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The Nokia N900: It runs Linux (Maemo) It’s not locked down by any carriers. It runs emacs(!!!!) N900: Because every cell phone should be capable of running X Windows, Apache, and MySql.

I hate to admit it, but I think I love Microsoft’s Consolas font. I have not seen such a beautiful mono-spaced font since Courier. It’s easy to read, yet stylish, in a way that doesn’t distract nor interfere with legibility. It reminds a little of one of my other favorite fonts, Gill Sans.

This morning I was listening to a piece of music that I’ve been looking forward to hearing with geat anticipation. It’s by an ensemble that plays a fairly accessible blend of jazz fusion/rock – exactly the sort of thing I love to listen to most, and what I aspire to play. I discovered them by [...]

I’ve been enjoying a great Google Tech Talk with Alex Wright, discussing The Web That Wasn’t – the various attempts at collecting knowledge that preceded what we now call the World Wide Web. Wright’s presentation offers an interesting perspective on our quest for knowledge preservation through information technology. He touches on philosophy, library science, theology, [...]

Project Teddy, despite the stupid name, is a really fun 3D drawing toy. Definitely recreational – not for diagramming the next addition to your home (use Google SketchUp for that!

I rewrote my shell script that grabs the current National Geographic Picture of the Day in Perl, which should allow it to run almost anywhere Perl 5 runs. The original version was a shell script that relied on the GNU version of grep (specifically the -o option). The new version, renamed ‘Paperhanger,’ is still dependent [...]

Now that my Mac is aging (I’ve already seen one hard drive die this past Spring), I’m reassessing my needs and considering my options for my next-generation music computer. Recently, I’ve noticed more buzz around Linux audio. Running across Steven Downer’s Linux Rock Star blog this week (via Peter Kirn’s excellent Create Digital Music) has [...]

Martin Fowler describes a quality he calles Customer Affinity, the ability for a software developer to work with the customer. I’ve often heard it said that enterprise software is boring, just shuffling data around, that people of talent will do “real” software that requires fancy algorithms, hardware hacks, or plenty of math. I feel that [...]

(Or, Jonathan Retreats to His Shell, While Paradoxically Becoming Less WIMPy) (Or, How I Became An Old Fart) I’ve been a unix nerd-wannabe for more than a dozen years, but all along, I relied fairly heavily on whatever WIMP interface was available. And though I’d read Neil Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line, [...]

I hate hate hate Struts tags. I see no advantage to Struts tags vs JSP scriptlets. I think I feel like someone looking at Lisp source code for the first time – that rising panic when you realize that the semantics are staring you in the face, but everything looks the same – nouns, verbs, [...]