Drinking the Kool-Ade

Well, I've finally done it. I've migrated over to the hipster world.

Yesterday I went out and bought a 13-inch Macbook Pro. It's a lovely machine. In terms of pure horsepower it's not spectacular, but I'm continually amazed by all the little touches that have gone into it. For example, the keyboard is backlit and its intensity is automatically controlled by an ambient light sensor. Sure, other laptop makers could have done this, but none as elegantly as Apple.

The precision machining of the aluminum skin alone is staggering.

In my defense, the Macbook Pro was $200 off the list price. And one of the first things I did was put a sticker over the big glowing Apple logo on the cover.

OS X integrates very well with the Linux environment at work. An X11 server automatically starts as soon as you ssh into another machine and launch any X application. And, of course, all the standard Unix tools are built in.

The 13-inch screen (1280x800) is a tad small, but usable - at work the machine is connected to a fairly large external monitor, freeing the laptop LCD up as a second display. Again, I was pleasantly surprised that when I pulled out the cable to the external monitor everything was quickly moved over to the internal display. Linux was a nightmare in that regard.

So far I've no major complaints, other than the lack of proper focus-follows-mouse, which Apple seems to have no intention of implementing.

Jim on 08.19.10 @ 08:55 PM ET [link]

Chrome

Chrome is Google's own web browser. I've been using Chrome for the past week in place of my beloved Firefox, and I think I'm a convert.

I do a lot of multi-tabbed browsing, sometimes having a dozen tabs open at any given moment. The number one thing that bugged me about Firefox was the the whole browser would sometime lock up for a while when one particular tab would have trouble loading. I'm not sure if the problem is with JavaScript or Flash or vanilla HTML, but it was really annoying. Chrome uses a more compartmentalized programming model and doesn't suffer from this problem.

My only complaint so far with Chrome is that they decided to dispense with the normal pull-down menu model, at least on the Linux version. There are a couple of icons to get to menus, but they're not in the normal place I expect them to be.

One other curiosity is the similarity between the Chrome icon and the old "Simon" electronic toy. I can't see one without thinking of the other. You be the judge:



Jim on 08.14.10 @ 12:47 PM ET [link]

To P or not to P

According to Vinay Deolalikar, a Principal Research Scientist at HP Labs: P != NP.

Our work shows that every polynomial time algorithm must fail to produce solutions to large enough problem instances of k-SAT in the d1RSB phase. This shows that polynomial time algorithms are not capable of solving NP-complete problems in their hard phases, and demonstrates the separation of P from NP.

Probably. If correct then this is Really Big News. The proof has not been peer-reviewed, but the consensus seems to be that this is a plausible approach, and definitely not a crank.

Jim on 08.09.10 @ 09:24 AM ET [link]