About a month ago, my house-mate Jordan discovered a program on his macbook pro that allowed you to use voice commands to perform certain tasks on the computer.  The program featured a hilarious voice synthesizer and was an interesting novelty for all of a week.  He eventually disabled it, because it had a tendency to spontaneously respond to non-commands, which gave the rest of us a brilliant idea.  This is the [long] story of perhaps the world’s most epic computer prank ever conceived. Read more…

Everybody knows I really love Java, and I’m a real fan of the new(ish) generic type features in Java, but as I mentioned last time, I have some problems with the way they handle reflection.  Well I have some other problems with Java as well, problems major enough to make me a little angry, but not big enough to make me even consider switching.  This post will just outline some of the things I would like to see implemented in future Java implementations. Read more…

My first experience with generics in Java was when I was working on my Darwin G.P. library.  I was excited to find out about and take advantage of generics, but there was one major problem I had with the way they were implemented–they were completely disregarded at run-time!  I never fully understood what the motivation behind that decision was, and I’ve been informed that C# does things differently (have not verified), but I recently discovered an interesting workaround using the Factory pattern. Read more…

Part of being the best nerd you can be involves keeping up with nerdy news.  There are tons of blogs and other services out there to keep you up on what’s happening, but up until this point, I’ve all but ignored them.  That was weird, because I’ve always been pretty interested in those things.  So it’s surprising it took me this long to discover RSS feeds… Read more…

I’ve always been a Firefox guy, but for one reason or another, I’ve been more and more tempted to try out Google Chrome.  I nervously gave it a shot, and after a couple of days, changed it to my default browser. Read more…

More on my series of Nerdy Lifestyle Changes, I’ve started using GIT for my version control, both on my personal projects and group projects.   Read more…