Attention trumps experience

It’s always bemused me that I did better in electronic engineering than computer science. I studied them simultaneously, receiving degrees in both after five years (some classes counted towards both, thus why it wasn’t seven or eight years). I grew up playing on, dabbling with, and programming computers. From BASIC II to Hypercard to RealBasic… Read more

Better is the enemy of best

A vintage Mechanical Horse Patent Drawing From 1893 on Dark grunge background.

You might have heard the aphorism “Perfect is the enemy of good“.  If you’re in a technical field, you’ve probably used it, or had it used against you, to shut down a conversation.  It’s an effective way to do so because it insinuates that the target is thinking impractically, not focused on the problem at… Read more

Altruism

I had an argument last night with someone as to whether altruism exists or not. Their argument was essentially “of course it does”. They used the example of a car accident they were in a while ago, in which they were very nearly killed, but they still consoled the driver of the other car (whom… Read more

Wasted memory by Foundation & AppKit

It bothers me that the iiUsage menu item, which takes up an entire 50mm^2 on my menu bar, uses 20 meg of memory. All it does it connect to a web server periodically, perform some sort of [probably trivial] parsing to extract it’s numbers, and display those in it’s menu. What on earth does it… Read more