This whole post should just be a single tweet, but somehow it doesn't feel safe to say anything comparing Android and iOS development, even implicitly, without five paragraphs full of disclaimers. First, here's the tweet:

Developers complaining about fragmentation on the Android platform are like fashion designers complaining about size fragmentation on the human body.

Expanding on that I'd say, yes, it's easier to make something that fits beautifully if you know the exact size and shape you're targeting and don't have to think about how it will look on other form factors / body shapes. Some designers create clothes for only the fashion model body shape, and some create clothes that fit a wider variety of body shapes.

When I start up the shower it's the wrong temperature and adjusting it to the right temperature takes longer in this apartment than it has in any home in which I've previously lived. I wanted to blame the problem on the low flow shower head, but I'm having a hard time doing it. My thinking was that the time delay from when I adjust the shower to when I actually feel the change is unusually high due to the shower head's reduced flow rate.

My primary home machine is a Linux deskop, and my primary work machine is an OSX laptop. I do most of my work on the Linux box, ssh-ed into the OS X machine -- I recognize that's the reverse of usual setups, but I love the awesome window manager and the copy-on-select X Window selection scheme.

My frustration is in having separate copy and paste buffers across the two systems. If I select something in a work email, I often want to paste it into the Linux machine. Similarly if I copy an error from a Linux console I need to paste it into a work email.

NFC tags are tiny wireless storage devices, with very thin antennas, attached to poker chip sized stickers. They're sort of like RFID tags, but they only have a 1 inch range, come in various capacities, and can be easily rewritten. If the next iPhone adds a NFC reader I think they'll be huge. As it is they're already pretty fun and only a buck each even when bought in small quantities.

WordStar was the first word processor I ever used. It was non-WYSIWYG, and it was good. I haven't used it since the mid 80s, but I haven't used MS Word since the mid 90s either.

Sometimes I am sent .doc or .docx files, and usually I can figure out what's inside them using OS X Preview or Google Docs, but it's never perfect and frequently numbered lists get renumbered, which makes discussing the docs on the phone particularly hard.

Back in 2008 I wote an extension for Mercurial to render activity charts like this one:

Yesterday I finally got around to updating it for modern Mercurial builds, including 2.1. It's posted on bitbucket and has a page on the Mercurial wiki. It uses pygooglechart as a wrapper around the excellent Google image chart API.

I really like the google image charts becuse the entire image is encapsulated as a URL, which means they work great with command line tools. A script can output a URL, my terminal can make it a link, and I can bring it up in a browser window w/o ever really using a GUI tool at all.

Now that I no longer live in Minneapolis it seems a fine time to shut down the Minneapolis Surveilance Camera Project I launched in 2003.

At peak it got mentioned in a few strib articles, was written about in the downtown journal, and got a lot of hits from computers within city and county government. After my initial inventory walk most of the camera additions came in via the website from strangers. More of the reports had photos of the cameras once everyone had a camera in their phone.

Two days ago I powered down a good server for the first time in years and the last time ever. It doesn't compare to euthanizing a pet, but it still made me more sad than I expected. Below is a remembrance. I've made the server male because once you've gotten so silly as to write a eulogy for a server you might as well go all out.

Ry4an.org II was a good server. In 2001 his Pentium III hardware was already old -- corporate castoff acquired for free. He took a Fedora install without any configuration hassles and always assigned the same ethX numbers to each of his three PCI NICs, without aliases in the modules.conf, which Ry4an.org I could never get right.

I've just emptied out my safe deposit box for the move, and thought I'd re-post this:

If you hear I've died someone who knows their way around gpg should ask Kate for the CD pictured below. It'll be in a safe deposit box that's in my name, and she'll have access after my death. There's a key revocation certificate with reason 'death' on the CD and a printed ASCII-armored version too since the odds of us being able to read CDs in a few decades is approximately nil.

I'll take Mercurial over git any day for all the reasons obvious to anyone who's really used both of them, but geeyah github sure makes contributing to projects easy. At work we had a ten minute MongoDB upgrade downtime turn into two hours, and when we finally figured out what deprecated option was causing the daemon launch to abort, rather than grouse about it on Twitter (okay, I did that too) I was able to submit a one line patch without even cloning down the repository that got merged in.