Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

MacPorts and keeping up to date

mccoy — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:51:23 +0000

I am quite surprised at how out of date a lot of the macports python packages are. I can’t think of a single reason why anyone would still be using python 2.4 instead of 2.5 (nothing was deprecated and I haven’t heard of a single package that worked in 2.4 but does not in 2.5) but the bulk of the python category is taken up with old 2.4 versions of various modules and packages. I am chalking this one up to laziness and a lack of interest on someone’s part, because it has taken me only a couple of days to whip up around 30 local portfiles that upgrade various modules to 2.5 versions and also get the most recent version of the package in question.

I guess it is time to sign up as a maintainer and push some new portfiles into the repo.

Jailbroken or just plain broken?

mccoy — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:52:57 +0000

Cydia sucks.

After spending last week enduring repeated reboots, boot freezes, and all around suckage (along with at least 10 different restores of the entire phone OS and data) I have decided that the iPhone jailbreak is neither stable enough to use nor worth the effort.

Before the 2.0 OS and App Store I used the old jailbreak to turn my iPhone into something more useful than it was without the non-Apple ecosystem. Now, everything that I used and found useful about the jailbreak apps is available (or in the queue for approval) from the App Store so the headache is just not worth it. I will be watching to see if my copy of NetShare gets deactivated if Apple eventually decides to pull that app, but as long as it stays on my phone I can’t think of a compelling reason to bother with the jailbreak and that horrible POS called Cydia.

BTW, did I mention just how much Cydia sucks?

Synchronized diving

mccoy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:29:22 +0000

Olympic observation of the day: synchronized 10m platform diving is a bit of a weird sport, but after having watched this while waiting for the 200M freestyle medal swims I found it to be a lot more interesting to watch than regular platform diving. In regular diving I can’t really tell anything about how something will be judged other than to see how big the splash is; big splash == low score. By the last round of the synch diving competition I was able to make easy judgements on how closely synced the two divers were and having the second diver as a comparator made it a lot easier to notice certain details like tuck position and how vertical the diver was while they were still in the air. With regular diving I only notice this when the commentator shows the dive in slo-mo, but in syncronized diving it seemed much more apparent and I was able to make a guess at what the score would be before the divers surfaced.

Hitting the reset button.

mccoy — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:06:52 +0000

I guess having a wordpress installation that was so out of date that I was easy pickings when the first big security problem for the platform hit is a good excuse to reset the blog and try to keep it up to date or at least relevant to my life.