http://delackner.com/blog ideas to share with friends new and old Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:15:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For various reasons I ended up writing a UIView that mostly mimics the behavior of UIAlertView. UIAlertView appears on screen with pleasant animated fade in and rubber-band-like bounce of its dimensions. After struggling to reproduce this through trial and error, I gave up and just recorded video of ... http://delackner.com/blog/2009/12/mimicking-uialertviews-animated-transition/ Sitting through watching Fanny and Alexander for the first time, I couldn't deal with the whole thing at once just before going to sleep, so I stopped it about half way through when it started getting really dark. Going through the remainder, I'm glad that I waited.  But before even finishing ... http://delackner.com/blog/2009/12/fanny-and-alexander/ I just had my yearly physical yesterday and they had a questionnaire first that included the bizarre:  "weekly, do you regularly consume juice, coffee, or sports drinks?  If so, how often." There was just one answer lumping all three together.  Am I missing something here?  Fruits are full of all sorts ... http://delackner.com/blog/2009/01/health-riddle/ On the iMac I use at work, I use Bootcamp to run Windows XP.  When the system wakes from sleep (suspend) the built-in Bluetooth device fails to wake up.  This is nearly 100% of the time. Solution: I bought a little USB Bluetooth device, plugged it in, and disabled the built-in ... http://delackner.com/blog/2008/11/solved-bootcamp-wake-from-sleep-bluetooth-failure/ Lovely, I see this on the Lloyds TSB remittance calculator page for today's exchange rates: Hopefully just a website error, right? http://delackner.com/blog/2008/11/exchange-rates/ I happen to live in Tokyo.  I have friends here and in the US, and London, and various countries actually.  That means I would like to be able to try to play networked games not necessarily just with people who live geographically very close to me, but with friends that ... http://delackner.com/blog/2008/06/region-coding-hell/ This article on The Age website has near the end this quote: Japan's meat consumption had increased by 900% since 1955, in part because expanding incomes had enabled families to supplement the sparse national diet of rice, fish and miso soup with more Western-style food. Which made me laugh because just before ... http://delackner.com/blog/2008/04/on-the-japanese-diet-from-the-news/ I haven't tested the official 1.01 build yet, but since it incorporates the ALT image support I added, my own build is probably nolonger necessary.  Rikaichan 1.01 announcement http://delackner.com/blog/2008/04/rikaichan-alt-support-merged-to-main-rikaichan-build/ By the president of Cypress Semiconductor speaking before congress, in the 1990s.  Well worth reading. http://delackner.com/blog/2008/03/a-great-speech-on-competition-and-government-subsidies/ Some comments on Marvin Minsky's writing on this mistaken ways in which we teach children.  First: his article. Looking at the systemic failures of the US education system leaves me unable to see a viable route to a high functioning system[1].  This leaves me wondering, when I  have children, how to ... http://delackner.com/blog/2008/03/commenting-on-how-mathematics-and-everything-else-is-taught-to-children/