Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Benchmark results for Snow Leopard: 32- versus 64-bit kernel

It was recently revealed by ZD Net that Apple’s new Mac OS X release, dubbed Snow Leopard, would default to a 32-bit kernel despite being largely portrayed by Apple as the final step in the Mac’s journey to being a fully 64-bit OS. The reactions, as with anything Apple-related, were sheer polemic. Just check out [...]

Twitter… for men

With recent advent of Woofer, the Twitter clone that requires the use of 1400 characters, I’d like to add my own entry into the foray.
Introducing Twitless: Twitter for Men. “140 Characters. A month.”
You can use your 140 characters any way you want, but if you use ‘em up early, you’ll just have to wait until [...]

New MacBook Pros have hard drive problems

When the new unibody MacBook Pros (MBPs, henceforth) came out, many owners were up in arms over the fact that the new, supposedly high-end models lost SATA 2, and were only capable of 1.5 Gb/s SATA 1 speeds. Some people felt this was fair because Apple only provides SATA 1 drives, but this isn’t entirely [...]

Accelerating code using GCC’s prefetch extension

I recently started playing with GCC’s prefetch builtin, which allows the programmer to explicitly tell the processor to load given memory locations in cache. You can optionally inform the compiler of the locality of the data (i.e. how much priority the CPU should give to keep that piece of data around for later use) as [...]

Classic Atlantic article on the diamond scam

One of the more useful things to be aware of as an American is the surprising ruthlessness of Madison Avenue’s manipulation. Nowhere is that more evident than in a classic Atlantic story from 1982 exposing how the public was fooled into thinking diamond rings are an integral part of marriage custom. I’d read it a [...]

Running Real’s Rhapsody in Linux

Every once in a while I have to put something actually useful up here. I just spent a while trying to get Rhapsody to work in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu 8.10. Having an entire music store at my disposal is one of the things I miss most from my Windows machine when I need to [...]

Major bug in Ubuntu 8.10 networking for static IP addresses

There is a bug in the new version of Ubuntu (8.10, or Intrepid Ibex), where static IP network settings are lost after every reboot. Kind of makes it hard to connect to your box remotely with ssh.
Pretty big bug, huh? You’d think it would be rather embarrassing when your latest operating system release breaks the internet [...]