Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like Batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

The world may now end

Holy freakin’ crap, Batman. This just in: I’ve finally done it and went and bought a new (well, refurbished) Powerbook. 15″ beautiful widescreen. 1.5G processor. 1G of RAM. 80G of 5400-rpm hard drive sweetness. Superdrive (DVD burner, etc.). All for the unbelievable price of $1499 (plus $59 for the second 512 megs of RAM). This thing rocks my world in amazing ways. I believe that this has always been one of the signs that the world will soon be ending. You know… Jason buys a powerbook, cats and dogs living together… MASS hysteria. WOOOOT!! I love this machine! I’ve just spend the entire evening repartitioning the hard drive to give Mac OS X 45 gigs and Linux the rest, as Read more…


Batman Begins

My good friend Mr. Schindler just let me borrow Batman Begins from him and I took the time to watch it this evening instead of patching, sanding, painting, cleaning, organizing, and stressing. All I can say is WOW. Batman Begins is easily the best Batman movie ever. It is what Tim Burton was striving for, I really believe, in his first Batman with Michael Keaton. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the first one. The subsequent Hollywood offerings for the Dark Knight on the silver screen were… how shall I put it… utter crap, so I won’t comment as to their lack of merits. But Batman Begins was absolutely brilliant in its exploration of Batman’s beginnings, training, techno-arsenal, and psyche. Read more…


This just in: Visual Studio rots your mind!

Well, maybe not. But this article by Charles Petzold is a clearly-articulated discussion of some of the dangerous trends that most programmers aren’t even cognizant of. His discussion is centered around Microsoft, Visual Studio, and dotNET, being that that is his area of expertise. And while there are certain similar problems that also affect other environments, I think that because of Microsoft’s goals and the goals of their tools, I think that much of this discussion is truly mostly-relevant to those deeply entrenched in Microsoft’s OS and tool stack. So I don’t think IntelliSense is helping us become better programmers. The real objective is for us to become faster programmers, which also means that it’s cheapening our labor. I agree. Read more…


1996, San Diego Zoo

As I was going through the junk around our home, getting ready for the big move, I found some REALLY old 3.5″ floppy disks from 1996 and 1997. See, kids, back in the not-so-good old days, we elderly people used to take “pictures” with 35-millimeter cameras which had “film” in them. Then, we’d take that “film” out very carefully and take it to get “developed.” Optionally, in the year 1996, we used to be able to pay some extra amount of money and have a “floppy disk” returned with the “developed” pictures with a slide-show of these pictures. I should have taken a picture of the disk itself. It was made to run in Windows 3.1, and was done by Read more…


New New Order, Still Excellent

I was listening to Dish Network’s “EuroStyle” channel the other day as I was working from my living room and I heard a new song by New Order, called Krafty. I was a bit surprised, as it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new New Order release. So I had to investigate. Investigate I did, and what I’ve found from their new Waiting for the Sirens’ Call CD is really, really good stuff. I’ve always loved New Order, and as they’ve been around for the entirety of my music-listening life, I’ve liked them for a good long while. But the last album of theirs that I bought was Republic, which, as I see now, was 12 years ago. Read more…


iChat Superiority

A wise man once said, “Never take a knife to a gunfight.” I have made that mistake. You can here see my attempt to challenge my friend’s chat client manliness. I thought this funny enough to share. =:) On the left, you can see the challenger, kopete, with its iChat style. And on the right, you can see Mike, using the real iChat, on a real Mac, laughing at me. Dangit I want a Powerbook! (psst! iChat Superiority was uploadd by: vanRijn).


Elektra shops at Rite Aid. Shouldn’t you?

It’s funny, but I completely missed this when watching the movie, Elektra before. My good friend Mike pointed it out to me and I had to comment on it. Apparently, Rite Aid managed to get some subliminal advertising into the Elektra movie! Hey, cool!! =:) (psst! elektra-riteaid-1 was uploadd by: vanRijn).


Usability Heuristics and Color Theory

I came across this really nicely-explained list of things to keep in mind when designing user interfaces. I’ll copy the short list here, but you owe it to yourself to check it out in full…. Ten Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen These are ten general principles for user interface design. They are called “heuristics” because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines. Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world Read more…


Firefly and Serenity

How, exactly, did I manage to miss this amazing-looking series from the recent past? And how did I manage to be completely oblivious about this equally-amazing-looking movie? Egads.


OpenSuSE 10.0-final released, and I’m #12

Now downloading the newly-released OpenSuSE 10.0 GoldMaster discs. Gonna do a clean install and see if I still have any problems. *fingers crossed* Tomorrow, I have a most-of-the-day Bible Quiz event with the whole family (my two daughters will be quizzing and my wife and son will be helping officiate and I’ll be coaching my eldest). If I have time tomorrow eve, I need to clean up the crappy cinderblock mess in my basement, hang new drywall over it, put the corner piece up, mud over that, wet-sand, mud, etc. And then there’s the whole #12 thing. Hopefully going to finish that up on Monday, though it’s definitely not something that anyone should think about rushing through. Right, and once Read more…