
8. Casino Jack (2010) — 6/10
9. The Expendables 2 (2012) — 7/10
10. Get Shorty (1995) — 8/10
11. Battleship (2012) — 4/10
12. Ted (2012) — 8/10
13. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)... [More]

Penn and Teller have had a TV show on ShowTime for a while now, but I’ve never seen any. Most of them are available on YouTube (see links below) but I have no idea how long those will last there due to copyright issues. As I watched, it was easy to sympathize with the new-agey folks—Penn is ruthless and relentless. Though he’s too self-satisfied at times, he tempers it with explanations for his anger—that he hates to see people preyed upon. Still, you think to yourself, these people seem to... [More]

1. Johnny English Reborn (2011) — 8/10
2. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) — 9/10
3. Platoon (1986) — 9/10
4. Midnight Express (1978) — 6/10
5. John Carter (2012) — 8/10
6. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) — 8/10
7. Paul (2011) — 7/10
8. The African Queen (1951) — 6/10
9. Culture in Decline – Episodes 1-3 (2012) — 8/10
10. The Dictator (2012) — 6/10
11. In Time (2011) — 8/10
12. Killer at Large (2008) — 9/10
13. The Campaign (2012) — 7/10

Johnny English Reborn (2011) — 8/10

A surprisingly amusing and... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

Windows 8 was made publicly available a few weeks ago. As usual, Microsoft manages to guarantee compatibility with a lot of software, but there are a few tools that will simply no longer run.

One of these is Microsoft’s own Security Essentials product, which has been completely replaced with Windows Defender, which is built right in to Windows 8. So that one’s easy.

Another is Microsoft Virtual... [More]