Comments for frankschmitt.org

Comment on HOWTO Disable that annoying Emacs Splashscreen by Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:37:57 +0000

Um, why are you editing your .emacs file with vi?

Comment on First Post! by Bob Kuykendal

Bob Kuykendal — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:45:53 +0000

Frank: Yesterday I posted a comment to FCOWS and now the web site is gone! Did I do it?

My comment may be important to you and your readers so I am going to repeat it. It concerns your "Product Idea: GPS Business Trip Logger" dated 2005-04-08:

Frank: I am an inventor in that I earn my living from stuff I have patented and developed. I previously applied to patent a Trip Logger and it was filed too late and was thrown out fair and square. It was going to be standard equipment in every car produced and was going to make me rich! Now I run across your blog dated April 8, 2005 and if I had seen it previously I wouldn’t have bothered applying. Why the hell didn’t you patent it rather than giving it to the world for free? FYI, another party has also filed for a “Trip Logger” application number 11/495356, filed 07/27/2006 which was over two years after your publication date. If they are awarded a patent then you should get a piece of it. Actually, it should be invalid because you previously put the idea into the public domain. Sincerely, Bob Kuykendal (rkuykendal@gmail.com)

Comment on Things I Hate, Part II: Web Forms that Auto-Tab by Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:12:08 +0000

Great article, Frank. You’re obviously a gentleman and a scholar.

Auto-Tab is the Devil’s work.

Comment on Things I Hate, Part II: Web Forms that Auto-Tab by Ronald Quartel

Ronald Quartel — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:28:00 +0000

Finally somebody that shares my same frustration….

Ronald.

Comment on Safari Tip: Search in Google in New Tab by manwhojaped

manwhojaped — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 03:08:17 +0000

If Apple “engineers” had really thought of it, they would have added the command to the contextual menu – the way firefox does it. Needing to hold down another key is not good ui – such action requires another hand to be used. Mine are all used up doing other things.

Comment on Resolution Independence and the Mac by Frank

Frank — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:24:23 +0000

I’m 35 and I’ll go into Safari 5′s Reader Mode (if you haven’t tried it, check it out) on pages that are perfectly readable but designed for 20-something eyes.

Comment on Resolution Independence and the Mac by Charles

Charles — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:21:48 +0000

"A caveat is that some people (particularly those my age and older) are going to want larger controls on an arc-seconds-of-visual-field basis. That in itself might make resolution independence worth fighting for."

It's the main reasons. I promise you the teens who don't care now will be worse off than us much faster by staring at these tiny characters so much from such an early age. As the monitors have zoomed up in resolution, I am finding the Mac less and less usable, and I'm only 40. I hit command + 4-5 times on safari for every web page. My eyes twitch constantly now, but I have no issues reading books. THE PRINT IS TOO SMALL WITH HIGH RES MONITORS.

This is a huge ball drop.

Comment on HOWTO Disable that annoying Emacs Splashscreen by VW

VW — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000

Thank u! I was already thinking to move back to vim!

Comment on HOWTO Disable that annoying Emacs Splashscreen by dan

dan — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:13:51 +0000

Love it. Thanks for the info.

Comment on Chaining vs. Nesting by Okke

Okke — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:24:24 +0000

I think matlab works around explicit branches quite nicely.

Matlab is used for working with matrixes (MATrix LABoratory), and instead of looping through the whole matrix, one can specify a condition on the elements of the matrix and then perform a calculation only on these elements:

x = [1 2 3]; x(x =< 2) = 0;

would produce a new matrix ('list') with elements [0 0 3].

As you see, this syntax does not explicitly use an if at all. A kind of selector is used instead.