Solipsism Gradient

The J-Walk Blog points at the Reverse Astrology test (thanks John!). You rate yourself according to a long list of personality traits and the software tries to guess your sign, cross-checking your ratings with a database of traits that supposedly apply to certain signs.

Here are my (slightly edited) results:

Red is your most probable sign and Blue is your least probable sign. The scores are from 0 (not you at all) to 100 (dead on match).
Aries	Mar 21 to April 19	62
Taurus	April 20 to May 20	67
Gemini	May 21 to June 21	53
Cancer	June 22 to July 22	53
Leo	July 23 to Aug 22	58
Virgo	Aug 23 to Sep 22	71
Libra	Sep 23 to Oct 22	56.05
Scorpio	Oct 23 to Nov 21	57
Sagittarius	Nov 22 to Dec 21	63.5
Capricorn	Dec 22 to Jan 19	62.5
Aquarius	Jan 20 to Feb 18	72
Pisces	Feb 19 to Mar 20	55

So my scores are remarkably well distributed across all signs, with the top scores in Aquarius and Virgo, and the bottom score in Cancer and Gemini – which, so it happens, is my actual sign.

My usual affirmation is that Gemini don’t believe in horoscopes. This test fully confirms that…

This is too good to pass up even in my currently busy state.

Boing Boing points at a Scientific American article and an astounding webpage about the Curta, the world’s first mechanical pocket calculator.

I remember seeing this marvel advertised in Scientific American in the late 60’s and even holding one in my hands a little later – I don’t remember who owned it, but it was an extremely sexy piece of machinery. The 17″ PowerBook of its day. Just turning the crank and seeing/hearing/feeling all the little internal gears purring and the numbers clicking into place was geek heaven.

There’s also an extremely interesting interview with Curt Herzstark, the inventor of the device (it’s a 67-page PDF file).

Unfortunately I couldn’t afford the Curta at that time – it cost US$125, if I recall correctly, and there were serious shipping charges and import duties on top of that. I had to content myself with a Faber-Castell duplex slide rule (pictured at top left on the linked page), which was capable of 4 or 5 significant digits and saw me all the way through engineering school. And, from a practical standpoint, did more complex calculations too.

Soon after that, in the early 70s, electronic calculators came up and both the Curta and slide rules became obsolete. I still have my slide rule here nearby, but I regret not having bought a Curta somehow… a specimen in good condition is worth more than US$1000.

Dave Pollard‘s put up some excellent tips for bloggers:

As much as I enjoy blogging, there are times it becomes an ordeal, especially when I am plagued by deadlines or a heavy workload. As I’ve reported before, being an empty-nester and night-owl allows me to devote 2-3 hours per day to the hobby – most of the time. When I can’t, it shows. How can you maintain a good blog in less time? Here are a few ideas…

Recommended.

Well, Zingg! 1.3 is out.

It took a few days longer than I expected. First there were some more bugs and suggestions; then I tested it on Jaguar and two things didn’t work at all; and finally I had a run-in with configuration problems for my local database server. If you’re wondering about the last item, it’s because Zingg! 1.3 now incorporates the latest version of my online version-checking code… which incidentally feeds me the user’s version of Mac OS X for my statistics.

As I type this, the VersionTracker page counts 387 downloads. If past stats are any indication, that means about 800 or 900 downloads total… many people go directly to my site. My site statistics run every midnight, so I have no exact figures yet. Meanwhile, 206 of those people (let’s say 25%) used the new version-checking code. 204 are on Mac OS X 10.3.2, 2 are on 10.3.1. No earlier versions at all! I’ll have to check whether this is a bug or a reliable statistic…

Then again, this is good news, as I’d like to do Panther-only software in the near future. I’ll try and hurry up the next version of XRay to get stats from those users, too.

The Jaguar incompatibilities were quite puzzling. The Zingg! Configurator relies on a main NSTableView to show a list of applications. I wanted to allow the user to sort the table by any of the 4 table columns. The standard way of doing this, by clicking on the column headers, seemed simple to implement. Since I used NSURL objects to store the application names and paths, I subclassed this to store a complete table row in each object and then used the standard NSArray sortedArrayUsingSelector: method to sort this in different ways. It worked on the first try on my Panther development machine… but then in Jaguar it threw an exception indicating that my subclassing wasn’t working at all.

