It turns out that if the evince or maemo pdf reader teams want a good performance torture test, I can strongly recommend the MTA’s all-in-one NYC Subway map. Completely, unusably slow on the maemo, unfortunately; merely painful on evince. On the plus side, even acrobat takes its time to render it, so it isn’t an easy case, and given a choice between a map that can be rendered quickly and the NYC system, I’ll probably take NYC. Get back to me after a few months, though; by then the persistent NYC smell may have turned me into an MBTA fan again…
August, 2006
7
Aug 06
oh great laptop gurus
Oh great laptop gurus… is there any Lenovo T-series or combination of T-series that isn’t in some way evil unsupportable (ATI, atheros, etc.?) I was about to get Krissa a five pound apple when I remembered there was a five pound Lenovo that I’ve heard does not set people’s laps on fire or make the baby RMS jebus jesus cry.
(Ideally one that is 1400×1050 and available with warranty… IBM’s ebay shop seems to have gone away, and as far as I can tell I can’t buy a 1400×1050 without an fglrx-only ATI in the T60 series.)
(And man, does Lenovo/IBM’s website suck- you can search for old models, and they’ll let you configure them, and then… throw a mysterious error when you try to buy them.)
(And no, don’t bother trying to convince me that Apple isn’t evil.)
(Yes, too many parentheses.)
6
Aug 06
Settling in in the city (D-7 day for classes)
Krissa and I are slowly settling in. She posted a bit about it herself, particularly about going to the green market up the street on Thursday. I went with her this morning- it was small but nice.
Yummy stuff from Beth’s Kitchen.
Krissa and some boxes.
More yummy bits.
Maybe I won’t miss Cambridge Common after all.
2
Aug 06
variety of weirdo links while I wait for dinner
- Dude, Miggie! No need to wait for rails on the desktop- JFDI! You’re almost uniquely positioned to take the lead in doing it, and beat MS at their own game.
- The last conversation I had at Berkman before moving was about the advance of open standards, with email killing the walled gardens of AOLmail almost the canonical example. And now the rest of AOL is following the trend. Yay for standards. Now if only AIM would go jabber…
- Made my first post to FreeCycle New York today- giving away all my moving boxes, hopefully. Freecycle is a really interesting idea (basically, think ‘people who are too lazy or too generous to sell stuff on ebay’) and there are mailing lists for it for a lot of places. New York’s list just happens to be insane- 24K members.
- I have long thought that most politicians (perhaps most lawyers?) don’t have a full grasp of the complexity of the system they are building. (If law is code, then the US government is Vista- big, slow, and potentially out of control. But without competition to discipline it.) So I’m having a lot of fun reading the new Jurisdynamics blog- turns out that there is a group of lawyers who study law and complexity theory, and the overlap between them. Fascinating stuff.
- Tim and Havoc are right to talk about licensing and the insufficiencies of current Free Software licenses, given where the web and our data is going. More later.
- Mike Linksvayer is da bomb. Everyone interested in the future of free software should go read. More later.
1
Aug 06
Cliche Alert
I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep…
Woke up in New York this morning, but too asleep to take advantage of the sun off the Empire State. Oh well. Anyone subscribed to my gallery RSS feed will be getting a crapload of cliched NYC photos in the next few days, I’m afraid.
Nothing like moving to make you realize how much crap you’ve accreted. And nothing like paying someone else to move you to make you realize how much you should have thrown out before you left Boston. Again, oh well. Mostly unpacked- hopefully finish tomorrow, once we figure out what to do with all our books.