monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

I’m trying out this little app called Ogg Drop - It encodes CD music as Ogg Vorbis files (as opposed to MP3, which has a patent/license on it), and supposedly produces smaller and better quality tracks. As soon as it’s done I’m going to restart, since I’ve installed Quicktime 6.0.2, and the Quicktime decoder ring, er, plugin for Ogg, which will let iTunes play Ogg files.

Well, I finished Neil Stephenson’s Crytonomicon. It’s a LONG book - 900 pages. It took me approximately 15 hours to read it - that’s actual reading time, and it’s an estimate since I generally read about 60 pages an hour, or a page a minute. That’s not terribly fast (IMO) but it’s pretty fast.

The book was really good, there are several people I’m going to recommend it to. One is my geek kid brother, Sean, the other is Jodi’s math-geek-military-consultant-analyst father.

I’ve noticed something about myself and books. For about the first 75-80% of the book, I can usually put it down for extended periods to do other things. Once I cross that 80% threashold, everything else (sleeping, conversing with signifcant others, eating, that sort of thing) kind of loses significance in the face of getting to the end. I’m generally ambivelent about this fact - I very much want to see what happens - but I also hate for the story to end. Either way, I simply must finish the book. Weird.

Jodi got sucked into Survivor this season. She usually records the second half or so, and tonight she recorded the whole thing. She’s watching it now, I’m in the other room with the headphones on. -) Nothing against the show per se, but I just don’t want to get sucked in too. Hehe.

Something we’re learning about this year in Arizona: Winter lawns. Apparently the only thing that can survive the Arizona summer is a particularly hearty strain of Bermuda grass, which goes dormant and brown once the weather cools off. So the practice here is, right about now, to plant a winter lawn of rye grass that stays nice and soft and green until about April, when the weather heats up fries it all. I’m researching winter lawns now; I mowed the lawn as short as possible the other day, and I’m about to go de-thatch and put down gypsum to treat the soil. Then we plant.

James Duncan Davidson (Author of tomcat and ant) on Enterprise Java Beans:

[via James Duncan Davidson ] Mike Clark was just muttering about EJBs and how they can lead you over the brink of complexity. And he asks: "Where did we go wrong?" (link)

I’ve worked some with EJBs, and they are some of the most complex component code I’ve seen. Oy.

Brent has released a new NetNewsWire beta.

This release supports ETag and Last-Modified headers, dramatically reducing bandwidth consumption for sites that support these headers. Other changes are listed on the change notes page. (link)

If you’re a Cocoa geek, you should check out the CocoaProgrammers wiki. Add your name and info, let others know where you’re at!

If you’re in Phoenix, AZ, let me know and maybe we can get together sometime.