Ben Crowder

This blog is now defunct. I’ve started a new one at Blank Slate to chronicle my creative and design activities, and all future posts will show up there instead. (It’s too much of a pain to migrate past posts over, though, so they’ll stay here.)

I upgraded to Leopard this past Saturday. Generally a good thing — I love Quick Look and use it far more than I ever thought I would, and I’m a big fan of Spaces as well (Linux window managers have had the same functionality for years, and I’ve missed it terribly — but no longer!). And if my WD Passport external hard drive weren’t acting up, I’d probably be in love with Time Machine, too.

The main downside for me right now is that Blender is now really sluggish, and it blurs the screen at times. I’m not sure what’s up with that — other people seem to be reporting that it runs on fine on Leopard.

Yesterday I pulled open my development site (hosted locally) to work on Blank Slate, but got a forbidden error message. It was rather worrisome (and my Internet connection was acting up at the time), but then I found Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and it solved that problem. Phew. :)

In other news, I finally bought a TextMate license yesterday. Now I just need to immerse myself in the keystroke documentation until I’m as fast as I was in Vim…

[tags]Apple, Leopard, PHP, TextMate, Vim[/tags]

I haven’t been as frequent on here as I was expecting, but hopefully that’ll change soon. :)

As winter approaches and there’ll soon be ice on the sidewalks again, I got to thinking about my dress shoes and their alarming lack of traction. I wear them every day to work, and last winter I remember the woeful struggle I made each day penguin-waddling home down the hill so I wouldn’t slip and fall on the ice. Loads of fun, let me tell you.

I wonder if there’s a good way to deal with this. De-icing the sidewalks is hard, so the most cost-effective way seems to be on the shoe end of things. Maybe some removable shoe-cleatish kind of wrapping that goes around one’s shoes, like chains on tires? It’d have to be easy to slip on and take off, lightweight (so you could take it with you), and preferably fold into a bag or something so it wouldn’t get your pocket/purse dirty when you’re inside. I’m envisioning some kind of plastic, perhaps, almost like bubble wrap but sturdier and with more traction. Or something. Anything, really, so long as I don’t have to wear huge boots to work. :)

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with a Sony Portable Reader (for eBooks), and I have to say I’m not that impressed. The typography was atrocious, the interface didn’t feel smooth enough, and even if those weren’t the case, the page switching thing (flashing black for half a second) was very annoying and distracting.

Reading Jeffrey Young’s review just now, I rather find myself agreeing — the real book wins out because it “is utterly portable, requires no batteries, has a well-defined user interface, and comes eqipped to be understood by most pairs of eyes.” And books don’t cost $400. You can’t trump the real thing.

That said, I don’t really know that eBooks are meant to replace paper books. I see them as being supplemental devices for times when the real thing isn’t feasible (textbooks, for instance, and reference works). Sure, some people will use them for leisure reading, and that’s great. There are times when it’s difficult to get a hard copy of a book you want to read, and eBooks could definitely fill that niche. (I’m thinking primarily of out-of-print books here.) But for works that are easily available, nothing beats the local library and a real, paper-and-ink book that you can take to bed without worrying about the batteries running out or it falling off the bed and dying an ignominious death.

Even so, I still think we need to continue research into making eBooks more palatable and feasible. And that’s a topic for another post. :)

So, I’ve decided to rechristen this blog. I don’t write often enough about programming to really justify having a separate blog for it, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But what I do have a huge itching to start writing more about is design. Not graphic design, mind you (I have BenjaminCrowder.com for that), but all the rest — industrial, instructional, UI, you name it. It’ll be the same thing I’ve done over on my Beyond blog, just with wider scope. (Everything except genealogy. :))

As a quick sampling of what I’ve got in mind, here are some of the topics I’ve got floating around in my head: ebooks (how to make them more palatable), kitchen designs, map design, and information design theory. And my inspirations include Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, Edward Tufte’s books, and the TED talks, so that’s the sort of flavor I’ll be getting at.

