October 30, 2003
Too Much for One Week
Too many things have been happening this week, and I'm overwhelmed. I had three midterms this week, which I'm all very unsure about and I got my CS 143 program back, which I am very unhappy with, eventhough I thought it was perfect. Bad stuff happened to lots of my friends and I was quite worried about some of them, which did not really affect me until I got back my program grade. Now I am fearing that getting my...
Posted on October 30, 2003 11:41 AM
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October 29, 2003
Here Comes Longhorn
Tristan was worrying about Microsoft Longhorn this morning, and how it might have a real chance of competing with Apple based on technological merit, not just competitive advantage. I think that it is good for somebody to bring out an OS as good or even better than OS X because it would drive competition and result in both systems improving. Unfortunately I do not believe my reasoing holds true for Microsoft, because Longhorn will most likely also contain tons of...
Posted on October 29, 2003 10:31 AM
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October 29, 2003
Ideas for the Post Panther Mac
Adam Angst raised some great points at his TenCon Keynote . In the future Apple needs to provide standard ways for programs to interact with each other. iPhoto, iTunes and the like are all great programs, but if they are to be integrated effectively, Apple needs to give independent programmers better ways of adding featuers to them. Architectures, not Applications. iPhoto is just an application. iPhoto should be an image database that Apple provides at the system level for anyone...
Posted on October 29, 2003 10:20 AM
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October 29, 2003
In Need of Sleep
I was planning to go to sleep at midnight yesterday becaue I have been a bit tired lately. Unfortunately this did not quite work out and I went to bed at 3am, and then had to get up at 8:30 for CS 147. The reason I went to class is because David Liddle is guest lecturing. Liddle was one of the first people to teach CS 147 a long time ago, and his work on the Alto and Star led...
Posted on October 29, 2003 10:08 AM
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October 29, 2003
More Dual Display Issues
Sometimes I attach my monitor to my laptop before opening the screen and thereby waking it up. What happens is that my laptop then assumes that my external display should be the main monitor. This is not a big problem of course. But after plugging out the display, the background image on my laptop display vanishes, and I have to go back and reset it. My background images are random chosen from one folder. If anyone knows what might be...
Posted on October 29, 2003 12:46 AM
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October 28, 2003
Screensaver Issue
When watching DVDs in Full Screen mode on my Dual Display setup the Screen Saver comes on after a few minutes. This happens on both Displays, but does not happen when I unplug my 20" monitor, and just use the internal display. This will probably be fixed by 10.3.1....
Posted on October 28, 2003 06:56 PM
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October 28, 2003
Terminal Issues When Running Emacs on Sweet Hall Machines
Panther creates an issue when trying to log onto the Sweet Hall machines over ssh from Terminal.app and running full screen applications like Emacs. I will go over how to fix the problem and then explain it for those of you who are interested in why it doesn't work. Log into a sweet hall machine and type setenv TERM vt100 Then type emacs .cshrc. Go to the last line of the file and type setenv TERM vt100. Then save the...
Posted on October 28, 2003 01:39 PM
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October 27, 2003
OSNews.com & More about Exposê
My Panther review was posted on OSNews.com this morning. I hope to write more for them in the future. I have been using Exposê more and more in the last few days, and I am starting to realize how great a feature it is. What I particularily like to do is push F9 and then look at all my windows at the same time, so I can read several IM conversations at the same time. Unfortunately, when I want to...
Posted on October 27, 2003 02:16 PM
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October 25, 2003
I Survived
It is Saturday morning and I am still alive. Last week I had a CS 242 Problemset, an E40 Problemset, a CS 143 Problemset, a CS 147 Essay, an E40 Prelab and a CS 143 program due. I also had an STS midterm. At the end of the week I was almost ready to give up, but Thursdays miraculous solution to the problem of parsing the "let" statement in Cool gave me new strength. Yesterday I went to the Panther...
