http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/09/09/bridge/ -- way cool article about "toll free bridging" -- the mechanism used to make CFString look like NSString on Mac OSX.... -- thanks to Rob Fahrni for the pointer

Also on the must read list: anything by Seth Godin. Purple Cow. Permission Marketing. Not that I've read them yet, but they are on the must read list. So someday.

Contest to develop an iPhone/iPod app for middle school math learning:

http://www.lwbva.org/applications.cfm

Enter by June 19th...

Last September, we took an awesome vacation in the beautiful land of Scotland. Then, later on, I finally went through all the photos and uploaded the best of them to a web album... For those of you we've talked to recently and promised to send you a link to them, here they are:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dlrdave/BestOfScotland

Enjoy!

It's here!

Frackle: The simplest fractal explorer on the planet. Now available as Frackle, in the iTunes app store. (Click this link directly, which launches iTunes, or search for Frackle by DLR softWare LLC in the app store...)

Frackle documentation online here:
http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle/iPhone

Check it out. Buy it. Put it on your iPhone or your iPod Touch.

Let me know how you like it. Or if you have a brilliant idea to improve Frackle.

I'm thinking maybe a blog entry a week featuring a cool fractal image straight from Frackle would be a neat way to show it off... Maybe I'll do that.


Take it easy,
David

So I read this book in the fall of 2008. "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss. You may want to read it, you may not. It'll only take a few hours at most. You might believe some of what he says, you might be skeptical. The concept is simple: stop spending so much time making a living and create something that produces income for you without as much effort as a "real job." If you could do that, you could spend your time pursuing what you want to pursue, and forget about going to work all the time. Stop making a living and make a life instead...

He recommends going on an information diet: consume less of the daily internet headlines, blogs, books, magazines, newspapers, tv, radio... And do stuff instead. Be more productive. Make more time for yourself by taking charge of your day each and every day. Ignore the unimportant.

But then he has four must read "other book" recommendations near the end of his book. Someday I'm going to read all of these, too:

• The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz


• How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan S. Kennedy


• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber


• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

(Big long subtitles of all five of these books omitted in all cases to save me time typing this...)

Maybe I'll come back later and put in links to these books on amazon. Or maybe I won't.


;-)
David

Excellent article on interop and .NET libraries on the mono web site:

http://www.mono-project.com/Interop_with_Native_Libraries

Coming soon...

Frackle: The simplest fractal explorer on the planet. For iPhone.

Documentation is online now:


        http://www.dlrsoftware.com

        


(which, for now, immediately redirects to http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle and then to http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle/iPhone)

Deep in the text of this posting is how to find the file "com.apple.dock.iconcache" using Spotlight on a Mac:

http://weblog.commandlinejunkie.com/articles/2008/12/20/changing-os-x-finder-icon-in-the-dock

Whew! Not sure why that file has to be quite so hidden, but there you go.

To framework or not?

Good (but long) article from a guy who seems to know what he's talking about...
http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/2005/11/frameworks-are-teh-suck-err.html

So the weekend after my last post, Nate and I went to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

It's a very cool place... at least, Nate and I thought so. The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith, U2, The Police... and on and on. If you're a rock and roll fan, there is something here that will thrill you or inspire you.

Cleveland is actually a very clean city, and for some reason, much nicer than I expected. The cashier dude at the Rock Hall store recommended eating dinner at a place up the street called Fat Fish Blue, and boy was it good. All kinds of southern style stuff way up north here on the shore of Lake Erie.

Check 'em out next time you're in Cleveland...


View Larger Map

So... we quietly launched a new product yesterday from Kitware Headquarters in Clifton Park, NY. It's called "ActiViz .NET" and it lets C# and VB. NET developers simply *use* VTK, the Visualization Toolkit, without all the hassle of downloading it, building it, having to understand CMake and C++, figuring out how that .NET interop stuff works ... all just to get a simple 3D graphic of your complicated scientific data up on the screen.

Suddenly it's easy again.

Check it out:
http://www.kitware.com/ActiViz


Unleash the Power of VTK on the .NET Framework!
Limitless functionality. Infinite possibilities.


Build something cool with it and send me a screenshot.

Cheers!

All right, so maybe some of my family members do not see photos included in emails... May as well just write it / post photos here because it is simply more reliable. Freakin' computers! Who writes the software for this stuff anyhow? It goes something like this:

The Trim: Before & After (aka "I was an East Coast Fahrni up until last Saturday")

Perhaps you've heard the rumor, perhaps not. I've got the photos to verify it, though... :-)



Me and five other ponytail donators are making a wig for some woman who's lost her hair to cancer treatments... via the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program.

So now I'm the coolest I've ever been.

Hairless Summer, dead ahead!

Wow. Yet another chain of "accidental" connectedness. I read an article on video game complexity just now on a whim, enjoyed it, found it interesting and then followed a link to the author's blog, where the most recent two articles also turned out to be extremely interesting... If you're a geek like me, or are interested in why humans make the choices they make, or have any musical inklings at all, check these out:

The Science of Interrogation

Musicians suppress self-monitoring functions of the brain while improvising...

A little bit of improv might be just the thing each of us needs to reset for another round in the real world.