I read a bunch of zombie themed novels. Some have lots of zombies, others not so many. Some are real books, some are what I was hoping were the upper echelons of more or less self published work.

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I don’t have any other dead horses around to beat today. Also, I just read a review of a different tablet that reminded me of something. Lots of electrons spilled so far, but most of what I read focused on comparisons with either the iPad or larger Surface Pro devices. Also, once the 23GB free number got out, it was like it was carved in stone, even before anybody actually touched said device. Then it comes out that maybe it’s more like 30GB free, but retractions are hard work, so you still see people complain about the old number. Anyway, how does the 64GB Surface Pro compare to other Windows 8 (not RT) tablets with 64GB of storage?

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Attended RedSnake Philly mini conference on Friday. All the talks were ten minutes, which is shorter than I expected (maybe I should have looked closer at the schedule), but meant that things really kept moving. It was a good pace, but some of the talks could have used more time. Maybe 15 minutes is about right. Anyway, it was a nice contrast from the hour long talks I’m used to.

As far as content, ironically the C++ and lisp talks had the most technical content. The ruby python talks were split between introducing a framework one might find useful and describing a solution at such a high level it was basically language agnostic. If the event’s purpose was to gather a bunch of people in a room and introduce a few speakers to them, then I’d say it succeeded wildly. Three of the event’s scheduled six hours were dedicated to social time. That’s not a complaint, but it’s a little shy of their goal of being “hardcore”.

On an irrelevant note, a lot more women were present, proportionately, than at any other software conference I’ve attended. Maybe because women like ruby and python more? Maybe because the event was both free and pitched as more of a social thing? Didn’t feel like being the guy to go around and ask, but if somebody wanted to promote women in tech, more events like this would be a good start.

The city is suing Yuengling to collect some tax money.

Changing the name of the tax from Business Privilege Tax (for serious, that was the name) to Business Income and Receipts Tax doesn’t make it any better. I’ve always thought this was a really stupid tax that just pushes every white collar office business out into the suburbs, twenty feet over the city line, but this is absurd. What counts as taxable activity? The city will tell you (or not, apparently) when they send you a bill.

Company responds.

A week late, but it’s a double issue for Dec. 31. Whew!

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The internet story of the now is how Facebook photo ruined Christmas, which reminded me of a time when I thought Facebook had ruined my photos. One day I noticed (actually, more like a gradual realization) that photos on Facebook looked strange. They were blotchy, with messed up colors. I figured that this was an artifact of recompressing uploads, but a rather annoying one, since it turned people into greenish purple skinned aliens. Turns out this had nothing to do with Facebook, but rather with Firefox. I just didn’t realize what was up because most of the photos I look at are on Facebook and pictures elsewhere didn’t seem affected (only partly true; some other sites were pretty bad too, but many were ok), and then when I compared with my phone, I figured maybe they were different sizes and compressed differently. Doesn’t help that with all the Hipstamatic and Instagram crap filtered photos it’s hard to know what colors are supposed to be in the image.

Finally, I decided the problem had to be in Firefox, and a little searching later led me to a blog post explaining how Firefox uses color management. Read it for details. I’m not particularly concerned about accurate colors, just so long as people look like people, so I disabled color management entirely. Now pictures in Firefox have the same slightly blue shifted look they do in all my other programs.

Some random thoughts after reading vfork considered dangerous. First and immediate response, yes, vfork is dangerous.

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It’s a little weird to write a review of an individual issue of a magazine, but it provides a chance to collect my thoughts. Also, I found The Onion’s A.V. Club reviews of individual TV shows kind of interesting. That said, this is less a review, but short summaries of some pieces I thought stood out. I don’t know what I’m paying for The New Yorker these days, but this issue was surely worth it.

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The movie In Time comes from Andrew Niccol, who also wrote and directed Gattaca, one of my favorites. I didn’t know this until I looked it up afterwards, if I had known I probably would have made more of an effort to see it sooner. I like most of his movies. All of them, in fact.

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I was growing tired of my old iPhone games so I bought some new ones. I play only on an iPhone, not an iPad. I was mostly looking for quick fix games, not anything to rival a console game.

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