This was complicated by the fact that I’ve migrated all my projects to Xcode, so I couldn’t use a debugger on the Jaguar machine… but I finally found some hints that the NSURL internal workings had changed significantly from Jaguar to Panther – apparently it used to be a class cluster, but wasn’t anymore. To save time, I changed from a is-a to a has-a pattern for my table row object, and this worked again.

Then I ran into a Jaguar bug: the delegate tableView:didClickTableColumn: method isn’t always called, unlike in Panther. The workaround is to turn on the option to allow column reordering (by drag&drop) – I thought it kind of useless but found no other way.

Then (after already uploading the disk image) I had to go back and rewrite the docs for the changes… c’est la vie. At least it’s out now and no bug report’s arrived so far…

Somehow this doesn’t come as a surprise to me… 😆

You are a Cyberculture Floozie. The theoretical
aspects of postmodernism interest you only
insofar as they can be used to make cool blinky
things. You probably take psychedelics and
know at least one programming language (HTML
counts!). Other postmodernists call you a
corporate whore. They’re probably just jealous
because you make more money than them.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?

brought to you by Quizilla

Thanks to the Dowbrigade News for the link!

Tomorrow morning the vacation’s over. Whew. It’s been marvelous: no interruptions, good food, beach runs after sundown, lots of coconuts and peace to work on my software; and terrible: heat, unrelenting sun, mosquitoes, constant Axé music thumpa-thumping along somewhere in the background, spotty Internet access and the general discomfort of being away from home.

The good news is that, as seems to become traditional over the Christmas holidays, I found time to do a new version of Zingg!, with lots of new goodies. Expect it in a couple of days; I just need to do some more testing and of course, constant Internet access to do all the publishing, notifications and hands-on support for early adopters.

From early morning to late afternoon temperatures currently vary between 25 and 35 degrees celsius; it’s so-called “good weather”, meaning no clouds are seen during daytime, and so I stay indoors most of the time. The best time to visit the beach, for my skin type at least, is after 5PM.

Yesterday afternoon we took a bus into the city and of course, with all that heat, coconut water is the preferred drink. Here’s where that comes from:

this bunch is almost ripe for drinking. Here’s a typical beach street scene:

notice the coconut payphone . Turning to the right, here’s a bunch of them lined up on the counter (we usually ask for a frozen coconut, though):

The proprietor demonstrates the proper technique for opening a coconut:

after which it looks like this:

notice that it’s full to the brim; in fact, the water is usually under pressure, so you have to be careful. At this stage it’s nearly transparent, and it’s drunk with a straw. After drinking one can ask to have it opened, and eat the flesh with a knife or spoon:

this one was halfway ripe. Unripe coconuts have only a thin, jelly-like layer inside, while ripe coconuts – the kind one usually sees in the US – have about double that thickness of flesh.

After my post on young coconuts some months ago I’ve always wanted to show you folks how this is done here in Brazil. Ah yes, and each coconut costs R$1,00 (about US$0.30) on the street; at a market it would cost about half of that.

The hotel is quite large, there are over sixty “chalets”, small cottages with a single bedroom and shower. Most of these are actually split into two units. They’re distributed along two roads on the northern third of the hotel area. On the southern third there’s a dozen small buildings with 9 or 12 apartments in each. In the middle third are the public areas: reception, restaurants, swimming pools and so forth. A small creek forms a lake near the pool, and in the back there’s an exit onto the beach.

The beaches in this area are quite shallow, you can walk in for perhaps 200m until you lose footing. The water is amazingly warm, from 27 to 30 Celsius even in the evening. And you can walk for dozens of kilometers either north or south. Here’s a photo of our cottage:

And here’s one of the view from there:

In front is the lake, the water is very dark due to natural iron salts. To the right are the pools and the main restaurant. The sea is visible in the distance.