An orange in an apple orchard
O.K. I may have just recently cleaned out the mouse wheel of my MX400 at home, for the first time in years: as the dog hair and gunk was making it nearly impossible to scroll.
Today however, I got a new treat at work: the mouse on my desk is so old, there is mold growing out of it!!!
I’m really glad the keyboard is good stuff lol.
Of recent, I’ve been doing a little studying on the issue of ebooks, primarily because I tend to be tighter on shelf space than disk space. For some stuff of interest to me, I must say, the digitial solution is usually cheaper: perhaps up to 40% or less the list price. Although that being said, I usually prefer “Used” books on the cheap to new books at full price, but the nearest decent used bookstore for years has been is Amazon o/.
Two major retailers of books in general exist that are worth my investment: Amazon (Kindle) and B&N (Nookland). Kobo looks intensely interesting but within minutes of checking their website, I do not trust them with my billing information.
Now I may be a major cheapskate but I don’t mind buying what I want, in fact, I prefer it—if it gets me exactly what I want. In the case of the Kindle and Nook stores at least, it is pretty much there. The problem is DRM. You can read it on a PC, a Mac, iOS, Android devices, and their own reader devices.
Well guess what, I prefer a PC but their software doesn’t work on mine. My PC’s run Linux and BSD based operating systems :-).
This creates a bit of a irk for me: why should I give them my money, if they will restrict what I can do overtly? Generally, I would choose the Kindle store as a matter of taste. The problem is each store’s DRM prevents me from using the devices that ***I*** wish to use at my leisure, so it is little better then requiring their hardware. Given the choice of using my cell phone or remoting to a windows or OSX box to read from Linux and BSD, isn’t what I call fair enough versus the cost of a real old fashioned book I can lay in bed and read.
Honestly, I am not against DRM in concept, only how it is typically executed. Because if it is much more complex then email + password + auth token = decode and enjoy content, ala setting up Dropbox on a new PC (to access your content). It is not managing my digital rights, it is removing them. IMHO the only practical form of DRM for books and the like: would be the kind where someone is unable to access the material in _any_ form, unless their DNA matches the DNA of the person licensed to access (read) it, and any violation results in automatic punishment; such as content erasure, imprisionment, etc. Even if locked down expicilitly to the ebook reader’s hardware, and somehow hardware hacking was prevented from being possible—it would still be a failure: because you could just photo copy the screen the same way as pages in a paper book. So in the end, we end up having to pay the price of assholes trying to outfox assholes o/.
The subscription model is better: pay x/cycle for such and such content. That is probably closer to what some DRM-folks like in the music indrustry want anyway, making profit off each playback rather than each distribution of content 8-).
It is very strongly worth noting that in general: I am very against dedicated devices like the Kindle or Nook, when you could spend more and get a more general purpose device like an Android tablet or iPad. I’m not willing to buy one of those for myself until after Ice Cream is mainstream, so I really should just buy a darn Kindle 3. It’s only like $140 with the 3G option, and I am more applicable to buying a Kindle then dealing with trying to get around the DRM issues.
While it’s limited to technical books, I really would consider something like Safari Online Books to be a much better investment but I want more than what it can offer. I’ll likely begin evaluating things more closely in the near future, as well as setting up Safari for a trial. Safari has the best techy publishers in my experience.
This is an except from a short convo’ about the similarity between programming languages in general.
Me: Most programming languages are pretty much the same, it's just a matter of choosing your headaches
A Friend: well yeh
Me: Lessons learned:
C -> sigh, yet another hash table implementation.
C++ -> error messages should only be written in one of two ways, templates are written in a third.
Java -> please GOD, not again.
C# -> groan, building C/C++ libs is even worse.
Perl -> Yes I know it is unitialized, damn gum it!
JavaScript -> WTF was that mac?
Lisp -> Did someone stick a fork in my eye?
Lua -> off by one errno'
Haskell -> Holy shit my head hurts.
SML -> Cool headfuck but where's the damn batteries?
Shell -> Shame most people SUCK at it...
Cmd -> COBOL just got sexy.
Python -> Can not use contractions.
Ruby -> You lie.
A Friend: you missed php
Me: I respectfully omit PHP as it multiple inherits from several, and adds it's own headaches :-)
A Friend: lol
Me: hehe
That being said, except for the sort order, I would say that Lua probably got the highest marks there lololololololololol.
While a very important girl was off visiting her grandparents, I resurrected work on Cassius! Thanks to a few nights and occasional Saturday afternoons, the interface is maturing to the point where I can almost use it, so I’ve decided to put it on GitHub.
Old code never goes away, it just goes back to the compiler.
After recently reformatting the Windows NT box (I tend to every year or two), I did install Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition out of my ISO for the whole show. Well, finally I got around to opening a project file (after generating it with premake4 ofc). Running off the default settings, I went ahead and compiled, then I ende dup standing here “WTF, where is the button to clean gone?”
Then I clicked on the thing to enable “Expert” settings and was elightened. I don’t know if it is just beause it’s the Express Edition rather than the Professional Edition or something, but I just lost my last tread of respect for Microsoft—I used to think they knew how to make development tools.
Eh, that reminds me, if anyone holds there breath waiting on C99 support in the C-aware portion, you’ll die.
Somehow, whenever my brain gets so heavily infused with thoughts about this one particular girl in Canada, my coding aptitutde seems to increase… algorithms fall into place. It’s almost like hack mode with a smile, and I can’t explain it :-S.
Sigh, another slice of the universe that makes no sense yet o/
Great way to start off the work day: a headache and occasional spells of vertigo. Oi. If this impacts my coding, I shalt be pissed.
Before dinner, ma came in and gave the dogs some lettuce, well for one reason or another, Corky decided to leap on my pillow and basically roost himself on my shoulder :-/.
On dixie, I generally used zsh, but have been using bash on alice, since that’s what I use at work. On the other hand, while zsh is _so_ big, I could never expect it to be fast, on alice, I find that opening a new shell takes irksomely long.
Tests: (avg m:ss reported by GNU time -v)
-bash:
no profile, no completion = avg 0:00.01
with profile, no completion = avg 0.00.10
no profile, with completion = avg 0:01.16
with profile, with completion = avg 0.01.27
-dash:
no profile = avg 0.00.00 # to fast to be timed?; highest was 0:00.03
with profile = avg 0.00.08
Ok, so maybe an Atom based netbook isn’t as powerful as a server with multiple quad core Xeons but that is still a rather big difference. No wonder though—on alice, /etc/bash_completion is 1700 lines and /etc/bash_completion.d contains over 25,000 lines of scripts to source.
My shell profile only adds like 700 lines of code when run on Linux. Although zsh really made me appreciate context-sensitive tab completion, the only interest I have with it in bash, is pretty much for git.
Hmmm…
Hooked up Alice to the big screen after getting off the couch tonight. Want to wrapping up some stuff—I kind of miss having a working pager in my panel. So I blocked off the door to keep Corky from coming in and pissing on the bed before I got done. Well guess what? The Parental Unit comes barreling in, complaining about the door being shut off.
I may have gotten a solid WTF!? Leap out of that, but at least I can laydown and __NOT__ have a wet fucking pillow!!!!!! I am thinking of making a door-barricade the SOP.