Ben Slade

Cocoa memory management is fairly straightforward, so I shouldn't have to post this. But I will, if only to prevent someone else from doing so. Only longer. And wronger.

BANANA CARAMEL PIE IS NOT THAT HARD IF YOU THINK IT IS HARD THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU BANANA CARAMEL PIE REQUIRES BOTH PATIENCE AND RICE IF YOU HAVE NEITHER GO TO HELL

Welcome to the K5 Book Club! Discussions on K5 have brought up this book. In an unrelated situation, real life people have recommended the same book to me. Mildly cultish following and also a nice short read. Dated but charming, and provides plenty of ammo for accusing your fellows of pathological behavior, which is probably the best reason to read psych books! Definitely up there with Freud and LRH. A true classic.

The real Planet Earth has an ongoing situation that could use a ship of superheros like those in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek soap opera. 60+ days have passed since the Deepwater Horizon's explosion and sinking. BP company engineers have been working continuously to stop the oil, but all efforts to plug the gusher in the gulf have failed. Efforts to contain the oil are ongoing, but the best case scenario calls for the well to run until the relief wells are completed in August. In short, people are becoming aware that BP's Big Problem in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the most epic environmental catastrophe of the past 1000 years. If only the Enterprise was available to help.

Salaryman arrived to the car-park just as Boss's chauffeur was stamping on his cigarette. “Boss will be down in a second,” the chauffeur said. “You don't happen to have a laptop running OS/2, do you?” “No, I don't,” Salaryman said, tuning his cufflinks. “Darn,” the chauffeur said, staring at the doorway he expected Boss to walk through any minute. “I wanted to check my email.” Just then the door opened. Boss walked through, followed by whoever had held the door for him. Salaryman kept a keen eye on the new fellow. He was dark, thin, and tall and wore a meticulously-brushed three-piece suit.

Salaryman set his coffee mug on his desk. On a coaster, of course. Salaryman respected his banking firm too much to stain their solid oak desks with his fresh-ground Brazilian coffee. Smacking his lips, Salaryman hit the space bar on his black keyboard with his index finger and sat back. There was a quick electronic beep and some fans under his gargantuan desk whirled to life. The LCD lit up and Salaryman typed his BIOS username and password. Username: salarymanPassword: •••••••••

It is never a happy occasion to realize that a not-for-profit group, no matter how destitute or successful, is undeserving of charitable donations. And just last week I had such an unhappy realization. I wanted to donate a sizable sum of money to the OpenBSD Foundation for development of the OpeBSD operating system and other related projects. My uncle, an old Unix graybeard from the Seventies, devoted his retirement and considerable savings to teaching inner-city youth about computers and programming. He recently passed away and left instructions in his will that I donate money, in the amount of US $100,000, to "the most meritorious Free, Unix-like operating system" as according to my own research into the matter. [From http://www.trollaxor.com/2010/06/why-i-almost-gave-openbsd-100000-didnt.html.]

Like many of my childhood friends, I was deeply moved by the 1984 B survival movie Red Dawn (Chinese title: 《赤色黎明》)--but that was during the peak of the Cold War when people still believed MAD was on the horizon...Patrick Swayze (RIP), C Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, and the then still lovely Lea Thompson played the most 'heroic' characters I'd ever seen on screen because Ronnie Reagan was in office and we were fighting the red menace of Soviet invaders deep in the American heartland. It's no wonder then that today, exiled here on the brink in semi-colonized .TW, I'm thrilled to learn this film is being remade to feature PLA divisions roaring across the Great Plains and my countrymen rising up to "murder Chinamen"!

I was a long-time OpenBSD user since the 3.1 days, and cut my teeth on Unix development there. I was attracted by its focus on security and conscientious coding practices. I was happy through the early 4.x days, but the more I got involved in developing for OpenBSD the more I was dissuaded from doing so.Part of the issue was this focus on security. After I began to use OpenBSD at home and at work in earnest, I realized that it was limited in hardware support compared to other operating systems. I purchased a new workstation and portable within a year of each other, and both times came to some unhappy realizations about OpenBSD support.I began to seriously look at Linux and FreeBSD at this point, knowing hardware support was much more robust. (I had also looked at NetBSD, but even though it booted on nearly everything, driver support was anemic.) I started to dual-boot FreeBSD on my workstation, and spent more and more time there. But it wasn't only hardware support that pushed me away from OpenBSD.[http://www.trollaxor.com/2010/06/why-i-left-openbsd.html]

Recently, Google announced Android 2.2, the next version of their Linux-based mobile operating system targeted at phones and PDAs, at Google I/O 2010. Developers praised the update, calling it and its features a "welcome addition" to the platform.Android 2.2 will bring the phone operating system closer to parity with its competitors. With 2.2r4 out now and a projected final release date of Summer '10, Android 2.2 is coming fast.But stepping back from all of the commotion, what exactly is Google offering with this update? What are these new features and who will benefit from them? There are plenty of questions about Android 2.2--and here are the answers.[See http://www.trollaxor.com/2010/05/android-22-googles-catchupgrade.html.]

There's a fight over video codecs brewing on the Internet. First, the bad news; the most popular video codec specification in the world - h.264 - used all over the web, on blu-rays and in broadcast media, is patented up the wazoo. The patent licensing deal is a poisoned chalice. If you join, you agree include all their users in a shakedown scheme: If you start making money from your video, film, documentary, etc., and a device capable of decoding/encoding h.264 was involved, anywhere, then you have to give the h.264 people a slice. So, how have the denizens of the web, defenders of freeness and openness, reacted?

After a 10 year run (far too long in Internet time) K5 isn't exactly a thriving, vibrant site. Despite what many think, K5 was not a victim of it's own trolls that's only a symptom. No, what really did it in are sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg and weblogs, otherwise known as the newest buzzword--social media.