Hand Coding

The OS clipboard is pretty handy — except that it can only hold one item at a time. For a few years, I’ve been using a clipboard manager which fixed that and kept track of multiple clipboard items as I added them. (Essentially, it keeps an internal list of items which have been in the clipboard, updating the list each time something is copied to the clipboard.)

However, since upgrading to Windows 2000 (yeah, I’ve been using it that long), this utility acquired some consistency problems — sometimes it’d just stop working. I’m not mentioning the app’s name here since I’m not even sure if it’s the component at fault.

Anyhow, I recently sought a replacement clipboard manager. And, my first stop was at SourceForge since there’s a wealth of good open source goodies there. I found a couple good utilities there and finally settled on Ditto. It’s free, natch, and it works great.

If you’re new to the idea, here’s how a clipboard manager works in general:

• Say you have a text document with the three biographies, one for “Alice”, one for “Bob” and one for “Carol”.

• Then, suppose you were to copy Alice’s biography to the clipboard (to paste into a side document). So far, the built-in OS clipboard can handle this much…

• After that, you copy Bob’s biography to the clipboard and paste that elsewhere…

• So, Bob’s bio is now in your clipboard… But, what if you need quick access to Alice’s bio again? If you were using the regular clipboard, you'd be stuck.

• However, with a clipboard manger, you can hit its hotkey and get a list of your past clipboard entries, choose the one you want, and that item is ready for pasting again.

All this may sound a bit esoteric if we’re just talking about biographies, but imagine this scenario with snippets of code or segments of a proposal which you’re editing. It can be a real time saver.

And the best part about Ditto — its killer feature which set it apart from similar apps — is that it supports type-ahead find. Also called “find as you type”, this feature was first seen in editors such as Emacs and became more widely known when it was built into Firefox. What this means is that finding stuff kicks in automatically. There’s no Ctrl-F or Edit -> Find; rather, you just start typing stuff and the program starts narrowing down the list as you’re typing.

For example, suppose that you had these entries in your clipboard:

• Mozilla — An open source Web browser and toolkit from the Mozilla Foundation
• Monkey — Any of various long-tailed, medium-sized members of the order Primates
• Modern — Of or relating to recent times or the present

If you wanted to recall the entry on Mozilla, you’d invoke Ditto with its hotkey (configurable by you) and then type M… O… Z… and, at this point, Ditto would have automatically highlighted the entry on Mozilla since none of the other entries would have matched that third letter (the “Z”).

Another cool feature in Ditto is that you can, either manually or automatically, share clipboard items with another computer that’s is running Ditto. One use would be that you could have a unified clipboard among two computers that you used. Or, and this idea is more intriguing to me, you could sparingly use it to place stuff in a coworkers clipboard. Of course, the recipient would have to be expecting it at the time (otherwise he/she might be confused to find that entry in his/her clipboard).

Anyhow, if you want to try Ditto, there’re two bits to download. First there’s the main installer for Ditto and then there's a DAO installer (I can’t say that I’m completely sure about what DAO does but its acronym stands for “Data Access Object” and I would conjecture that it’s some type of database toolkit). They can be installed in either order, for what it’s worth.

Ditto’s hotkey is configurable (Options -> Keyboard Shortcuts) and I’ve set mine to Ctrl-Alt-Y (which was the hotkey for the old clipboard manager that my fingers were already used to typing). And, as for other configuration options, I’d also recommend poking around in the Options -> Supported Types area which, as I understand it, defines what types of clipboard data Ditto keeps track of (text, images, and so on). There, I’ve added “CF_BITMAP” to the list (using the “Add” button there and selecting) which should enable Ditto to keep track of images in the clipboard as well.

PS I’m open to suggestions if anyone can recommend a clipboard manager for OS X (which runs on my other box). Unfortunately, a climate of shareware licensing engulfs that platform and I'm not holding my breath on finding a free equivalent for that OS.

Update 2005-06-18: Apparently, Quicksilver (for OSX) can be used for clipboard management. I may have to give that a try.

I have an aversion to PG-13 rated action movies. Invariably, I get the sense that the director is holding back — there’s absent or rare blood on the screen, violence which moves off screen as it becomes more intense and a general lack of suspense. For example, X-Men was fine — I didn't mind seeing it once — but I would have preferred not to have spent $8 to see it in a theater. And don’t even get me started on how awesome Anakin’s lava scene in Episode III could have been with an R rating.

