DanBailey.net

Over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Dillinger muses on why Apple would buy out PA Semi. It’s an interesting line of thinking and it raises some awesome questions. Foremost among them is, why is Apple buying out a chip design group that specialized in varieties of the PowerPC architecture? This is an important point to ruminate on, as Apple just invested heavily in making the switch to Intel’s x86-based Core chips for their hardware.

Mr. Dillinger goes on to speculate on Apple’s reasoning behind this — and eliminates the concept of a PWRficient chip in desktop macs, as well as in mobile applications (notebooks, iPhones, etc.). He then moves on to speculate that Apple will put chipsets in its boxes for the purposes of hardware acceleration, which seems the most likely line of reasoning.

But the question becomes: why? Read the rest of this entry »

So I got asked the following questions by Christopher Hawley:

1) Your take on the Olympics, the venue, and whether bicycling is adequately represented in the official events

2) optimism/realism/cynicism/pessimism: where do you see yourself on this spectrum? Is there another position which you would prefer to find yourself?

3) perversity of the universe, and why it tends to a maximal value (possibly one of Niven’s Laws, but ICBA to check): any personal anecdotes or insights?

[Here’s a starting topic: Why are people who are most hard of hearing the most likely to unplug the phone ‘because its ringing would disturb my sleep’?]

Well, let’s go through these one at a time.

First, the Olympics and cycling’s place in it. The venue? I’m fine with the games being hosted in China. Sure, they’ve got some human rights issues that they need to work out, but as a whole, I’m fine with the games being hosted there. That said, however, I feel bad for any endurance athlete that has to compete in Beijing’s air pollution. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I love about Wordpress is that it’s relatively easy to upgrade. Download file. Unzip file. Upload resultant files to server while not touching the wp-content folder.

Last night, I also embedded the Last.FM thing in the sidebar, and finally sat down and did a 404 page that blends quantum physics and haiku.

Looking forward to moving to Wordpress 2.5. I’m hoping that that process goes as smoothly as this transition did.

Upgrading Wordpress and adding plugins. Shitstorms may ensue.