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Joseph Auricchio: Master of Science

Joe Auricchio — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:09:02 +0000

Today I presented & defended my final project, fulfilling the last requirement for the degree Master of Science. This makes me the first in my family to earn a graduate degree.

College has been a long, fun trip. I’m sad to leave, even as I’m eager for the next chapter to begin.

Defeating the Cylon Missile

Joe Auricchio — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:14:30 +0000

See it
Put it on your 3-9 line
Countermeasures
Turn hard into it
Pray

(BSG is sweet)

mspaint.exe for the Mac

Joe Auricchio — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:30:37 +0000

Mac OS X comes with lots of things Windows doesn’t. It comes with one of the best browsers out there (Safari), a huge dictionary for both spell checking and definitions, a handful of good media programs (iTunes, iPhoto, and Front Row; I hate each of them but I’m in the very small minority), the best desktop calendar program ever (iCal), an AIM and Jabber client (iChat), an Image Capture program that can pull photos from 90% of cameras and scanners without installing a darn thing, printer drives for gosh near everything, a solid mail client that doesn’t try to take over your life, the simplest and most effective backup software ever (Time Machine), a secure password saver and retriever (Keychain), a system-wide Address Book that any application can hook into, and let’s not forget a decent Unix shell environment. ¹

The one place Windows actually comes with better default software is mspaint.exe. Whether you want to point something out or make highly precise technical diagrams, mspaint is about the easiest thing ever. Sometimes you want to make a boxes-and-lines diagram with OmniGraffle, and sometimes you want to do some Art with Canvas or ZBrush or The 800-Pound Gorilla… and sometimes you just want to draw something.

So today I found PaintBrush, an open-source bitmap editor for Mac OS X. It’s mspaint, translated to the Mac look-and-feel. Its tools are: pencil, eraser, select, paint can, bomb, line, bezier, text, box, and oval. It does no antialiasing. It can’t resize images after you’ve created them. It only has ten levels of undo.

I am so happy.

Insert boring discussion about bundling and anti-trust here. ↩

Why Upgrade-Installs Worry Me

Joe Auricchio — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:39:52 +0000

This is Danny’s Ubuntu computer. Tonight he upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10. Now he has two Printing control panels.

Administration, showing two entries for Printers" />

Death of a Company

Joe Auricchio — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:38:16 +0000

“Death of Individuality” was the headline for this pic when it came up on Reddit.

I’m not mourning individuality, I’m mourning the Macintosh’s nearly twenty-year standing as the sharpest tool in the drawer for the few who weren’t afraid to cut themselves; as the best for the best; cult classic, not best-sellah. The iPod set off a massive demographic shift in Apple’s customer base, and they’ve retargeted their efforts and redefined their corporation, and turned Apple into something it never was: a mass-market company. Apple used to sell products to customers, today they market trends to consumers.

One of these days I should turn this and the various conversations I’ve had with folks into a proper essay/elegy.

Link reposted from Ryan’s blog.

Mnemonics

Joe Auricchio — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:24:47 +0000

You know the “30 days hath September” rhyme to remember which months have which lengths? The only one I can ever remember is September.

Google Calculator is my hero

Joe Auricchio — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:52:56 +0000

Mooneer’s starting a hosting service. He’s considering charging $125/mbps, and wants to know how much per GB that is, assuming full-tilt usage for a month. We did the math in our heads and calc.exe. Paul said Damn. Google Calculator can’t do that conversion. I started messing with different ways of specifying units… and lo and behold it can!

125 (dollars per month per (megabit per second)) in dollars per gigabyte

This is nontrivial engineering. But I guess that’s to be expected from Google these days…

Nine cents of Serrano chiles

Joe Auricchio — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:30:09 +0000

SERRANO CHILI GREEN .09" />

In these dark days of rising prices (healthcare, petroleum, food… everything but real estate), it’s good to know that you can still get enough capsaicin to knock your face clean off for less than a dime.