-=-= a b o u t - h e r e =-=-

Payson.

Some photos of Payson, AZ.

Fix for crashing Apps: install another one

Apparently the iPhone 2.0 software will sometimes crash ALL 3rd party Apps (independent of the hardware, as this happens on the 3G and original iPhone). The weird, but somewhat understandable solution is to download and install a new App from the AppStore.

Cloneable/clone() is broken.

I totally agree with Josh Bloch on this.  Clone is broken.

A bother.

Something that really bugs me is trying to figure out uncommented code.  And it bugs me even more when I wrote the code but neglected to comment it.

And now...

Juno.  I liked it.

Leopard.

Mail.app tells you when an email is being sent now (versus doing this completely in the background) and the HD icon on the desktop updates its current free space as it changes.  Among the other more talked about "enhancements", these functional changes allow OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to make more sense.  I mean, why not tell us when an email is being sent?  Also, why allow us to display the free HD space of a hard drive if it doesn't update?

Much needed iChat enhancements.

Chax provides important, missing enhancements to iChat. For instance, it allows for automatic setting of your status to "away" when your screen saver comes on (something that always bugged me).

LaTeX using elsart and algorithm2e.

So you have a document that used algorithm2e and want to apply the elsart document class to it?  Well, with the latest version of algorithm2e (3.9, released 4 October 2005) you'll get the error:

! Too many }'s.
l.1616

What do you do?  You need to undefine algorithm before loading the algorithm2e package, since both elsart and algorithm2e define the algorithm environment.  This answer is discussed in this post.  Sometime before \usepackage{algorithm2e} you need:

\makeatletter
\newif\if@restonecol
\makeatother
\let\algorithm\relax
\let\endalgorithm\relax

This took me a while to discover, so I hope having this information in another place on the web is helpful.

Apple's new bluetooth keyboard.

I like the looks of the new keyboard that Apple has just released.  However, the wireless version looks like it's missing something: page up, page down, home and end buttons.  Since none of the local Apple stores are carrying the keyboard I cannot verify this (and Google provides no answers either).  But it seems like a very strange design decision.  I use those buttons enough that I find myself searching for them on non-standard notebook keyboards, so I know it would baffle and annoy me if they were completely missing.

Update: I found out recently that the page up, page down, home and end keys work exactly in the same way as on the MacBook keyboard (that is, use Fn-Up for page up, Fn-Down for page down, Fn-Left for home, and Fn-Right for end).

JGraphT

I'm liking JGraphT lately.  The API offers some nice basic tools to model graphs. Hopefully it will be speedy enough for what I want to do with it.