First let me say, I love Netflix. When I’m not programming, sleeping, or running, I’m usually watching Netflix. What a life! A friend who also loves Netflix came to me with a puzzling problem. He’s coming out of a long term relationship, and among the other shared possessions to be carefully divided was the couple’s [...]

Every good API (or language) should have a fundamental, powerful, impossible to ignore encapsulation of a primary building block in computer programming: the string. Wikipedia defines a string as a “sequence of various simple objects.” Wow! That’s an indulgent definition, but kind of nice in its flexibility. When such a robustness is properly implemented in [...]

(Note: The title of this entry is an homage to Aldous Huxley’s classic Doors of Perception.) Most Mac users and many developers don’t realize how extensively windows are used in the composition of the overall UI experience on Mac OS X. In the years since Mac OS X was first released, the basic “Quartz Window” [...]

I have become dependent over the past couple years on Google Calculator. This is the feature that allows you to type in queries like “X in Y” and get meaningful (not search results), immediate responses. For example, even though I’m a technical person, I can’t seem to memorize anything metric to save my life. So [...]