What's it all about, Alfie?

It's shocking, but I'm not really surprised. As John Gruber put it:

Three years ago it sold out in a month. Two years ago it took a week. Last year it took 12 hours. So, if you want to go, I wouldn’t fuck around.

And indeed he was right. It sold out in two hours. Amazing.

I'm not sure what they'll be doing a year from now - it's likely to get even worse as time goes on. I'm guessing they are just going to have a shorter and shorter sell-out time and let people stay up all night to try and anticipate when they will go on sale.

After all, what else can they do? Raise the price? They'd have to make it 10x to impact the demand in any really significant way, and then the people you really want coming will probably stay away. You want the indie Mac developers that have made it - at least a little, and the soon-to-be indie Mac developers to intermingle and share ideas. This gets the ecosystem going and makes sure that you have great ideas passed around.

I think it's an interesting note that if you were in a long meeting, or might have been sleeping in, you'd have totally missed it. Amazing.

This morning I noticed a somewhat minor update to Google Chrome dev to 20.0.1115.1. The release notes only say that there are "fixes" and an update for the V8 javascript engine to 3.10.5.0. Still, it's nice to see that it's making progress still as I'm thinking about a web project to keep me occupied while I'm off. I still need to finish the iOS/OS X library I'm working on, but after that, possibly a little more web stuff? Who knows.

I was reading a little from the newsgroups today and decided to have a look at the latest from the HPC on Mac OS X to see if they had an updated gfortran for OS X 10.7 - and indeed they did. I downloaded the package, updated my removal script and then installed the latest version. I then rebuilt my thesis code with it, and was happy to see that it all still worked.

Not that I didn't think it would, but it's nice that it still works.

I'm not sure what I was planning, but I have to admit that it might be really nice to get back into FORTRAN and just write code. But that's the same with C++, isn't it? I just want to write code. Not really mess with GUIs… not mess with people, and politics, and all the cruft that comes from dealing with people -- I just want to write code again.

Maybe I'll dig into my thesis and try to see where the convergence issues really are. I know they are there, but I'm not sure that FORTRAN is the best language to find them. Maybe Obj-C might be nice. It's certainly got all the functionality I'd need, and it'd be nice to be able to have the physics in modules, but we'll have to think about it a bit.

This morning I noticed a minor milestone for Google Chrome dev - the 20.x.x.x series is out with 20.0.1096.1. There is a new V8 javascript engine, and a few more nice things in the release notes, but it's interesting that since I've been looking, I haven't done a lot of writing, and noes Chrome 20 is out. Kinda wild.

This evening I decided I wanted to get out of the house a little, so I went with Liza to the Naperville North Women's Lacrosse Board Meeting and sat at a little table for two in the corner and did a bit of coding. I can see why Wil Shipley and so many others do the exact same thing. It's so nice to have a simple little break from the home office where I've been hammering on this same problem for quite a while. Just the change of scene… the different background music… the different table and surroundings - all makes for a really wonderful experience.

Now I don't think I'd do this over the home office, but it's certainly nice to have the change of scene. If I went indie, I'd be doing this a few times a week. Maybe Starbucks, Panera, and other similar places would be where I spent my afternoons. Hard to say, but it's a lot of fun. I can see myself doing a lot more coding here if Liza's going to stay on this board.

Very nice change of pace.

And I got a lot of coding done too!