“So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?”
Nice: So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?
I know Helvetica is pervasive, but I never noticed them on most of these household names. For Toyota, here’s a clue: the clue is on the quiz itself.
AT&T Can Get It Right Too
I’m still using a prepaid SIM card on my iPhone (which is now a US phone, thanks to a nice dude in the 5th Ave Apple Store), which means that I need to purchase my SMS and data packages separately.
Before today, I had to call 611 to buy these “Feature Packages”. Going through several minutes of automated voice menus was the only way to buy these packages. Today, I’m simply overjoyed to see this:
They too included an “Automatic Feature Package Renewal” feature, which I’m not going to fall for. Hah!
The Finer Things
Stolen from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball: Finer Things in Mac
Many tiny little finer things makes for One Big Compelling Thing. Windows can do everything that Macs do (and some might argue for cheaper), but Macs simply feels nicer.
Conway’s Game of Life on <canvas>
With Firefox 3.5‘s release today, it’s time to start playing with HTML 5. <canvas> isn’t new to 3.5, but it is part of the proposed standard, along with other juicy stuff like <audio> and <video>.
I have first encountered John Conway’s Game of Life in a freshman CS course and implemented it using some primitive graphics library on C++. It was definitely much easier and more straightforward using <canvas> and JavaScript.
Note: This only works on the latest versions of non-shitty browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. There are <canvas> APIs built on top of VML for IE, but *shrug*.
Screw you, AT&T
I’m using a Canadian iPhone 3G, which was jailbroken and soft-unlocked using yellowsn0w so that I can use AT&T GoPhone’s SIM card on it. Today, the iPhone Dev-Team released ultrasn0w, which means that I can finally join the rest of the iPhone OS 3.0 world.
Unfortunately, AT&T decided to be a dick and disabled 3G/EDGE data access on 3.0 because I’m not on an “approved iPhone data plan”. WTF? As if the iPhone (and 3.0 only, mind you) sucks down special bytes that other devices don’t.
Fortunately, Alan Vasquez over at Limited Edition iPhone is a genius and figured out a workaround using a custom APN.
Of course, AT&T can be a bigger tool than they already are by patching this up just to rain on our little parade. Can somebody please kill this dinosaur of a telco already?
Getting A File’s SHA1 Checksum on Leopard
Note to self—to get a file’s MD5 hash on a default Leopard install (sans additional cryptography libraries), it is just:
$ md5 filename
But for SHA1, it is:
$ openssl sha1 filename
From man md5, it looks like the md5 command is just a binary wrapper around OpenSSL:
$ openssl dgst -md5 filenameOr simply:
$ openssl md5 filename
Robert Nystrom on “Naming Things in Code”
In the same vein as “If it’s hard to name, that’s generally a bad sign”, Robert wrote an excellent guide about Naming Things in Code.
I agree with everything in that post. The only thing I’m going to nitpick is regarding style—most of the languages I’m familiar with usually use TitleCase for class/object/constructor names and camelCase for function/method and property/variable names.
PHP is a notoriously bad example of style conventions, but maybe understandably so considering its legacy.
Bing’s Logo Is A Little Off?
From Brand New: Bing sets New Record in Horizontal Scaling
I thought it was just me when I observed that Bing‘s logo looked a little off, but Brand New manages to explain why.
I Washed My Apple Keyboard In The Sink
Yesterday, I spilled a healthy serving of organic peach yogurt all over my Apple keyboard. Read the rest of this entry →
The Fender Stratocaster, As Applied to Software Design
One of Jimi Hendrix's flamed Stratocasters at the Petersen Museum, Los Angeles
From Cooper Journal: What We Can Learn From the Fender Stratocaster.
I came across this article a long time ago but it is still as relevant as ever.