Astro73 » Blog

Wired has an article:
How Videogames Blind Us With Science. It made my outlook on America that little bit better.

I have gotten several posts on my wall which link to false websites. These are most likely caused by the social enegineering attack Fanebook.com.

Check what you have posted on walls! If anything has been posted without your knowledge or consent, change your password.

For future protection, I strongly encourage you to switch to Firefox 3, which includes protection against such sites.

Loren Heiny of Incremental Blogger has a few words to say about Microsoft and iPhones. Specifically, he said that Microsoft needs to make an iPhone and could make a better one. Between the previous touch experience and they’re ability to create vibrant developer communities, Loren believes that Redmond could make a product that is, in several ways, superior.

Also, some of the advice he gives might be useful to developers in general, such as this tidbit.

One bit of advice I’d give to Microsoft is to take every opportunity to improve the ease of use of the iPhone. For instance, if there’s public or known WIFI and poor cell phone coverage, the phone should transparently switch coverage.

Things like this should be available in more applications. The app should try as hard as it can to produce the best user experience, and only not do so if the user tells it to. It’s not something you see much, nor is it something you really notice. But when you do notice it, it’s something that you appreciate.

Yet another utility in the subversion: cropper. It’s a simple app that allows you to crop images. That’s it. You load up and image, add a couple of boxes, and hit crop.

What you’ll need to run it:

• Python 2.5
• GLib
• GTK+ (>=2.12)
• Cairo
• Glade
• PyGObject
• PyGTK
• PyCairo
• ImageMagick

Under Ubuntu (and probably Debian), you can use this line:

sudo apt-get install python2.5 python-gobject python-gtk2 python-cairo python-glade2 imagemagick

It’s not feature complete (by any means); there’s still lots to add and polish.