Silicon Valley Cocoaheads and Amit Singh
This evening I was a first-time visitor at the Silicon Valley Cocoaheads meeting at Apple’s campus in Cupertino. There we enjoyed a presentation from Amit Singh, author of the newly-released Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach from Addison-Wesley. This evening I saw his book for the first time, and it was a stunning sight.
mongrel with launchd and lighttpd
I just switched my web apps over to mongrel, the new Ruby web server that’s gotten so much talk lately. It’s striking to see how much easier web application development has gotten in the last year. I have a few light web applications, and they are all now running with mongrel. I’m running a separate mongrel server for each and using lighttpd to proxy to them and serve a few static sites. Everything is running on a mac mini and is configured to be run automatically by launchd, the daemon manager on OS X.
Beautiful Ruby in TextMate
"A storm broke loose in my mind"
These were the words Albert Einstein used to describe the events of 1905, the most productive year of his life. At age 26, he published five papers that had a lasting influence on physics and twentieth century thought.
Last week I read John Rigden’s Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. It’s a history and explanation of Einstein’s 1905 papers. I found Rigden’s descriptions of the five papers to be just detailed enough for me to understand them intuitively as a technically trained non-physicist.
In this short and accessible book, Rigden gives us a great description of Einstein’s work and life. He makes a strong case that Einstein is one of the most brilliant scientists in history. But as a lifelong student and hopeful parent, I find the most interesting parts of the story to be the characteristics of Einstein’s life that enabled him to do so much.