For many years, there was only one PG-13 action film which I thought of as worthy of repeat viewings, Goldeneye (aka Bond 17) which also happens to be my favorite Bond movie (yeah, yeah, pipe down you Connery nuts in the back — his films were good too, but they just seem a bit anachronistic to me these days). As it turns out, I joined Netflix earlier this year and I’ve recently added two other films to that list — Hellboy and one other film which I’ll get to in a moment. (Then again, is Hellboy perhaps more of a sci-fi movie or even a comic book movie than an action flick?)

The film Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened this weekend and I’ve been largely doing my best to ignore it. At first, its mere PG-13-ness put me off; soon after, the hype surrounding supposed Pitt/Jolie affair made me even less interested in the flick. However, I looked it up on IMDB and learned that Doug Liman directed it — the same guy that directed The Bourne Identity.

You may have already seen where this is going, but The Bourne Identity is the remaining item on my list of PG-13 movies that I would consider seeing multiple times. I rented it through Netflix and watched it a few weeks ago. It’s almost two hours long but I didn’t find myself checking my watch at any point during the movie. The acting was good and the action was fairly lively within the confines of its rating.

Getting back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I realized that I couldn’t completely discount the Liman effect. Granted, not every director makes great movies every single time, but even if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was half as good as The Bourne Identity, it’d still be a fun time. I then checked Metacritic to see how critics scored it. (Metacritic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a movie review site that publishes a “Metascore” based on an aggregate sampling of many critics’ reviews.)

I’ll concede that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t actually do very well at Metacritic, at least not in the conventional sense; it got 55/100. However, among the critics that I’ve found to be reliable — and which have tastes in movies similar to mine — they mostly liked it:

• The Onion (A.V. Club) / Scott Tobias — “Rarely does a word like “deft” come to mind when viewing any film released between May and August, but Liman and company make it all look easy.”

• Film Threat / Clint Morris — “Thankfully, Liman’s film is not the equivalent of a piece of stale cheesecake — all look, no taste — because the script’s as tight as a scout-tied noose.”

• Salon.com / Stephanie Zacharek — “Some people will see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way.”

I’m not saying that I’m ready to sing the praises of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But, it’s probably better than I initially thought it was — maybe even venturing into “good” territory. If nothing else, I’ll toss it into my Netflix queue if I don’t end up seeing it in theaters.

I work in the West End and my coworkers and I occasionally go out for lunch in the area. And, one common spot is what we call “BOAT” — the Bank Of America Tower (which is just a few blocks from the building that we work in). There’s a food court in its basement level and we’ll often go there if nothing better comes to mind ;).

I usually bring a lunch to work, but sometimes I’ll walk with my coworkers as they pick up lunch just so that I can get some sunshine and fresh air. Such was the case last Wednesday (or was it Thursday?) when I walked with Bryan as he went to BOAT for some Chick-Fil-A. As we approached the counter, we both spied a tray of brownies under a clear dome. I’m not one to turn down a brownie and yet I wasn’t sure if I wanted a full brownie’s worth of sugar; so, I offered to split one with Bryan.

He declined and suggested that I just get one for myself and that I could tell him about it afterwards (well, voila, Bryan). I bought the brownie — 99¢ + tax — and took it back with me to the office to have as a snack sometime that afternoon. Sure enough, I ate the brownie, and here’s how I would rate it on its various metrics:

• Chewiness — the brownie was similar in some ways to vending machine brownies in that it was oddly chewy, almost to the point of gumminess. I blame corn syrup for this (HHOS).

• Texture — while I’m not one to turn down an extra-thick fudge brownie, some of my fondest memories are of brownies with a more cake-like density. Not that I want a brownie to resemble cake, but I like to be able to bite through a brownie without conscious effort. This brownie was dense but fakely-so; I wouldn’t be surprised if flour was absent from their recipe.

• Chocolatiness — the brownie had a chocolate flavor to it (so far, so good) but it was a fairly meek chocolatiness. Then again, I’m a bit of a chocolate fiend — I’m the kind of guy that would want to make s’mores out of 70% dark chocolate (which, come to think of it, would be tasty right about now).

• Nut Coverage — the brownie was topped liberally and homogeneously with chopped walnuts. These were just fine.

• Temperature Bonus Factor — if the brownie was served hot or warm, I would have offered bonus points for that; but, I consider it just a bonus as I’ve had some very good brownies in the past that were just served at room temperature.

