Quarter Life Crisis

Sine Romance¶

567 words

• Comment in The Guardian has it that maths teaching should be as much about its romance and mystery as about sines and cosines. There we go.
• Looks like people are spooling again. Right away with some quality material. I shall be observant on my forthcoming trip.
• Steffen found out that holding the option key while dragging the scroll thumb in Cocoa applications will give you slowed-down scrolling. Very handy for long lists or documents. Such as greatly improved versions of UnicodeChecker that will be available shortly.
• That said, I feel compelled to comment on the Carbon vs. Cocoa debate you see popping up every now and again: While it may be true technically and even ideologically that both Carbon and Cocoa are first class citizens on OSX, looking at applications certainly feels differently. You want working Services, good use of sheets, nice scrolling &c? Then you're probably looking for a Cocoa app. You want to worry about Unicode text or not to able to dismiss that request the application has without switching to it? Then Carbon apps may be more to your taste. I am not saying Cocoa apps can't get it wrong and Carbon apps can't get it right – it's just that many Cocoa apps come with all bells and whistles straight away while many Carbon apps don't. (link via 2lmc)
• Also at that site, detailed views on Mac Word 6. Not that I am into Office products now, but certainly of historical interest.
• Eric Raymond curses CUPS' user-friendlyness. Many good points there, including that Apple still gets it wrong in the way they let you choose between different ways of connecting to a printer. The thing Eric misses, though, seems to be that Aunt Tillie, will probably run away screaming when having to add a print queue, rather than a printer. We want to print stuff, not queue it, right?
• That said, it seems that the highly successful project of our admin to put obstacles into our way reached another level. Somehow I can't reach our printers via AppleTalk anymore. Welcome to the world of manually entering printer names, selecting the models and setting up the options. I have been printing over AppleTalk without any setup whatsoever since 1994. Seems that it took people a whole decade to rid us of that convenience.
• As for the Cocoa vs. Carbon bit above: While it may be possible to achieve the convenience of AppleTalk with today's technologies, it just doesn't seem to happen. So it's worth very little.
• Sometimes, German online and conspiracy magazine Teleoplis publishes articles in both German and English. Mostly these seem to have been in English and translated to German afterwards. Their translations aren't brilliant and occasionally you get gems like for this article's teaser summary: It's How far America's military will go to swindle a young person to die for an unworthy cause in English and the strange Wie weit das US-Militär geht, um einen jungen Menschen dazu zu bringen, für einen wertlosen Grund zu sterben in German. Translating unworthy as wertlos is not just strange but rather wrong.
• I have to admit that I have a special relation to the word unworthy ever since my tutor marked the only human-readable sentence in my M.Sc. dissertation with Please remove this unworthy sentence.
• Richard is full of good advice for your life.

February 28, 2004, 4:13