I don’t get it.

They obvi­ously went to a lot of trou­ble to design a new touch-based inter­face. But because they need back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity as well, they have a “tra­di­tional” apps iso­lated into a kind of “Win­dows 7 ghetto”, some­thing that looks just like Win­dows 7, and with no vis­i­ble trace of being inte­grated into the whole Win8/touch thing… And this is for tra­di­tional PC’s. On my PC, I’m appar­ently going to have to choose which envi­ron­ment I’m using cur­rently, because there’s lim­ited inter­ac­tion between them. And both worlds are going to suf­fer from that. (more…)

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog for a while. The last month or so has been bru­tal. By May 16th, I had to be out of my old apart­ment (long story), mean­ing I’ve had to find another place to live pretty urgently.

With­out get­ting into all the painful details, I’ve spent most of the last month or two try­ing to find a new apart­ment, and this past week­end was spent mov­ing out of our old apart­ment, paint­ing it and fix­ing it up. It’s been stress­ful, and it hasn’t left much time for any­thing else.

Until July 1st, when I get to move into the new apart­ment, I’ll be liv­ing on a friend’s couch, so things aren’t quite back to nor­mal yet. But the worst part is over, and hope­fully I’ll be able to spend a bit of time now on inter­est­ing things, such as blog­ging, cod­ing and blog­ging about coding.

A while ago, I made a post about the pro­posed TeX Stack­Ex­change site. Now it’s out of beta, and it’s got a brand new, and pretty sweet-looking, design. Go check it out: http://tex.stackexchange.com/

It some­times amazes me how many peo­ple, pro­gram­mers as well as non-programmers seem to take offense at my lack of psy­chic abilities.

Either that, or at my ten­dency to try to answer ques­tions with a use­ful answer.

Or maybe they’re just bad at ask­ing ques­tions. (more…)

So the big news these days is obvi­ously Paul the Psy­chic Octo­pus. Def­i­nitely inter­est­ing. It was able to main­tain a 100% suc­cess rate in this year’s World Cup (and a much higher suc­cess rate than it had in 2008 where it mis­pre­dicted a whop­ping two matches).

So what’s going on here? Freak coin­ci­dence? Super­nat­ural pow­ers? At a first glance, both sound ridicu­lous to me.

But I want to think about the more “inter­est­ing” expla­na­tion a bit: per­haps Paul really is psy­chic. Per­haps Paul can tell the future. (more…)

A Stack­Over­flow sib­ling site ded­i­cated to LaTeX (or TeX in gen­eral) ques­tions has been pro­posed. How­ever, the site won’t be launched unless enough prospec­tive users indi­cate that they’re will­ing to use it.

As a LaTeX user, I’d love to see this take off. (more…)

Dear world.

I grad­u­ated. My the­sis defense went well and I’m no longer a stu­dent. Just thought I’d let you know

So what hap­pens now? No clue, but I sup­pose it involves find­ing a job.

The end is nigh.

On mon­day the 12th of April, I’m going to defend my master’s the­sis. If you’re in the area, and are geeky enough to find it inter­est­ing, feel free to drop by. (more…)

Just over a month ago, I handed in my Mas­ters The­sis. All that’s left now is an oral defense of it one of the next weeks. So what hap­pens then? I sup­pose I should find a job. A few peo­ple have asked if I am going to do a PhD, but I don’t think so. I think I’ve had enough of acad­e­mia for now. It was fun while it lasted, but I think it’s time to try some­thing dif­fer­ent. (more…)

So Google launched their Twitter/MySpace/Facebook killer, Buzz, and appar­ently sub­scribed every GMail user to it with­out ask­ing any­one for permission.

The result is that a lot of peo­ple now have sen­si­tive per­sonal infor­ma­tion float­ing around in pub­lic. (more…)