I did make my way through the whole brownie, which is saying something. (I have tossed halfway-eaten desserts before, such as a cake batter ice cream + brownie chunk mixed ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. Their ice creams are normally tasty but the brownie chunks in this one took on a texture resembling melted gummi bears.)

Back to Chick-Fil-A’s brownies, though. Supposing that a 50% rating signified a brownie that was nether good-tasting nor bad-tasting, I’d rate this one at 55%. If someone were to offer one to me for free, I’d probably take one. But, I don't think I’d buy one on my own. Then again, can much more be expected from a 99¢ brownie?

Autoblog reports on a nifty feature in the Bugatti Veyron (which just happens to have 1,001 horsepower). Upon inserting a special lightweight aluminum key, the car enters “Top Speed” mode (no joke, the words “Top Speed” then appear on the facia). I must concede that Autoblog beat me to the punch on this one, but it does rather resemble KITT’s Super Pursuit Mode:

“[The] car begins a series of safety checks on such things as tyre pressures. Once complete, the chassis squats to just 65mm above the road at the front and 70mm at the rear. From now on, the diffuser flaps remain closed and the angle of incidence of the rear aerofoil is minimised to reduce wind resistance. The final action of this high-speed mode is to disable all limiters (the car is otherwise limited to 375kph). Touch the brakes, however, and the car reverts to standard settings.”

For the metric-challenged, the equivalent measurements would be a height of 2.5" in front and 2.75" in back. In case you don't have a ruler handy, think of it as being lower to the ground than length of your pinkie finder (from knuckle to tip, assuming your pinkie finger is about the same size as mine). Naturally, some lucky bastard piloted one of these to a new world record — 400 kph/ 248.5 mph in a production car.

I take my PowerBook when traveling and it’s often handy to be mooch some WiFi while waiting at an airport gate or cafe. Of course, it’s not so convenient to have to lug out the laptop just to check if there’s WiFi in the area. Fortunately, there're various hand-held WiFi detectors that can tell you if there's WiFi in the area. And, Handtops has a comparison of five of them.

As opposed to some first-generation WiFi detectors — some of which didn’t even work — this lot fairs much better. All of them include 802.11b & 802.11g support and one even detects Bluetooth. The one that caught my eye, though, was the Digital Hotspotter from Canary Wireless:

The Digital Hotspotter (HS10) is the only device on the market that not only detects a connection and its strength, but can also tell you whether it is encrypted, what channel it is on and the name of the network. You simply press the button and the device starts scanning and then stops once it finds a network. […]

WiFi detectors are useful in theory, but not good for much when they obediently report on the nearby full-signal network… that’s encrypted. With a digital screen which can display the nearby networks’ SSID information, there’re shouldn’t be as much of the doh-it’s-encrypted problem. (Then again, it wouldn’t be able to differentiate from open networks and “open” networks with a for-pay gateway.)

All the same, even though the Digital Hotspotter was the only device with a digital screen and the device with the longest detection range, Handtops wasn’t conclusive in declaring a winner. Apparently, the Digital Hotspotter occasionally had trouble detecting some networks; according to the manufacturer, it could have trouble with some devices that “broadcast their beacon frames at a higher than acceptable data rate”. Still, I don’t see anyone else offering a digital screen and a range of up to 600 ft ;). I may just have to get one of these sometime.

After some browsing through Answers.com, I stumbled upon “minimal”. I discovered that it doesn’t quite mean what I thought it meant.

Minimal and minimize come from the Latin adjective minimus, “least, smallest,” and people therefore use minimal to refer to the smallest possible amount, as in “The amplifier reduces distortion to the minimal level that can be obtained with present technologies.”

In recent years, however, people have begun to use minimal more loosely to refer to a small amount, as in “If you would just put in a minimal amount of time on your homework, I am sure your grades would improve. Language critics have objected to this usage, but it is fairly common.”

In an earlier survey, the Usage Panel was asked what minimal meant in the sentence Alcohol has a particularly unpleasant effect on me when I have a minimal amount of food in my stomach. Under the strict interpretation of minimal, this sentence should mean only “Alcohol has an unpleasant effect when I have eaten nothing.” […]

Aha, so I had fallen into the trap of common usage, the meaning that minimal meant merely a small amount; I didn’t know that it meant the smallest possible amount. Well, with that out of the way, perhaps I can put this newfound knowledge to work. I could say that I “make minimal use of tables for layout” or that I eat “a minimal amount of trans fat in my diet”. Whee! I think I like this “new word” already.