JibberJabber

WaveInterference (OpenGL Shaders at CocoaHeads)

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RainbowWave (WaveInterference)So as I try to think of things to fill in my blog, this is one of the significant ones because this is one of the reasons behind me leaving my anonymity behind.

At CocoaHeads in Silicon Valley some number of months ago, I gave a short demo on using OpenGL shaders to offload processing onto the graphics card. This had been prompted a month earlier by a student who gave a presentation on a Wave Interference program he made for science class. I noticed that the performance suggested it was using fixed pipeline drawing on the video card to render the Wave Interference patterns. I suggested at the time that shaders may make the thing stupidly fast (at the cost of complexity).

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Sunday, November 18, 2007 11:04 PM

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Making Comments and Trackbacks harder than they should be

I’ve been investigating how to add commenting support to this blog. The easy way would be to sign up for .Mac (since I’m using iWeb at the moment). But I have a very hard time parting with money. Some features of .Mac I already have available to me, and some others I don’t care about, which means the cost per-feature list of remaining features that are useful to me seem pretty steep with the $100/yr price tag of .Mac.

Enough people on the discussion forums at Apple seem to share the same sentiment, and have posted several alternatives. The most popular solution is HaloScan, which seems to be an online service that allows you to embed Javascript that points to their systems so people can add comments to their web site. …
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Sunday, November 18, 2007 6:03 PM

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On Time Machine Errors and Data Integrity...


Today I got my first serious error with Time Machine. An automated hourly backup was running when all of a sudden an alert panel popped up saying there was some error and Time Machine failed to backup. (Not very helpful.)


I immediately tried to run a manual backup, and the same error occurred. So I checked the system logs and found some nonsense like:

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[457]: Error: (-50) Creating directory 
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[457]: Failed to make snapshot.
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[457]: Backup failed with error: 2

So I opened up Disk Utility, and I thought I would try running a Verify Disk/Repair Disk and maybe a Repair Permissions just in case.

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Friday, November 16, 2007 5:56 PM

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Advertising a legacy network printer with Bonjour (with a little help from launchd)

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Rendezvous is truly revolutionary. It's one of the things that is going to have the largest impact on application design over the next couple of years. All the UIs, and all the security models, are going to have to be rethought once all applications are rendezvous-enabled. And that is going to happen.... We're just at the beginning of the second internet revolution, and Rendezvous is a big part of it.     -- Tim O’Reilly, May. 2003




One of my favorite technologies from Apple is Bonjour/Zeroconf. Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) for those who don’t know is Apple’s implementation of Zeroconf. Zeroconf is a technology developed at Apple (being pushed as an open standard) that in layman terms brings plug & play or “zero configuration” to IP based services.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007 5:43 PM

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Leopard Printer Driver Gripes


So printer support has been an annoyance to me recently. I upgraded my systems to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It seems that printer drivers are a problem for me. First, I have an old Lemark Optra S 1625 laser printer (bought used). The Tiger drivers worked fine, but in Leopard, almost all the drivers for the Lexmark Optra series no longer exist. Fortunately, the printer understands PostScript 2 and HPL-6 so there are generic drivers I can use. This was one of the reasons I paid extra to get a PostScript printer. 

Actually, I knew about the Lexmark missing drivers before Leopard shipped because I was in the Seed program. I filed a bug report with Apple (5441973) and their response was to contact Lexmark to tell them they need to write drivers. …
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Thursday, November 15, 2007 5:33 PM

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My First Blog

Greetings! This is the first entry in my first blog. I’m not sure what to say.

<At this point the reader realizes nothing profound will be found here.>

Thursday, November 15, 2007 5:31 PM

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