michael-mccracken.net

Focus

Maybe it’s a little dramatic to think of it this way, but it has seemed like I have two computing personalities - the one that writes here about Macs, user-app programming and interfaces, goes to WWDC and hangs out with indie developers, and then the other one that actually gets paid - a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science who works on compilers, performance tools and high-performance computing at UCSD and SDSC. OK, I don’t get paid much, but that’s who I am in real life.

In order to get real work done, I’ve had to cut back on the first guy, shelving a few projects I would love to release, and dropping out of sight for months at a time on the BibDesk project, which doesn’t seem to miss me, really.

What this means is that I’ve been pretty silent here lately, which I think is a shame, because I’m hugely vain and love attention. And yet I don’t post personal details. This is evidence that I am complex and fascinating. Nevertheless, you really have got to hear what I’ve got to say.

In order to help you with that, I’m going to start posting about research topics, both my own and good papers I read or talks I go to, and hopefully some of it will be interesting. I have no idea how dedicated I will be to this, and it could get touchy - don’t expect anything too controversial, since I do want to get hired and like a fool, I used my full name as the domain for my blog.

Coming up next - some thoughts on peer review.

Previously:
Universal I-Search
January 13, 2006

There are a couple minor improvements in the pipeline, but I wanted to get a universal binary version of the I-Search plugin out before you noticed that it wasn’t universal already. It’s the same as the last version, just twice as fat. Get it here.

Next up for this project is to move it to the [...]

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Sending large files?
January 12, 2006

This problem comes up occasionally - I want to send some large files (hundreds of megabytes) to someone else. They’re too big for email, I don’t want to share them with the world, can’t just burn a DVD, and neither of us has a computer that is constantly connected to the internet.

I usually resort [...]

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Lapwarmer
January 10, 2006

New Powerbooks, whatever they call them. I’m not sure I’ll be able to say “MacBook Pro” without a self-conscious wince.

4x faster is a nice number - the memory bandwidth numbers (6.3x faster) are certainly impressive. I’ll have to avoid using one so I don’t start hating my 1.25Ghz G4.

A little disappointed that there’s no massive [...]

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