chrishitchcock.com

Nov 9

“The fake rib bones, those porky railroad ties that give the McRib its name, are a big middle finger to American labor and ingenuity—and worse, they’re the logical result of all that hard work. They don’t need a pitmaster to make the meat tender, and they don’t need bones for the meat to fall off—they can make their tender meat slurry into the bones they didn’t need in the first place.” Willy Staley, A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage

Oct 31

“We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.” Mona Simpson, A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Oct 18

Replace Shia LaBeouf with Jason Statham

avclub:

… but producers are already considering replacing him with a new lead, Jason Statham, who would presumably be introduced as an all-new character. However, let it be known that we would be at least 50 percent more excited for the film if he just stepped into LaBeouf’s role with no explanation.

I would pay the IMAX 3D ticket price to go see the next Transformer’s movie if Jason Statham ran around as Sam Witwicky

Oct 6

“Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count.” Matt Drance, SJ

Oct 4

Following up on my post from this morning, I saw this image during This is My Next’s coverage of the iPhone 4S event. The photo shows the iPod app gone and replaced with the Music and Video apps à la the iPod touch.

I’m sure this is probably a feature of iOS 5 and not a feature of the iPhone 4S.

On the latest episode of Build & Analyze, Marco and Dan discussed the rumor that Apple may be canceling the iPod classic during the special event that is going on today.

This got me thinking about the iPod icon on my iPhone. How long is that icon going to stick around? The iPod classic is the only iPod that the icon still bares a resemblance to (rectangle screen with scroll wheel below it). If the iPod classic is discontinued, then that icon quickly becomes something like the floppy disk toolbar icon that is used to save files in applications like Excel. It will start to look a bit dated. The mental connection between “rectangle screen with scroll wheel below it” and “play Lady Gaga” will be less clear to people who never used/saw an old iPod.

The iPod touch has always split the iPod app functionality into a Music app and a Video app. I haven’t played around with the iOS 5 betas, but maybe Apple has done the same thing with the iPod app on the iPhone.

Oct 1

“The reality is that there are no global service brands. Not in telecommunications (operators are, at best, regional), not in Media (TV, radio, publishing are a local businesses), not in Banking (not even in commercial banking) and not in Retail (even Wal-Mart was humbled trying to export its disruption). The internet has not broken down any of these boundaries and even Amazon has modest reach outside the US for any of their franchises.”

Horace Dediu, The case against Kindle as a low end tablet disruption.

Another reason why service jobs are safe jobs in the global economy.

Sep 29

Finding Data Store Read and Data Store Write blocks

I was recently dealing with a system of Simulink models that makes use of DataStoreRead and DataStoreWrite blocks to communicate data (basically global variables) between the separate systems in the software. I was having trouble finding the corresponding Data Store Read blocks for a particular Data Store Write block. I couldn’t figure out how to do quickly lookup this information using Matlab’s built-in tools. I’m guessing this was due to the fact that the blocks were in different referenced subsystems

After doing some searches, I found out about a Matlab function for working with Simulink models called find_system. Using find_system and get_param I was able to whip up a small function called FindDataStoreBlocks that takes as parameters a model name and the name of a data store. The function would then search through all referenced models in the specified model to find where this data store name is used in a Data Store Read block or a Data Store Write block.

You can download FindDataStoreBlocks from github.

The following code can be used to exercise this function:

Perhaps there is a better way to do a search like this in Matlab, but I couldn’t find it.

“Initially, I’d figured the Appstore wouldn’t be much more than a way for Amazon to earn a little coin off the booming, highly profitable mobile app business. Instead, they’ve picked the very lock that Google uses to control Android. By creating a legitimate Market alternative with over 10,000 apps (at last count) and the full backing of the Amazon juggernaut, Jeff Bezos no longer needs a thing from Google.” Chris Ziegler, Editorial: How Amazon picked Android’s lock

Sep 16

Finally, I was wondering how long I would have to put up with the summer drinkware that I’m using now.

chrishitchcock.com

Not really sure what this site is about. Links get posted here, maybe some pictures. Maybe some original content every once in a while. Twitter | Flickr | github

Replace Shia LaBeouf with Jason Statham

Finding Data Store Read and Data Store Write blocks

Not really sure what this site is about. Links get posted here, maybe some pictures. Maybe some original content every once in a while.

Twitter | Flickr | github