Distrust Simplicity

If you’re a Mac user who works with 3D applications — SketchUp in particular — you’ve probably figured out by now that there’s nothing equivalent to the Nvidia/ATI control panels on Windows for tweaking graphics driver settings, e.g. forcing the use of multisampling/antialiasing. Individual applications have to enable antialiasing on OS X, and many don’t, SketchUp included. Even so, SketchUp does have a hidden (and unsupported) option for enabling the feature:

I recently found myself in need of a quick-and-dirty way to forward UDP packets from one machine to another. SSH port forwarding was out, unfortunately, as the source host was Windows machine and I wasn’t about to install Cygwin or MSYS, etc. After a brief and unsuccessful search for simple tools to accomplish this, I decided to whip something up myself. The project I was working on was already using python with the Twisted networking library, so that’s what I used. I tried to make it as flexible as possible, allowing forwarding to multiple hosts and name resolution, while keeping it as simple as I could. Here’s the result:

I recently encountered this list of terminal tips and tricks (for Mac OS X, but most are more generic) and, as often happens, learned something new: with the bash shell, the command C-x C-e opens the current command line for editing in the editor defined by the $EDITOR environment variable.

Previously, I’ve written about my fondness for Readability, a bookmarklet that makes reading online a more pleasant and less distracting endeavor by removing unnecessary clutter and improving typography. Well, a couple weeks ago Apple introduced Safari 5, which touts a new feature closely resembling Readability called Safari Reader.

While neither method is an efficient way to solve this problem, this is the kind of thing that just works in Haskell:

I was pleased with my Ruby solution to the problem of finding the last ten digits of the sum of 1 + 2² + 3³ + … + 1000¹⁰⁰⁰

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that OpenSSH has a number of very useful commands available via an escape sequence (the default escape key is ~ preceded by a newline, and can be configured with the EscapeChar directive in your ssh_config). The ~? sequence presents a list of available commands:

One of the developer technologies introduced in Snow Leopard is an extension to C/Objective-C called “blocks”, which adds anonymous (lambda) functions to the language. If you’re not yet familiar with blocks, I recommend Mike Ash’s excellent introduction to the subject.

I was recently faced with the simple problem of blending two textures in a GLSL shader and found no straightforward discussions of the topic, so I’ll try to collect my thoughts here.

Last night I began reading The Lay of the Völsungs, Tolkien’s own version of ancient Norse legend, only recently published by his son Christopher in a volume titled The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún. In my reading, this strophe (14) captured my attention: