Recently I read a link from Gizmodo (“… I’m going back to Firefox“, after eliding a curse at the beginning of the link) where a developer was deciding to abandon Google Chrome for Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The article suggested that Chrome was bloated, slow, crashing often, used far too much disk and memory space, used [...]
Vaccinations
I refuse to participate in the current flurry of condemnation against vaccination opponents. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, it’s wrong – not because vaccination is a bad move, but because the condemnation itself is ugly, stupid, and wrong. Worse than being ugly, stupid, and wrong – it’s not effective. It’s cruel, in the end. If you’re [...]
Books better than e-readers: a possible reason
A study by Anne Mangen of Norway’s Stavanger University suggests that print books are better than electronic forms of the same books, with a few theories as to why: haptic feedback, the separation of processes enabling the mind to breathe and integrate the story…. my personal thought is that it has to do with the [...]
Florida State Football: Why So Unprepared?
My sarcastic comment to my son during the Oregon/FSU game – where FSU got smeared like a bug on a shoe – was that at least FSU had the excuse of not having known who the opponent would be. Except, of course, we did know that we were going to play Oregon. I guess that [...]
Java Authors, Learn Java
I was reading a book on Neo4J and encountered this sentence: What is the secret of Neo4J’s speed? No, Neo4j developers haven’t invented a superfast algorithm for the military. Nor is Neo4j’s speed a product of the fantastic speed of the technologies it relies on (it’s implemented in Java after all!) (Emphasis mine. Quote is [...]
The Problem with the College Football Playoff
I really don’t know, offhand, if I’ve been pro- or anti-playoff for NCAA football. I liked that the BCS gave us the possibility of seeing a champion determined by playing a game, but I recognize that there are lots of arguments about who should be playing in that game. So far this year, though, I’ve [...]
Review: Pink Floyd’s “Endless River”
TL;DR Go get Pink Floyd‘s Endless River. I did, and it’s great – as long as you enjoy Pink Floyd. I bought the Floyd’s latest release – “The Endless River,” as mentioned – because it’s Pink Freaking Floyd, and it’s a new release. It’s awesome – but wants immersion. If you’re looking for something that [...]
DuOS-M: Android on Windows 8.1
One of my sons recently got me invested in Ice Cold Muffin‘s ICE, a game in which you try to take over bases in a simple directed graph. It’s a lot of fun, despite the extreme simplicity – maybe other game makers could benefit from noticing how simple games can be fun. Anyway, while it’s [...]
A few thoughts for a Monday…
Life has changed a lot lately. First, I changed employers; I’ve left Red Hat (for various reasons) and am now working for a company that will give me a little more direct purpose, along with an imperative for using Scala. (Did you see what I did there? Scala’s typically a functional language, not an imperative [...]
Adding arguments to CentOS boot
I’m running CentOS in a VirtualBox image (so I can play with Docker while using Windows, because … um… because). I don’t want X running; I am happiest with the command line for this application. So the screen resolution is really important to me; I don’t want an 80-by-25 console, I want something better. It’s [...]