I’ll have the maiden post up in the next few days.

It’s been a while. :) So, I ended up buying a Mac Mini, and last week I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs so I’m sitting pretty well right now. (With the original 512 megs the Mini had at first, things were dog slow, especially when I tried to run Photoshop or InDesign. But now it’s quite fast. I am happy. :))

In other news, at work I’ve been coding a board game in Flash. It’s effectively my first Flash project ever (years and years ago I edited a company map in Flash, but it was so long ago that I can hardly remember it, and I was only maintaining it, so it doesn’t really count). Flash is smooth. I’m not completely satisfied with ActionScript, but it certainly works well enough, and I’m sure more experience with it will make it better. Overall, my time with Flash has been good and fun.

Finally, I’m hoping to get back into more Ruby/Python/Perl coding before too long. My new job’ll require some XML magic, for which I’ll probably use Python and XSLT. And in my typographical work on the side I’ll be doing a lot with TeX and either Ruby or Python.

All of which is to say, hopefully I’ll start blogging here more often. :)

Since I never was able to get this box to boot off the install CD, I’ve left it on and have just made my changes from there. (Which has saved some time, I’ve got to admit.)

So, up until a few hours ago I was using Xfce, but I switched to Fluxbox (which I was using back in the old days) and I’m very much pleased with it. I’m flirting with installing idesk or fluxter to give me desktop icons, but I want to see if I can go without. It’s really been interesting going back to a minimalist window manager — I’ve taken so much for granted. :) But the speed is phenomenal. Fluxbox rocks my world.

As far as themes go, I’m using Sleek, which I think I made myself but it’s been so long and I can’t remember anymore. (I love the artwiz fonts, by the way.) Still have to set the Gtk theme to something I like…

Anyway, I was originally somewhat hesitant to going back to Linux, but now I can very easily see myself using both Linux and Mac in the future. Now if only I could get Blender to stop crashing… (It doesn’t like my video card.)

I’m writing this from my “new” Linux box. (I bought a flatscreen monitor off Buy.com and then a computer from a guy on Facebook Marketplace.) It’s Xubuntu 7.04, and at the moment I’m running off the guy’s installation, but as soon as I can get the drive to boot off the install CD, I’m wiping it clean and starting from scratch (with Xubuntu).

It’s nice to have a computer again. Really nice. And while I still plan to get a Mac again — a MacBook or MacBook Pro, most likely — I’ve got to say that I’d forgotten the cool things about Linux. (Being able to configure the window manager so extensively, for example.) I’m a happy camper. And when I do get that Mac, I’ll have the best of both worlds. This is good. :)

And now that I have an easily accessible computer, I’ll hopefully be able to start doing more development from here. And that’ll mean I may even start posting on here more frequently. :)

Came across Lisp: The Ducati of Programming Languages over at defmacro.org yesterday:

“When you drive a car”, he said, “there is a disconnect between your thoughts and the machine. You sense it, but you’re never really conscious of it until you get a bike. You want the car to accelerate, you add some gas, and then you have to wait for a split second before the car listens to you. On a bike this delay is so much smaller, your brain doesn’t really register it. You think of something, and you’re there. A bike becomes a part of you – an extension of your body. You’ll probably need a Ferrari to achieve such unity with a car.”

~drool~ :)

[tags]Lisp, programming[/tags]

I’m not doing so hot at updating this blog regularly, am I. :) School’s keeping me busy (seems like I say that a lot) but I’ll try to figure out a focus, something that’ll get me writing. (And be interesting to read.)

In the meantime, I think I want to master regular expressions next. I’m familiar with them and have used them often, but there’s a lot of power in them there regexes. In other news, I’ll be coding a family website in Rails over the next few months. It’ll be a good testing ground for my Beyond work. And at work, it looks like this web app I’m working on will be almost all Javascript. Not what I expected, but I’d much rather work in Javascript than ASP.NET. :)

[tags]Rails, Javascript, ASP.NET[/tags]