AZ Monsoon Starts Today? Nonsense!

No stickiness yet, but Ariz. monsoon season is here via kwout

What?!? This is nonsense. The monsoon season starts when the humidity goes up. Looks like the NWS is dumbing down the definition. Why not call it “summer” ?? The weather folks have never been able to predict when the monsoon will start and when it will end. By redefining it as a simple date range they might get their predictions right.

Those of us who have lived in AZ for a while (31 years for me) KNOW this is BS.

One of my dogs, Annie, a Labrador Retriever mix, thinks summer started this weekend. When I brushed her, sheets and sheet of shed hair came off her. She is preparing her summer wardrobe.

Resize Multiple Images in OS X Preview

Usingmac.com had a useful tip: How to resize multiple images using Preview. I tried it, it does work on Leopard. This seems like a great way to create a bunch of thumbnails. Be careful, though, when you save the resized images. It overwrites them. I copied the images I wanted to resize to a new folder, then resized them. Keeps my original images as is.

1. Open images to be resized in Preview
2. Select images you want to resize.
3. On the Preview menu Tools -> Adjust size.
4. File -> Save All  The images are overwritten.

Laptop of the Future? All Screen, No Keyboard

Computerworld has an article predicting what your laptop will be like in 5 years. Hmm, maybe. Interesting.

Happy 30th Birthday Intel 80×86

For those who don’t know, the Intel 8086 was the great-great-great grandfather of the Pentium chip in your PC or Mac. The family is 30 years old. Here’s a ComputerWorld article.

The 8086, 8088 (cpu in the very first IBM PC), and 80286 had a segmented memory architecture that drove us programmers to abuse substances :-)  Hey, I was young then. You could only address 64K directly, then you had to fool with the segment registers to get to more of the 24 bit total address space. This was finally fixed in the 80386 with its 32 bit flat architecture.

I also remember the 8080, 8085, and my favorite of the 8 bit world the 8051 microcontroller (an 8085 variant designed for embedded applications). The 8051 was the first microprocessor I really worked with professionally. I fondly remember the Intel micro development system that could emulate this chip at full speed. The first microprocessor I ever programmed was the 6502 (not an Intel chip).

Killing Rampage in Japan: Knife Used, No Gun

Blog warnings posted ahead of Tokyo knife rampage - Yahoo! News via kwout

A mass killing in Japan was done by a madman with a knife. A knife! Not a gun. As I and others have been saying for years, it is not guns that are the problem. It’s the madmen, or evil in the world, or both. In the US these large scale murders have typically been carried out with guns, so the media and politicians scream for reducing our right to keep and bear arms. It’s not the gun, it’s the human being whose finger is on the trigger.

My sympathies go out to the families of the victims.