011010000110000101110000011100000111
100100100000011100000111001001101111
011001110111001001100001011011010110
110101100101011100100010011101110011
001000000110010001100001011110010010
Today is September 13th, the 256th day of the year. According to the Wikipedia the 2^8th day of the year is Programmer’s Day.
Have a wonderful Programmer’s Day!
As I had mentioned earlier, since finishing up at school and getting settled here in California, I’ve been keeping busy with several undertakings of my own design. One such activity was getting further work done on my miscellaneous projects. Nothing too significant, mostly just house-keeping and some polishing-up, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be exciting!
CTBadge: Some minor tweaks, now the badges generated are very nearly identical. First change was to the character alignment, it turns out in fact that Apple aligns their text without the help of NSParagraphStyle. The second change(s) were to the badge gradient, now the colors are darker, and the gradient’s progressions and angles match their corresponding “official” badge (yes, there are different angles for different badges).
CTGradient: Knocked a few items off of my list. The big addition is added support for beautiful chromatic blends! (I’m excited, aren’t you?). In order to celebrate I also hacked out a delightful new icon which I should be adding (sooner or later) to my icon collection.
Aside from that I threw in some new gradient styles (Sourcelist enabled/disabled, Rainbow, and best of all, Hydrogen). What’s more, I added other things like a few colorstop methods (and a bug fix)… but you weren’t interested in those, now, were you?
Back in April I submitted my application for Apple’s student scholarship to WWDC. Later last month I got word that I’d been selected. Over the weekend I made hotel reservations for me and a friend.
I remember having a smashing time at last year’s conference. There were a number of sessions which piqued my interest, a few which I had to miss (and hope to make up for this time around). Throughout the whole week there was rarely a lack of discusion, what with the whole Intel transition thing going down, but most importantly, that week at WWDC let me sit back and focus on mac development (which had been the first time in a while), it let me jumpstart the personal projects that I had left waiting in the wings, and allowed me gain the momentum I needed to continue those projects months after. My only regret is that this year I’ll be attending at the closing of the summer as opposed to the opening of the same.
…So this August expect me to be in San Francisco. If you expect to be thereabouts as well go ahead and drop me a line.
In keeping with tradition I will once again make another terribly delayed post…
About a month and a half ago I got out of school and began my summer in earnest. As with last year, I made my way to sunny California and to another internship in the Bay Area. Since then I have managed to stay fairly busy both with work and also with several other things, which I hope to write about later. Needless to say, I’ve been enjoying myself thus far, and don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Here are a few pictures from my journey out to the west coast:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Last Thursday my family and I went to the Chase Auditorium in Downtown Chicago. Went to see one of the weekly tapings for Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!.
Wait, Wait, “The NPR News Quiz” is one of my favorite public radio shows. It’s on my short list along with This American Life, Left, Right & Center, and A Prairie Home Companion.
The format for the taping is (roughly) audience intro, show taping, outro, and retakes (where they redo some parts of the dialog), followed by a Q&A. The taping is a while longer than what actually airs (what with station breaks, etc.). So there’s a fair bit that gets edited out for the show that goes out over the radio that weekend.
Now, while it’s true that seeing the production of the show spoiled the illusion that accompanies any good stage act, nonetheless, it was a fun experience that was well worth the while, and one that I would recommend to any NPR fan who finds themselves in the Chicagoland area on a Thursday evening with $20 to spare.
A final note – here is the show that I watched get taped last Thursday. And here is a link to the Wait, Wait… Don’t tell Me! podcast.
Try searching for:
"electricity consumption of " + someCountryName
I stumbled on this when trying to calculate the amount of energy used refining Aluminium in the US.
In case you were wondering, using Google’s (via the CIA) figure of 3,660,000,000,000 kWh and a usage rate of 5% according to Nature’s Building Blocks by John Emsley, the final figure comes out to 186 billion kWh devoted to aluminium production annually.