Yesterday I gave a presentation at the eTech Ohio conference titled “Practical Computer Science with Python.” For the past two years, I’ve been teaching computer science to upper schoolers at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, OH, and in the presentation I shared some of the reasons why I think Python is an excellent choice [...]
I use Macs and I use Windows PCs. Sometimes I have a choice – sometimes I don’t. Overall, I’m definitely more of a fan of the general “Mac” user experience – focusing on making things “just work” with sensible defaults, and using as few clicks as possible to get things done.
On Macs, there is a [...]
Another year, another blog post! If you’re not interested in reading backstory and just interested in getting MobiPocket DRM-protected books onto your Kindle, check out the Mobi2Kindle page at Google Code.
Not too long ago, I won an Amazon Kindle while attending the CS4HS workshop at CMU (Yay Google and other sponsors!). Perhaps not surprisingly, I [...]
Alas, I find myself having to do some work on a Windows machine. I also find myself needing some additional PEAR libraries that don’t come pre-installed as part of XAMPP. I found the below commands in a comment at http://www.tohir.co.za/2006/07/pear-on-xampp-windows.html, and have taken the liberty to “re-translate” them. These instructions will setup MDB2 and the MySQL [...]
I recently “refreshed” my Mac – I’d accumulated a fair amount of cruft in my attempts to install alternate versions of libraries, and decided that a fresh install of things would clear things up. I kept my wife’s user profile intact, since she hadn’t done anything funny in her user directories, but I decided to [...]
I’ve been doing a significant amount of video work lately. This led to my recent purchase of Final Cut Express (It is so wonderful having a brother-in-law who’s an Apple Store employee), and with it many changes to my typical workflow. I’m used to using Sony’s Vegas Studio product for any editing that iMovie couldn’t [...]
I use Subversion with my own, personal projects, and about a year ago I started using it to track changes on clients’ existing sites (No, I didn’t want THAT!). On my Windows dev machine, I used TortoiseSVN over an svn+ssh connection. While I don’t dislike the command line/terminal, I liked the filesystem integration of TortoiseSVN [...]
A little while ago, there was some hype on the interwebs about a “newer version” of Gmail coming. Well, it looks like that “newer version” might be here…
As sort of a continuation to my post On Migrations, I thought I’d post about the first piece of replacement software that I’ve found.
It’s called Actiontastic, and it’s geared toward using the Getting Things Done approach to productivity/time management. I myself have not read David Allen’s book on the subject, but simply the description of [...]
A variety of factors combined to cause my wife and I to decide to purchase a new computer about a month ago. After much deliberation, we decided to get a Mac. After about two seconds in our local Apple Store, I was convinced of getting a 24-inch iMac.As a web developer/freelance programmer/dabbler, the iMac seems [...]
And then Sony just had to go and make a hypocrite out of me.
I am a frequent reader of Digg (among other news sites). However, for the past few days the above Sony ad has been showing. It’s a Flash ad, meant to wow me the user with Sony’s brilliance. After the initial play-through, the [...]
Subtitle: Adventures in Transitioning.
After a number of big changes in life last year (getting married being the biggest of all), it was of course time to take another big plunge. This time it came in the form of Jess and I moving to Cleveland, OH, so she could teach choir.
Coincidentally, this was the same time [...]