The Amiga 1000 was introduced in 1985, amid aesthetically bland and technologically limited IBM personal computers and the then-monochrome Apple Macintosh. In comparison, the Amiga offered “a palette of 4,096 colors, screen resolutions up to 640×400, four-channel digital stereo sound, true preemptive multitasking” and more.

Computer journalists struggled to understand just what practical implications these sorts of new features would hold for users. Many wrote about how the Amiga would surely advance the world of computing, though not everyone saw the potential. “There are products now that address every need of the business person,” said computer retailer Bert Helfinstein. “Why add another one unless there is a compelling reason? And in [the case of the Amiga], that compelling reason doesn’t exist.”

Maher spends the rest of the book showing us compelling reasons why the Amiga was indeed a groundbreaking computer: “the world’s first true multimedia PC.” Descriptions range from technical historical journalism reminiscent of classic Byte magazine articles, to surprisingly in-depth (yet layman-friendly) computer science surveys to help us understand how the Amiga hardware and software was wired together.

I am delighted with the level of detail and behind-the-scenes trivia that Maher has provided. Some interesting bits that stood out to me:

• The origins of the IFF file format to allow Amiga users to more easily share data across applications
• The selection of the name “Amiga” in order to appear before “Apple” and “Atari” in alphabetical corporate directories
• Inner workings of Deluxe Paint’s “undo” functionality, which explain some of its odd behavior that might not have been understood from the surface
• A thorough overview of the original “boing” bouncing ball demo that kicked off the Amiga’s graphics-producing fame

I always knew that the Amiga platform was ahead of its time, but it is fascinating to gain more insight into just how advanced it was, and how clever its developers were with the resources they had to work with.

There are a number of illustrations included in the book, but I imagine it would be perfectly readable in Kindle format as well. Also available as an eBook directly from the publisher.

A quick inspection of the lens suggested that it was slightly dinged up, but appeared to be pretty good. The glass looked clean. I put it on my camera, and took Samantha outside for some test pictures. Even with a fast maximum aperture of 1.8, it was hard to capture any non-blurry shots of Samantha running through the yard…

After about fifteen shots, the camera (Canon 5D) suddenly locked up and displayed “ERR” status. That has only happened to me once or twice with this camera, since 2006. Could be a coincidence, but it seems odd that it happened after putting this new (used) lens on. I restarted the camera and took about 50 more pictures of Samantha without problem.

Back inside, I examined the lens more carefully, and noticed that the manual focus ring seemed to exhibit more than expected friction when turning. Autofocus seemed reasonably smooth, but focus by hand was a little tough and a little loud. Finally I more closely examined the glass elements of the lens, and observed dust on the inside of the lens. Not a big deal in terms of image quality, but it just heightened my suspicions that the lens wasn’t quite up to par. So I packaged it back up in the box to return.

As far as the 85mm/1.8 lens in general, it appears to be a good short-telephoto portrait lens, which is exactly what I was expecting. I didn’t keep this lens long enough to try it out on any people, and Samantha wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to get a good portrait of her, but some other tests look positive.

So I guess I’ll be ordering a new one after all, and forgoing the expected savings…

More photos

Like many children, I imagine, I too was captivated by the Muppets, making some attempts at building my own puppets (initially out of construction paper, and eventually working my way up to foam rubber and fabric), all the while in the back of my mind occasionally wondering how someone could land a job actually working as a Muppet performer.

The film gives some clue as to what it would take, namely, a lot more dedication to puppetry than I’ve ever expressed! But what impressed me the most was that Kevin’s story serves as an example of deciding to do something in life and working hard at it. I think too often people idly wish something would happen in their lives but never actually take steps toward seeing it comes to pass.

Buy on Amazon / Watch on Netflix

I wonder: would it be useful to be able to schedule your mobile phone ring mode, similar to how you schedule calendar alarms? For example:

• Sunday 10am – 12pm (church): silent
• Monday through Friday, 8am – 5pm (regular working hours): vibrate
• Tuesday 9am – 10am (weekly staff meeting): silent
• Friday 6pm – 8pm (Parcheesi tournament): silent
• All other times: normal ring

You could also integrate this with your calendar, so that when you schedule an event (a haircut, a meeting, whatever) you could specify a ring mode for that particular day and time.

