I gave the 500mm spotting scope another shot. I put it on the 20D, stuck the tripod plate on it, and hauled it out to one of the bird watching decks in Baylands park. There’s a few more on photos.xythian.com. After a bit with the stationary spotting scope, I […]
I browsed through archives for Stevey’s Rants a bit and came across Saving Time, a post about automating things. I’m pretty passionate about automating tasks. I don’t think people should spend time doing things that computers can do, especially when automating those things is easy. I have, in […]
I mentioned Math for Programmers in the last post. My own experience leading me to reach the conclusion that I should also “repair my rusty math skills” expanded beyond what fit into the post…
I should know more math. Especially more of what is possible and at least the name of the […]
It’s been about two years since I started (again, but this time for real) reading articles regularly via feeds. I’ve been using the web to read stuff for much longer than that, of course, but there was a limit on how many sites I’d remember to look at. I’d played with RSS […]
I’m a software developer. There are tools I like and have successfully built applications using but I also enjoy learning new tools and languages.
My goal is to use the best tool for the job. As I said before, most of the time the “best tool” is not a choice based entirely […]
An extended post responding to James Gosling’s Java is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby, or C# (that site, java.sys-con.com, is the worst I’ve enountered for quite a while with regard to ad content — annyoing pop-up DHTML ads not caught by Firefox’s pop-up blocker, a million flashing, blinking, and whirling ads. awful):
I […]
I’ve been working on an update to my homegrown RSS aggregator for a while now. It’s been “nearly” ready for a while, but it took me time to convince myself it was actually ready. It’s funny how quickly I become relatively conservative about pushing out updates to a tool that’s […]
The other day I wrote about a script to simplify GPS plots for plotting polylines using Google Maps.
The momentum from that finally propelled me to learn enough about this stuff to be able to have the script output this:
(The inlined image is resized to fit into my Wordpress layout, it links to the full image. […]
I’ve been storing the raw data from each HTTP my RSS fetcher makes so I could run tests in the future with real data when I revise my processing code. The future is now. I’m entirely glad I kept all this data (around 7 gig) because it really helps to have lots of […]