InfoFork.com

Last night my son Amos was born!

Ain’t that cute?

Added a function to view properly list (PLIST) files. Still testing it but seems to work quite well. Should be releasing this in 2.1 soon.

Btw, your old license key for WildEyes! 1.x should work on 2.x. Drop me an email if it isn’t working. 

CNN is reporting that there was a drop in consumer credit in October. (I assume the reason they are just now talking about October is because the numbers for these sorts of things are a few months lagged.) I think that’s great! Consumers have been using far, far too much personal credit for years. The best thing about the financial crisis is how many people have actually took action and changed their behavior for the better.

Humorously, though, they open with this line,

Consumer borrowing unexpectedly decreased in October as the weak economy continued to weigh on household budgets.

Unexpected? Really? After telling us 24 hours a day that we were in a “credit crunch” where getting credit was “hard,” they felt that people having used less credit was still unexpected?! Was CNN not watching the news?

WildEyes! Is finally working on 2.x. WildEyes! is a browser to view or play files in your device. There are some major improvement in this update.

- No longer dependant on LightTPD and Safari
- View docs (such as Word documents, PDF, Powerpoint, Excel, plain text etc
- View images
- Play media (video and sound)
- Opens up to the last browsed location
- Shake to toggle showing of hidden files

WildEyes! has to be completedly rewritten for 2.0, so you might see some missing features. I’ll build them up again. Drop me an email if any of those particular features are top on your priority list.

Note that there should be a file size limit of 10MB, just like Safari. 

I’ll format the screenshots properly later. Only just downloaded the WordPress app on iPhone while commuting on a train. Can really do much formatting, but it’s better than Safari crashing once in while and I lose my unsaved posts

The C lineage of languages stubbornly refuse to die. C was built up from the very simple concepts of assembly language (which of course is just a representation of machine code). C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, etc. were built primarily upon C. On the other hand, Smalltalk and LISP first started with abstract ideals and then were forcibly mapped onto the less-than-ideal machines below. The C lineage continues to enjoy almost universal popularity while the Smalltalk and LISP lineages seem to languish by comparison - even though there’s theoretically many advantages to the purity of a top-down approach to language design.

Smalltalk and LISP proponents tend to put forth that their systems were so much more advanced from the start that the mainstream languages haven’t caught up yet. There might be some truth to this - after all, both C++ and Objective-C (and Java, etc) all owe a great deal to Smalltalk and LISP. Even so, they are clearly of the C lineage of languages. Is this simply a reflection of the idea that learning a language that is a derivative of the language you already knew is easier than learning one that’s got an entirely different root? Or is it that an incremental improvement of past methods is considered the safer choice when pitted against a clean slate approach?

I think it’s interesting that the languages that seem to persist in popularity have evolved much like human languages. Just as english is based on many of the languages that came before it, the C lineage was based on assembly which is based on machine code which is a reflection of how the physical hardware works. Smalltalk and LISP started at the other end of the evolutionary chain. Instead of working with the state of the world as it was and adding a little something to it, they instead chose to try to reshape the world to their ideals.

These two opposing approaches to language design parallel other things seen in human culture. In many ways, it is the same attribute that divides liberals and conservatives: Liberals are always pushing to change, expand, and try new things whereas conservatives, by definition, are cautious of change and treat tradition and past knowledge as a kind of safety net.

Like a typical Neal Stephenson novel… I’ll just end this here in the middle… I had more thoughts, but they suddenly escaped me. Oh well.