Mc-Kenna.com

@robertdempsey I’m sticking with Twitterific, it has better system integration from what I can see.

Huge congratulations to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová for rightly winning the Oscar for Best Original Song for Falling Slowly from the movie Once. Beautiful song, wonderful movie, and rightfully deserving. Their performance on the night was great, and their acceptance speeches demonstrated their honesty as people and integrity as artists - I loved it how Glen’s first action was to turn around to hug his mum :-) Again, congrats to both.

For the past two years I’ve been using SmartSVN as my graphical subversion tool of choice on OSX, mainly because it seemed more feature rich and stable than the others. On the MacPro with 3gig of RAM I used to have at work it was great, I didn’t notice the bloat associated with its Java foundation, but on my current 1.33ghz PowerBook with only 1.2gb of RAM the bloat really is noticeable - it can take easily use more virtual memory than anything else running (about 700mb is typical), and take longer to become active again when swapping between apps. So after a quick look at similar tools again I’ve decided to try out ZigVersion, a native C application which makes it much faster. While the workflow is definitely different, it seems pretty good so far, though it’s early days yet. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Florida’s government’s ruling that evolution is a scientific theory, as part of a broad-spectrum updating of the state’s educational standards, highlights just how ignorant the populace as a whole is of scientific terms and concepts. As mentioned before, a scientific theory is different to what most people think as a “theory”, and as such evolution fits the term “scientific theory perfectly - remember that there are gaps in the theory which is why it hasn’t become a scientific law yet, unlike the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. So, proponents of evolution who complain that evolution is a “fact” need to re-read their science 101 text books, and the people who believe evolution is incorrect need to a) get their heads out of their posteriors and b) accept that just because they can’t understand it or it wasn’t in a 2000 year old story anthology doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Anyone who needs anti-virus software for their Windows-based machine should try out the following free options before paying for anything:

• AVG
• Avast
• ClamWin
• Kaspersky

A few weeks ago I picked up a small heater at Lowes as a) it was on sale, b) I’ve got circulation problems so if I get cold when typing my fingers go numb. Amusingly it still gets a little cold in Florida occasionally, so for $11 it was worth picking up to have available if it was needed. Today the room I was going to be working in was a bit too cool for my liking - the windows had been open to dry paint, so it was a perfect time to try out the heater. Well I must say it was worth the $11 - it has a digital temperature gauge, an oscillating fan, a timer, and best of all, you don’t just set it on or off, you set a temperature and it automatically turns on/off as needed. Excellent stuff.

After several weeks of trying to do everything yet accomplishing nothing (or so it seemed), this week we’ve turned ourselves around and started living better, starting with a stronger separation of church and state, er, I mean work and home. We started off with a trip to the chiropractor, picked up breakfast, then spent some time painting the bedroom together. Now I’m going to work for a few hours and later will take a break away from it, then work some more - rinse, repeat. Amusingly this way we’ll actually accomplish more for our day than otherwise, and this morning has so far been a lot more fun and less stressful than previously, which is exactly what it should be.

Just a little note to say that I hate email spam. I really do. I get about 190 of them per day, which all have to be verified as spam as my filters occasionally block something that isn’t spam, maybe two or three per week. So as a result of the economics of spam (the numbers haven’t changed much in six years), I have to check about 1300 message per week to ensure that I don’t miss anything important. Also, this number will continue to increase year upon year, so by this time next year it’ll probably be 250 or more. Just thought I’d mention it.