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- November 4, 2004
Transparency in Web Development
November 4, 2004Read moreCornell University’s Web Communications Team kept a blog about their site development, which is an interesting exposition of “why decisions are made a certain way”. It’s an interesting read, for those of you who are interested in seeing how the production process goes from the PM’s perspective.
- November 4, 2004
Screen Typography
November 4, 2004Read moreBuddy Sean asked me about choosing fonts for software development. “What is a good legible font for software? Where do you find out more information about this? Is there a developer kit you can buy or download?”
- November 4, 2004
Money of the World, Regrettable Food
November 4, 2004Read moreI was browsing through lileks.com after visiting the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which preserves stomach-churning food photography of the 50s and 60s. There’s also a neat section on Money on the World…check out Brazil and Cuba! A country’s money tends to be filled with interesting iconography and symbolism too, so that’s well worth checking out from a graphic design perspective.
You can see a lot of their other projects as part of their Institute of Official Cheer. It’s a good waste of an hour.
- November 3, 2004
How to Write a Compiler
November 3, 2004Read moreBack in my high school days, I found that I liked knowing the hoary details of low level computer operations: assembly language, instruction decoding, firmware and register manipulation.
One regret I’ve had, though, is not ever taking a Compilers course. That is, how to write a compiler for a language like C or C++. Unlike some of the fruitier “Learn to code in Pascal, LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE” courses, writing a compiler is a marriage between expression of code in a high level language and implementation in nice spurts of machine code. While I have no great desire to write compilers for a living, I do wish I knew more about how they work. So I was bopping around the web today and came across Inger, an open-source compiler with an e-book. Cool. And also Open C++, an open-source C++ compiler project. The Internet rocks.
- November 2, 2004
Computer Cooling
November 2, 2004Read more
My desktop PC, used primarily for production, started making a funny fan noise a couple days ago. Today, it emited an alarm noise on powerup. This usually means something bad, so I had to diagnose the problem.
It turns out that the CPU cooling fan was worn out. It’s only a year or so old, so it’s kind of irking. Today’s CPU’s need active cooling fans, so when they poop out you have a few seconds to shut down before they melt down. Fortunately, my motherboard detects these anomalies and shuts down. So I went down to CompUSA and got a new one:
Behold!
This is an “enthusiast” CPU cooler, with an adjustable knob you can mount on your PC to control the fan speed. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work very well with the fan speed detection circuitry on my motherboard. For $14, it was one of the cheaper Athlon coolers, and it certainly looked neat. So far temperatures seem acceptable…not amazingly low, but at least my computer isn’t beeping at me anymore.
