Programming Languages on the iPhone

So I read about how Apple banned many programming languages from use for iPhone apps today, and I had a reaction similar to Rob's. John Gruber thinks that Apple did this to prevent frameworks from targetting both the iPhone and other platforms like Android, but he also argues that applications built using such frameworks usually suck. This seems like a contradiction to me: if apps built these frameworks suck so much, why take the trouble to ban the frameworks? To me, the ban seems like an admission that many apps could in fact be "good enough" when built on such a framework. Apple simply wants to make life harder for developers of such apps who want to target multiple phones, in the hopes that they will decide to just focus on the iPhone. What a lame move.

Bagels outside NYC

Vaguely related to Cog's recent post on American yogurt, what's the deal with the sub-par bagels outside the New York City area? We just got bagels from what is supposedly the best bagel place in Boulder, and they weren't even close in taste to our bagel place of choice in Westchester. Why are the bagels so much better in the NYC area? If there were some ingredient local to NYC that didn't travel well, I could understand, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

New Times Reader

I just installed the new Times Reader on my Mac, and it seems to work very nicely. This blog post discusses many of the improvements. For text layout, it uses a new framework implemented on Adobe AIR. Of course, the downside is you have to pay to get the full product; for free, reading the Times on the web with my multi-column Greasemonkey script is a decent substitute :-).

NYMag Top Chef Posts

For those Top Chef fans out there, I created a Yahoo! pipe that has the New York Magazine Grub Street posts on the show: here you go.

Exporting Powerpoint Figures to Latex on Mac

I wanted to quickly write down how to export Powerpoint figures to use within pdflatex on Mac OS X, since a quick Googling didn't turn up a straightforward explanation:

1. Ensure the figure is on its own slide.
2. Print the slide to a PDF.
3. Open the PDF in Skim.
4. Do Tools -> Select Tool.
5. Select the figure and adjust the borders of the selection appropriately.
6. Do Tools -> Crop Page.
7. Do File -> Export..., pick a file name, and choose "PDF with Embedded Notes" as the file format.
8. Include the resulting file in the Latex document, e.g., using graphicx.

The Office has jumped the shark

I found the first four episodes of this season of The Office to be distinctly worse than the best episodes of past seasons. The show is getting too weighed down by several long-running plot lines, none of which are interesting dramatically. (Jim and Pam's story was never interesting, and neither was the equivalent plot in the British Office.) Hopefully this is just a bad streak, but I think it's more likely that the show has just jumped the shark.

Updated version of Multi-column articles

I've updated my multi-column articles Greasemonkey script to coincide with the release of Firefox 3. The coolest new feature is automatic hyphenation (only works in Firefox 3), accomplished via the awesome hyphenator script. In my experience, automatic hyphenation sometimes provides a significant improvement in readability. Also, support for many more sites has been added in the last few releases, along with other bug fixes. If you installed my script a while ago, it's a good time to update (which requires uninstalling the script and then installing the new version; not sure how to do better).

Professor of Conservative Thought at CU

Take a listen to this interview with University of Colorado chancellor Bud Peterson regarding his effort to create an endowed chair for a Professor of Conservative Thought at the university (and read this article for background). I find it extremely disappointing that a university chancellor would make such inane arguments about the need for such a position, e.g., that the current faculty don't have sufficient expertise to teach the relevant topics. If this is really about plugging a hole in faculty expertise, why even bring up the so-called "liberal bias" in the personal political views of CU faculty? Absolutely infuriating. Rice and Keats has more.

David Simon speaks

David Simon answers some questions about the fifth season of The Wire. I think he has some great responses to the bigger criticisms of this season that have been circulating around. Can't believe there are only a couple episodes left...

HBO Online No Good

I was so excited when I saw the headline "HBO Putting Shows Online, at No Additional Charge." Then I read the article:

The free service will allow access to about 400 hours of movies and original programming each month. It will be made available only to people already subscribing to HBO, and it will be marketed and delivered through cable operators.

“There are a lot of people, particularly young people, who are watching TV through the PC. We wanted to create a product for them,” said Eric Kessler, a co-president of HBO.

Most major television networks already make much of their programming available free on the Internet. But as a channel with 29 million subscribers, HBO cannot afford to bypass its cable partners.

That really sucks. If HBO wants to reduce downloads of their shows through other channels, they need to address the needs of people who want to pay HBO for their shows but not buy digital cable and 500 other channels.

Quality of classical MP3s

There have been a bunch of recent articles and blog posts about the sound quality of MP3 files on iPods, some related to the opening of the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) Web Shop. It is disheartening how little evidence is presented regarding the claims of relative quality of MP3s versus CDs. Given how passionate some of the authors are about audiophile equipment and the like, they could have at least done some ABX testing to see how well they could distinguish between the formats. I'd especially like to see Fred Kaplan claim that lossless formats like FLAC only sound "very close to CD-quality" after such a test; give me a break. I'm also curious which of the authors could distinguish the 320kbps MP3s from the DG store from 192kpbs VBR MP3s properly encoded by LAME, the format long used by eMusic. On my decent equipment, I can't tell the difference between the 192kbps VBR MP3s and CDs, and that's good enough for me.

