Tag Archives: Computers

Macbook Pro: STAND BY READY

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So in my rash foolishness, I ordered a Macbook Pro just before WWDC and I received it the Friday just before. Luckily, while the new Macbook Pro upgrades were impressive, they weren’t what I was looking for. As it turns out, my primary motivation was to get a computer with a discrete video card, which the new low end 15″ MBP lacks. In the end, all is well.

The thing I was most pleased about was about Snow Leopard. Some people might say that tuning up an OS is a copout way to put out an upgrade, but these people don’t know anything about computers. The upgrades were impressive from a technical standpoint and at $30, a very good deal.

It turns out I don’t have much to say about the new computer, because it works exactly like my old one did. The migration manager is nice because I just told it to migrate, left my house for a few hours, and came back to my exact setup that I had. Nothing broke: documents, settings, apps, all of it.

I guess the other thing is how much I love my iPod touch. Even though it’s not an iPhone and thus, dependent on wifi, it’s a great device to have around. It’s nice to have so much more space for music, but more importantly, the platform is ridiculously useful. For my commutes, I’m able to grab light novel translations off Baka-Tsuki to read. I’ve already read through all of Haruhi and am making my way through Spice and Wolf, both of which are fantastic. I’m also able to write up drafts of blog posts (LIKE THIS ONE) and upload them to my server. All of a sudden, my one hour commute is suddenly productive.

So for the most important part of getting a new computer: naming. If you’ve been following my twitter posts, you’ll know I almost named my MBP Lightning-1, the callsign for Fate T. Harlaown. After I thought it through over the day, I decided to go with Bardiche, Fate’s magical device. My iPod is similarly named The happiest magical tome in the whole world, after Reinforce Zwei, Hayate Yagami’s unison device. Yeah, I guess I really like Nanoha.

Software and Social Justice Revisited

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Several months ago, I posted something about Eben Moglen’s talk on free software and social justice. In it, he goes through how software will control the 21st century and how free software will enable us, the people, to achieve social justice and freedom without the need for violent upheaval.

The guest speaker at CCF was talking about social justice, and it was a very good talk. One of the questions that was asked of him was, what do we do? His answer: right now, we can’t do anything, except to work hard through school and get into a position where you can do something.

Something I’ve always tried to do is to connect everything I do back to my faith. Whether it’s design, math, or programming, there will always be some way to connect what we do with God. And why not? After all, he did make it so that ??¬? can never be true and that ?f?df(x)dx=f(x).

And so I’m always trying to find out what God would have me do with the skills and interests he’s placed in me. How does typography further the kingdom? How do web standards advance the kingdom? How do recursive descent parsers expand the kingdom?

So the obvious thing is to use your gifts at church. And obviously, that’s too easy. It’s great for discovering and developing your gifts, but Jesus called us to the ends of the earth. The extent of our talents should not be the church.

So what other ways are there to excercise your skills? Christ called us to go out and serve the weak, the needy, the broken, and in doing so, show them the love of Christ. The problem is that there’s so much to do. The hungry, the sick, the oppressed, it’s impossible to serve all of them especially with our finite skillsets.

I am studying software engineering. Presumably, I’m going to go on to become a software developer and come up with some hot algorithms to parse some hot language. But how does software accomplish the Great Commission? And that’s when I read and listened to Eben Moglen’s “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century”. Afterwards, what I had to do was made much clearer.

Below, is the transcript from the talk; thanks to Geof Glass who transcribed it.

Continue reading →

Copyright and Community

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go hear Richard Stallman speak. The Computer Science Club at Waterloo managed to snag him and gave his speech entitled “Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks.”

Stallman’s arguments about copyright are essentially the same as Lessig’s from his talk, “Free Culture.” That is, copyright started out as a restriction on publishers but now has grown into something that denies the freedom of the public. The media corporations are now excercising their influence on our governments to continue to extend the breadth of copyright so that they are in control of our culture.

Because his points mirror Lessig’s so closely, I kind of wish he did give a talk about Free Software instead, since it’s so relevant to those of us hoping to become developers at Waterloo. And while he kept emphasising that this wasn’t a Free Software talk, he inevitably had to talk about it.

There were a few interesting points that he brought up during the talk. The first was about GNU/Linux. We’ve all heard the argument before that Linux really shouldn’t be called Linux because it isn’t just Linux. It’s something that I’ve never really thought about, but I knew in the back of my mind. The two reasons are that Linus Torvalds isn’t a free software person and that the GNU portion of the OS has been worked on for almost a decade.

It makes sense that Torvalds wouldn’t really be part of the free software movement, considering he mentioned that he used whatever was right for the task, and so open sourcing the Linux kernel was the most efficient way of working on it. This lead people to believe that Torvalds was all for free software, where this isn’t really the case. I’ve never really thought about how dangerous it would be until Stallman mentioned it.

I’d also knew that GNU had existed long before Linux and that we were all diminishing the work that GNU has done by thinking of the OS only as Linux the kernel. Stallman believes that properly crediting the work that GNU has done will take some of the limelight off of Torvalds so that GNU will be able to talk about free software with more authority.

There’s also the idea that copyright was put in place since it affected only industry. Since in the 1700s, the only people who were capable of mass production of copies was industry, it didn’t hurt to restrict them, and so the law wasn’t enforced against the general public. Today, however, we all own copying machines: computers. And as a democratic state, the right thing to do should be to diminish the powers that copyright grants.

Stallman also addressed in the Q&A how programmers are expected to live off of free software. Essentially, proprietary software restricts and oppresses the user. To create proprietary software is essentially taking away the freedom of others, and that’s unacceptable. However, most paid programming is for custom software for companies anyway, so that will remain largely unchanged.

“amg faecbook is selling my privacies!!!!”

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This just in: I have heard from various sources that Facebook is selling your data through a service called the Facebook Development Platform.

My response: No, no they are frigging not. They are not selling anyone’s personal data. If they are, they certainly don’t need the Development Platform.

“But amg programs that aren’t faecbook are accessing my datas!” you say. Well, it’s too bad that all of those people making angry Facebook groups, thereby sticking it to the man, aren’t as good at software development as they are at parsing through the Terms of Service to take quotes out of context.

The Facebook Development Platform is an Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia says:

An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.

The software that provides the functionality described by an API is said to be an implementation of the API. The API itself is abstract, in that it specifies an interface and does not get involved with implementation details.

The API allows a program to make requests without having to know the details of the implementation. What does this mean? Well it means that using Facebook’s API, programs don’t need to have all of your private informations that you hold so dearly, since it can just make requests to the server and process everything without having the entire Facebook database on its machine.

I mean, hell, you need to log in for these programs to work. If Facebook is giving your information away, you have more to worry about than your silly little datas; they’re giving away passwords too! Oh noes! Security breach!

People really should actually read the API docs before accusing Facebook of criminal activity, because you all end up looking like retards to people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about.

In conclusion, Facebook users make me angry.

Shiira

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Shiira is one of the newer browsers for OS X and has just hit 2.0. Its rendering engine is Webkit, which is the same engine that powers Apple’s Safari. Shiira has some pretty nifty features and the first few minutes of using it were pretty sleek and fast. I was going to try it out, except within the first few minutes, it bugged the hell out, and it became unusable, even after reinstalling it. Good game.