Mike Cohen

CD Cover Meme

by

I found this on Flickr a few days ago.

Make your own CD Cover with the following steps and rocket yourself to mulit-platinum status and start fending off the groupies!

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
    The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

  2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
    The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

  3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
    The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover (make sure the picture is CC licensed).

CD-Cover

Original photo here.

AppleTV

by

My AppleTV arrived today. The setup was quick and easy, although it took about 20 minutes to sync with my MacBook Pro over 802.11n. The picture quality is excellent, even though I’m using component video rather than HDMI, since the lone HDMI input on my TV is being used for my Comcast HD DVR.

AppleTV

AppleTV

Eclipse

by

I tried to take some pictures of the eclipse tonight, but they came out pretty bad. I was using my 18-55mm lens, which is my highest power zoom lens, but it wasn’t sufficient. I shot raw using a tripod with extremely long exposures. Since it was too dark for AF, I had to manually focus. It was also extremely cloudy.

This is the best one:
Eclipse

While I was setting up the camera and testing the exposure, I took this shot which I think looks really cool:
Night Shot

Barack Obama: a leader, not a boss

by

Via Craig Newmark:

Recently, I’ve developed the unfortunate habit of reading history,
seeing that now and then there’ve been people who moved entire nations.
They’re usually competent managers, but have some elusive additional
ability that makes then what we call leaders.

That includes JFK, Lincoln, Elizabeth I, Victoria, Gandhi, Churchill, and a short list of others that you know.

We need to restore American values to the White House, and to enlist
all Americans in that effort; we want to be the good guys again. That
takes a leader, and that means Barack Obama.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

MacBook Pro Keyboard Firmware Update

by

I installed the keyboard firmware update on my MacBook Pro last night and it fixed the annoying keyboard problem I’ve been having since I got this machine.

I didn’t even have to reboot when I ran the updater; it simply required quitting all open applications. It took about 20 seconds to run and the keyboard was fixed. The console log showed a series of messages from HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool ending with “Flash image verification succeeded” and “bootload success”.

Happy Birthday to Minipundit

by

Minipundit turned 18 today, which means he’ll be able to vote in the most important election of our lifetime. He’s been working for Obama’s campaign. I’ve known Dylan since MacHack 2001 and I’ve known his father, who wrote Fetch, even longer.

Is Assembly Language programming an obsolete skill?

by

Obsolete Skills is a wiki inspired by Scoble’s recent post listing “things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us”.

One of the “obsolete skills” listed on the wiki is assembly language programming. Although most programmers won’t write an entire application in assembly language, it’s still a very useful skill for several reasons.

Being able to understand assembly language is essential for effective debugging. Looking at the generated code in the debugger gives an extra depth of understanding how the application actually works and what’s really happening. Seeing the register contents and the last instruction executed will give important clues about why it crashed.

Even with faster processors, there are still times when it’s important to squeeze out the highest possible performance, such as games or graphics-intensive work. In many cases, the only way to do it is to recode some inner loops or frequently executed code in assembly language.

I don’t think assembly language programming will become obsolete any time soon.

links for 2008-02-19

by
  • Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis. Now available only by IP address.
    (tags: censorship)
  • Converts bitmap images into vector art.
    (tags: graphics)
  • Scoble came up with the idea in a recent blog post to make a list of ‘obsolete skills.’ He describes these skills as things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.