On the other hand, it seems that DG made a good choice with 320kpbs MP3s. The files easily work on all kinds of devices and players, and they seem to satisfy people who usually complain about MP3 sound quality (rationally or otherwise). Personally, until I can get lossless tracks for reasonable prices (around $10 an album), I'm sticking with CDs and eMusic.

Metropolitan Opera and Rhapsody

I just saw that the Metropolitan Opera has has just made available 100 past radio broadcasts on Rhapsody. I'm listening to a great 1958 Otello right now. With this, the theater broadcasts, and the satellite radio station, the Met is really doing amazing things these days.

using Gmail IMAP access for email backup

Gmail recently enabled free IMAP access, an extremely useful feature for many reasons. For me, perhaps the best feature of IMAP access is an easier and better method for backing up old email to a Gmail account. Now, email backup is a simple process:

1. Import the old email into Thunderbird. (Other clients may also work.)
2. Enable IMAP access to your Gmail account in Thunderbird.
3. Drag and drop the old email folders into your Gmail account.

That's it! Your folder names will show up as labels in the Gmail web interface. The copying process in Thunderbird takes some time, but you can safely let it run and go do something else.

Previously, one could backup email into Gmail using a program like GMail Loader. A key advantage of the IMAP technique is that the original email dates are preserved in the Gmail database. With GMail Loader, the date when a message was imported shows up during search (though the original email date remains in the headers). Use of the import date messes up both search and Gmail's threading features.

Generally, importing email into Thunderbird is a pretty easy process. I successfully imported and backed up some old Eudora email and mail in the MH format (by converting to mbox format with the packf command). The only downside of this whole process is the time one inevitably wastes reading ancient emails :).

"Long-Form" News Aggregators

I've had a lot of spare time recently, and one thing I've been doing even more than usual is reading in-depth newspaper and magazine articles. There are a bunch of good aggregators for these kinds of articles on the web, and I thought I'd point out my favorites:

• Arts and Letters Daily, the classic
• NewsDog (of course)
• The Informed Reader, which summarizes about three articles a day
• Other Magazines in Slate, updated once or twice a week
• Brijit, a new site that seems promising

If you needed help procrastinating, I hope this does the trick. Let me know if I'm missing out on some other similar aggregator.

Wire Season 5 teaser / Wire with a laugh track?

There's a promo up for Season 5 of The Wire: I can't wait. I also found this clip pretty funny, in a sort of disturbing way:

Vegetarian Frosted Mini-Wheats

We were recently told that 365 brand Bite-Size Frosted Shredded Wheat, the Whole Foods generic version of Frosted Mini-Wheats, is free of gelatin and hence vegetarian. We've been eating them like mad ever since. Apparently Organic Frosted Mini-Wheats are also vegetarian; sweet!

comparing renting and buying

David posted a nice analysis of whether to rent or buy a house, along with a handy spreadsheet to do your own calculation. Check it out.

Feed for Josh Marshall's posts on Talking Points Memo

Finally, full text feeds are available for Talking Points Memo. I've wanted a feed just for Josh Marshall's posts on the blog for a while. Now that these full feeds are available, creating such a feed was easily done using Yahoo! Pipes. The pipe for Josh Marshall's posts is here. Enjoy!

Toshiba Portege M200 and Dell 2407WFP

Warning: This post has specific technical tips that you probably won't find interesting unless you have hardware similar to that mentioned in the title.

I just got a new 24" monitor (the Dell 2407WFP-HC), and I had to set it up as an external display for my Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. Unfortunately, the video drivers on my laptop didn't support the native 1920x1200 resolution of the monitor, even though the video card (an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5200) could do so. Furthermore, Toshiba is quite lax about updating the official video drivers for the laptop, and NVIDIA artificially cripples their official drivers so they don't work on older cards by default.

Fortunately, there's a web site dedicated to solving these problems: Laptop Video 2 Go. The site provides various versions of NVIDIA drivers along with modified INF files to enable those drivers to work on older hardware. I got things working with driver version 97.44 and this INF file, following these installation instructions. My INF file differed from that provided by the site in two ways:

1. I added the appropriate resolutions for the 24" monitor and for my laptop screen (1400x1050), as in this post.
2. I added support for Tablet PC features like rotating the laptop screen, as in this post.

After updating the driver, I also disabled the NVIDIA Driver Helper Service, as suggested here. The service was causing constant 20% CPU utilization (mostly in the RPC service under svchost.exe), and it doesn't seem to do anything critical.

Anyway, things seem to be working nicely now. Hopefully this post will help others in a similar situation.

Insane Tetris Video

I'm not sure if this is real, but in any case, it's pretty awesome: