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Prairie Madness

It occurred to me, as the rain made a Photoshop filter out of my windshield. I squinted through the sheets of water, trying my best to discern traffic and traffic light. Gradually, fog crept its way up the windshield, cocooning me into the driver’s seat. And it occurred to me, as it has on so many other drives home, that I hate my ancestors.

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The Floating Interface

I’m a Machead. I’ll admit it. I grew up on PCs, which might be WHY I became a Machead. Since my first “stick of gum” iPod shuffle to our household iMac, my wife and I have come to embrace and relish the iLove.

That’s why I spent half my day refreshing the Apple homepage. I had heard, just in time, that Apple was announcing iPhone 3.0 software. When I realized the video of the keynote wouldn’t be out until afternoon, I sad mac’d the browser window and went about my day.

Little did I know…

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Ask Lost

Inspired by my wife, who has asked two questions of LOST, I submitted my own tonight.

A great deal of symbolism and metaphor plays into every episode of LOST. So much so that I assume the entire series is, in fact, another (greater) metaphor or symbol. It seems to me that the struggle between Whidmore and Linus over The Island bears strong resemblance to the Dokdo/Takeshima kerfuffle between Japan and South Korea (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/dokdo_or_takeshima.html). Can you confirm or deny that LOST is, in fact, little more than an impressive, epic incarnation indicative of an inane Asian insular impasse?

Eagerly, m!les

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Mozilla Labs Presents “Bespin”

The Bespin Code Editor
The Bespin Code Editor

I can program your website in Notepad. If you dare me, I’ll totally do it. Any programmer would. The geek cred for doing an entire website in Notepad is off the charts. People familiar with FrontPage, iWeb, or Dreamweaver shudder at the thought of being forced from the warm embrace of these applications to the cold, emptiness of Notepad. I would quickly embrace such cold emptiness. Any programmer would. It is that, we tell ourselves, that separates the true developers from the WYSIWYGers.

The honest truth, though, is that I would hate nearly every second of it. A hammer and a nail gun accomplish the same task, but I’ll take a nail gun over a hammer any day. Any programmer would. (Plus, a nail gun is cool on so many levels.)

Some background: behind every website is a bunch of folders and text files. Because of this, programmers have a lot of tool options since folders and text files are two of the most fundamental components of computers. The tool a programmer uses to manage and write his code is called an IDE. FrontPage, iWeb, and Dreamweaver are all IDEs, as are Notepad, Visual Studio, and Eclipse (to name a few).

Enter Bespin.

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