[I personally don't enter my regular weekly schedule into my calendar, just the unique differences. For those who enter everything into their calendar, this entire system could be implemented by letting calendar entries specify ring mode, and that might be the most elegant way of making it work.]

Of course, you could override all of this with a switch, to turn the phone completely silent, but I imagine a lot of people have fairly regular schedules of when they want their phone to ring, vibrate, or remain silent.

I don’t think I can just “write an app for that”, since this is a core functionality of the phone itself, but for any phone operating system designers out there, this might be a worthwhile feature!

• Campbell’s Healthy Request Beef with Country Vegetables Soup: 410 milligrams per serving (820 in a whole can)
• Wendy’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich: 1080 milligrams
• Mrs. Grimes Dark Red Kidney Beans: 390 milligrams per serving (1365 in a whole can)
• McCormick Reduced-Sodium Taco Seasoning: 300 milligrams per serving (1800 in a whole package)

And some less surprising (though still astonishing) sodium numbers:

• Taco Bell 1/2-pound Cheesy Potato Burrito: 1360 milligrams
• Arby’s French Dip & Swiss: 2120 milligrams
• McDonald’s Big Breakfast with Hotcakes: 2150 milligrams
• Taco John’s Potato Oles Scrambler with Bacon: 3510 milligrams

But even with less outlandish sodium counts, it seems very easy to go well beyond the daily recommended amount of sodium without trying very hard, even while thinking you are eating in a perfectly healthy manner. Why isn’t our modern 100-calorie-cupcake-pack society more interested in maintaining sane levels of sodium intake?

But wait, what version of Python? Does it matter? What version of PostgreSQL? Does it matter? What version of PyGreSQL and CherryPy?

And oops, it seems PyGreSQL doesn’t build properly on my Mac, and there’s no precompiled binary available from the developer.

After some poking around, I finally got all of the individual pieces in place, I think, but then the whole system doesn’t work! I must still not have something right, but I’m not sure what.

Grr. I think I’ll just update it all to use Python3 and newer versions of the other tools, rewriting from scratch anything that I need to.

Lesson learned: document not only the tools used to build the software system, but the versions of the tools, and, if at all possible, make an archive of the tools themselves in case you can’t download them again later…

After investing a fair bit of time into learning iPhone development, that hurt a little to hear! But further consideration leads me to the same conclusion. For all of the hours I’ve poured into iPhone programming, I’m still pretty disgusted by it. I wince when I envision the drudgery involved in making even modest changes or additions to an iPhone application. But web applications have always felt pretty streamlined overall.

But what about making money? Isn’t it super easy to make money on the iPhone App Store?

I’ve recently been making some designs for a music education program that I planned to develop as an iPhone application. Yesterday, a friend showed me her new iPad, and asked what I thought about running GarageBand on it for basic music tracking. I said it’d be hard to go wrong with that option, as it only costs five dollars.

I seriously doubt that my planned music education app would have 10% of the overall functionality as GarageBand, so maybe I could offer a good value on the iPhone App Store if I just gave it away for free!

At least with web applications, you can justify time and resources spent hosting and maintaining the application, and charge money accordingly. Big companies might think it’s a good idea to build iPhone applications just so their marketing departments can say that they have one, but for an individual software engineer, maybe it’s not only more technically pleasant to write web software, but potentially more profitable…

• What I Learned at MIT
• Photos from the trip

The weather was delightfully unseasonably warm, making the mile-long trek from the hotel to the classroom quite reasonably pleasant.

In the past, when declining the offer to purchase a car wash, I found myself pressing “No” repeatedly several dozen times before the system finally registered by response, but on the rare occasions I did want to get a car wash, it managed to accept my “Yes” response immediately…