semi/signal

From Apple’s Carbon dev mailing list:

• On Jun 13, 2007, at 7:53 PM, Matthew Formica wrote:
  We can’t speak to future plans to make WWDC sessions available to non-Select/Premier members. In general, getting a Select/Premier membership, and in particular attending WWDC, is the best way to stay current with programming directions on the platform.

Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? You don’t stay “current” going to WWDC. You get to watch Steve perform. You hobnob with Apple people and hear the latest promises. Then you go home and hope what was promised actually comes to pass, but the other 51 weeks of the year WWDC does nothing to keep you current.

Last year developers at WWDC there told would be 64-bit support for Carbon. What kind of company charges people $1500 to sit them in a room and tell them lies?

Larry

I came across this amazing photo while looking at the wikipedia entry on high dynamic range imaging.

Photo by Paulo Barcellos Jr. Check out his photostream, many of his other works are equally impressive.

… or not:

The #2-pencil requirement is mostly historical. Because modern scantron systems can use all the sophistication of image sensors and computer image analysis, they can recognize marks made with a variety of materials and they can even pick out the strongest of several marks. If they choose to ignore marks made with materials other than pencil, it’s because they’re trying to be certain that they’re recognizing only marks made intentionally by the user. Basically, these systems can “see” most of the details that you can see with your eyes and they judge the markings almost as well as a human would.

from how everything works.

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish:

Photo by Peter Schuchert

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.

From robots with feelings,

Possibly the best explanation ever on how to execute a *nix script:

To run a non-executable sh script, use:

sh myscript

To run a non-executable bash script, use:

bash myscript

To start an executable (which is any file with executable permission); you just specify it by its path:

/foo/bar /bin/bar ./bar

To make a script executable, give it the necessary permission:

chmod +x bar ./bar

When a file is executable, the kernel is responsible for figuring out how to execte it. For non-binaries, this is done by looking at the first line of the file. It should contain a hashbang:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

The hashbang tells the kernel what program to run (in this case the command /usr/bin/env is ran with the argument bash). Then, the script is passed to the program (as second argument) along with all the arguments you gave the script as subsequent arguments.

That means every script that is executable should have a hashbang. If it doesn’t, you’re not telling the kernel what it is, and therefore the kernel doesn’t know what program to use to interprete it. It could be bash, perl, python, sh, or something else. (In reality, the kernel will often use the user’s default shell to interprete the file, which is very dangerous because it might not be the right interpreter at all or it might be able to parse some of it but with subtle behavioural differences such as is the case between sh and bash).

The amazing, but unused, child-killer illustration from Fallout 2, created by Brian Menze.

This image was unused and the only Vault Boy image to ever be cut from Fallout 2. (I’m sure you can figure out why) I remember when I got the request to do a perk illustration for “child Killer” that there would be no way to keep in from being offensive. I mean really! How do you make an illustration of “child killer” and keep it from being offensive? Anyway for some reason, I thought this was the least offensive way to do it. I have no idea what i was thinking. Even the designer who requested it realized it was a bad idea, so we nixed it. Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I drew this.

h/t HellForge

STS-130 Space Shuttle Endeavor launch from the Intracoastal Waterway Bridge in Ponte Vedra, Florida; about 115 miles from the launch pad. This launch was extra special because it is NASA’s last scheduled night launch of the space shuttle program.

Credit & copyright: James Vernacotola

I spent some time recently investigating file tagging on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and I was less than happy with my findings. The problem is that only certain file formats that support metadata can be tagged, for file types without such support it’s simply not possible to do any tagging. This is a major limitation and without ubiquitous tagging support, the feature itself becomes all but useless; as an end-user, I don’t care about file type, if I’m searching for a document should I have to remember whether it’s a Word document or a plain-text file? JPEG or TIFF? Absolutely not. The confusing thing is, at some point, Microsoft seemed to believe this as well, by default Win 2000 and higher hides file extensions for know file types – isn’t it then completely counter-intuitive to present a limitation based on file type. What this ultimately boils down to is the question of why would I bother tagging anything if only a subset of my files, based on file type, an attribute I don’t care much about, would benefit from the additional metadata?

This isn’t to say that there is necessarily an easy solution. I found this blog post to be the best write up on the topic which explains several approaches that could be taken to implement tagging and why storing metadata in the files themselves was chosen as the best approach. However, I don’t think storing metadata in the file system would be such a bad idea, I can understand the issues about losing metadata when copying to another volume, typically one with a older file system, but at some point you have to do what’s best for the future, not the present, by that I mean the only way you’d actually start to see file systems with proper support for metadata (via. NTFS-esque alternative streams or whatever) in use is by providing an imperative for users to buy or format devices with those file systems; as-is, we’ll continue to use systems such as FAT32 and programmers will continue to remain agnostic to metadata. At the very least, a hybrid approach, storing metadata both in the file itself, when supported, and within the file system would seem a worthwhile solution.

I’m not an artist, but I think this is a pretty great message and can be extrapolated pretty easily to other professions and to those of us who are starving artists in spirit,

Link