Patrick Beard

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 23:25:59 GMT

JNIDirect is released! The code is checked in to Source Forge and there is a white paper describing what it's all about. Using native methods w/o JNIDirect is like debugging with stone tools...

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 16:22:16 GMT

Wow, the IPv6 transition is really a mess. This article describes why it is being bungled. Perhaps they need that networking saviour, Stuart Cheshire to step in and come up with some clever solutions.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 07:20:07 GMT

This item from MacCentral boggles the mind: Microsoft acquires Virtual PC from Connectix Here are a couple things Microsoft might do: 1. kill the VirtualPC product for the Mac, to lock Mac users out of future versions of this powerful PC emulation engine. 2. recompile the Windows bits as PowerPC native code, potentially hugely accelerating the performance. If they chose option 2, then who knows, maybe they'd release PowerPC code generators for their compilers, and things could get weird pretty fast.

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 19:00:34 GMT

OK, I finally get this RSS stuff. Represent news items as XML, aggregate them in a page. Voila! You have a web log. For a long time I didn't get it. What would an end user want with all that XML? Well, not much really, it's only valuable if it's displayed in a format the user can use. But one never knows what it might become useful for down the road. Makes you think... Being an editor is the most crucial thing. Sure, you get lots of RSS stuff thrown your way, but you sift the good stuff from the chaff, and decide what YOU think is interesting. One thing I'm curious about is attribution. For example, I just posted a blurb about Apple which included attribution to MacSlash. Must I do that? Are there rules about this stuff?

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 18:45:21 GMT

Just saw this on MacSlash: Apple Posts XML Schema For Keynote Very interesting. Makes Keynote all the more attractive over PowerPoint. Microsoft uses XML file formats too, but they don't document it, and have so many extensions that it isn't very useful XML. If Apple stands behind this specification, this is a really good thing (tm).

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 19:55:43 GMT

I took a flute lesson from Guido Fazio at House of Woodwinds last week, to get an alternative view on how this instrument is supposed to be played. The single most useful thing he told me about the flute embouchure (how you hold your mouth) is to visualize yourself sucking on a thin straw. That puts your mouth in the right formation, then you blow with the same mouth position. Since that lesson, I've also been experimenting with my sax embouchure, hoping one day to wean myself of my wax & gauze crutch that I've been using for a while to help play without feeling any pain. I managed to do a couple of rehearsals last week without using the crutch, but had performances Friday and Saturday night which I absolutely needed to be able to play comfortably. The sax and flute embouchures are similar, except for one important difference: you need to support the reed without letting any air leak out of the mouth, but without biting the lower lip with the bottom teeth. This is the source of my frustration, how to keep from biting my bottom lip, while supporting the reed enough to get a pleasing sound. Ironically, the sax tone is much better the more you allow the reed to vibrate, but it also feels much more out of control.