Posted on October 25, 2003 03:00 PM
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October 21, 2003
Looking Forward to Friday
I was woken up by my phone ringing, got up to pick it up, and was annoyed that the call was by the Medical Center, looking for someone who was no longer assosciated with my dorm phone number (phone numbers stay the same for rooms). Unfortunately it was already to late to go back to sleep, so I had to get up and go to CS 143. I have been swamped with work this week, and I really feel like...
Posted on October 21, 2003 11:44 AM
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October 20, 2003
More on the iTunes Store
From a The Register article: Why a song costs just as much when delivered via the Internet sans packaging instead of by a complex global shipping system is a question that needs answering. We also wonder why users are paying the same price for music but can't do what ever they like with their property. Although the Register is known for complaining about even the smallest of issues, and I generally like the iTunes store, the article does raise some...
Posted on October 20, 2003 01:51 PM
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October 20, 2003
Blogging Breakdown: Solution?
I think I know what's causing my blogging breakdown. There appears to be a problem with rebuilding the category pages, though I am not yet sure, if it is only in the Personal category, or in all of them. We will see....
Posted on October 20, 2003 02:19 AM
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October 20, 2003
Work, Work and Music
As work goes, this weekend has been crazy. We submitted our CS 147 project proposal today, and Eric set up a great website. Travis and me made good progress on CS 143. I finished the first half of the 143 problemset, and the second part requires information from Tuesday's lecture. We are finished with everything but let, errors and precedence. Let is turning out to be quite difficult, and unfortunately I will not have too much time to work on...
Posted on October 20, 2003 02:14 AM
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October 18, 2003
A Musing by Knuth: Notation
Today Donald Knuth had one of his famous musings on Computer Science. The topic was mathematical notation, which was very interesting, even though I am not a math major. The topic was also a lot simpler than the proof that Knuth presented in his last lecture, which was incomprehensible for me and most of my friends, and it seemed that even Knuth was slightly confused, mostly because he was skipping parts of the proof, and forgot what he was doing....
Posted on October 18, 2003 12:26 AM
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October 17, 2003
Can's Debate Lessons for Debating Can
I have had so many arguments and debates with people today, that I'm really tired. I always end up caring too much about what happens which leaves me with this weird feeling of incompleteness. Therefore, I want to tell you two things everyone should keep in mind when debating. Remember, that these are simple rules I spontaneously wrote down. If you disagree with the specifics, that is fine, but they are meant to be semi-funny, so don't nitpick: You are...
Posted on October 17, 2003 08:52 PM
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October 16, 2003
Sooooooo Cold!
Hell just froze over. Except that I don't believe in Hell, and that everyone knew that Apple was going to announce iTunes for Windows today. But the significance of this should not be understated or even worse, ignored. In recent months Apple has become increasingly good at making world changing announcements, coming up with new innovations that might change the lives of many computer users. The iPod, the Music Store, the G5, Panther, the Music Store for Windows,......, are all...
Posted on October 16, 2003 05:03 PM
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October 16, 2003
Installing SkyOS
After reading an article on SkyOS today I felt the urge to go ahead and install it on Virtual PC. SkyOS is a hobby OS and one of the most popular hobby OSes there are. It is also written by an Austrian, Robert Szeleney, which I find very impressive. SkyOS runs on x86 hardware only and has some interesting software available, including a browser, DVD Player, and OpenGL renderers. It has a TCP/IP stack, though the TCP layer apparently needs...
Posted on October 16, 2003 02:09 AM
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October 13, 2003
Kill Bill, Dinner and a Lot of Work
I am currently fighting against our last bug in CS 143. If anyone out there knows how it is possible to push characters that were already read back onto the stream in Jlex please send me an email. Apart from that, there is only one known difference between our Lexer and that of the Professor. According to the language specification '\0' is not valid in strings. I implemented our Lexer, so that it would complain about this. The provided binary...
Posted on October 13, 2003 01:22 AM
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October 10, 2003
Dragon's Book and Indian Food
After trying to get the Dragon's book (Compilers: Principle, Techniques, and Tools) unsuccessfully for a week, I finally got it today. I have not had enough time to read it yet, but from the table of constants it looks fascinating. While at the bookstore I also looked at the textbook for Earth Systems 10, which I will take next quarter. The class is a moderately easy 5 units, and satisfies my science requirement. It also covers an area that I...
Posted on October 10, 2003 07:14 PM
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October 10, 2003
Insanely Great
Tristan made read this book on the Macintosh by Steven Levy and though not as fascinating as Tristan claimed it was still an interesting read. Steven Levy is able to make mundane things seem fascinating. Levy made the excitment of the people involved with the Macintosh project perfectly clear, and described all the major people of the project. More importantly he brought accross the feeling of how working on the Mac team must have felt, and what an indredible experience...
Posted on October 10, 2003 01:47 PM
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October 09, 2003
Panther - October 24th
The release date for Panther is finally set: October 24th 8pm. I for one will be buying it on the same day from the Stanford book store or get it from the Palo Alto score, if they offer student pricing. I think that the price is acceptable for the new features and improvments in Panther, especially since it is only 69$ for students. Because of my excitment about this I am going to start doing research into Darwin again, since...
Posted on October 9, 2003 12:03 PM
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October 09, 2003
Predicted, Released and Unreleased
A while ago I predicted that Apple's strategy for the iPod would make it into a mobile home directory, as well as a music player. This would allow users to work on any computer, by attaching their iPod, and then synchronize all the changes with their home computer. Apple announced this feature with Panther (see below), but then removed it from it's website. The following excerpt is not on the Apple website any more. We can only hope that it...
Posted on October 9, 2003 11:38 AM
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October 09, 2003
More Blogging Problems
I haven't really been able to post in the last two days, but I think I can now get everything posted by posting, waiting till the rebuild fails, and then rebuilding the index site. This is quite annoying but it works for now. I hope this will flix itself soon, and I already submitted an ITSS fix it request....
Posted on October 9, 2003 11:28 AM
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October 07, 2003
More on the Job Fair
The job fair was both a negative and a positive experience. All the companies I were interested in were not present (Apple, Google, SUN), though they will be at future job fairs. This was, however, still a great disappointment. I gave a Resume to Amazon.com and the conversation went really well. I talked about my Coursework, CS history and areas of focus. In the end I got the recruiter's email address, and he told me to email or call him...
Posted on October 7, 2003 03:07 PM
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October 06, 2003
Blogging Breakdown
Today I was unable to post to my blog because Movable Type kept giving me errors. Because of that I lost an entry, which I don't mind much, because I am just happy to see that it is working again. Today was mildly productive. I finished most of CS 242, though I am still missing 2,5 problems, that I mostly understand. I also still have to do my E40 problemset and prelab, all due Wednesday. After that I can relax...
Posted on October 6, 2003 03:25 PM
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October 01, 2003
CS 143 Compilers
I'm just watching the first CS 143 lecture online. The sylabus is already set, with all the dates of when assignments go out already known. The professor is new at Stanford and taught at Berkley for 10 years. He seems really nice and like most of my professors this quarter seems to have a good sense of humor, which I very much like. We will be working on a compiler for an Object Oriented Language called COOL (Classroom Object Oriented...
Posted on October 1, 2003 04:18 PM
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October 01, 2003
OSNews Book Reviewer
I just applied to OSNews as a book reviewer. If they accept me, they would send me free books, and I would have to read and review them within two or three weeks. Reading books is something that I love to do, and writing the reviews would not take me long. I have been a fan of OSNews for a long time now, and I would just love to write for them. I hope they accept me....
Posted on October 1, 2003 01:44 PM
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October 01, 2003
Apple Everywhere!
My friend Greg who works at Microsoft is now an Apple convert and would love to get a Power Mac, if only there were a C# implementation for it, that he needs for work. I am sitting in class right now, and behind me my former TA and Microsoft Campus Representative is sitting, typing away on his PowerBook. Also, there are more and more Apple laptops showing up in Stanford CS classes....
Posted on October 1, 2003 01:38 PM
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