I don’t have time for this. But I’m going to write a couple of paragraphs anyway. In fact, I guess they could be called “Bullet Points 0”, were I that way inclined.
- I’ve never really worked out the whole dual core thing. Mostly because Apple weren’t selling any systems with ‘em, and I didn’t want to get too disheartened by seemingly how far in front x86 was for that particular ball park.
Two processors have been known to be very nice for a long time now; less because apps were actually using both processes and being twice as fast (although in very rare cases this could be true) but rather because two apps could be running (and would be running, in Mac OS X) on the two separate processes. Provided that the whole system bus or RAM thing wasn’t being hogged or clogged by one half, you pretty much got multitasking for free without all the crustiness that my PowerBook experiences often.
But four? Is the kernel up to that much scheduling when the task isn’t embarrassing parallel? I’ll leave that question to the philosophers.
- I’ve started learning MetaPost. I’ve been meaning to for a long time now (well, all of this year), but it’s never been enough of a priority. Well, I’ve had the need to draw a complex picture or two so I thought I’d try it out.
My first thoughts? Ah, crap, I can’t work out how to make it do what I want. No worries; I’m sure it’s just my ineptitude.
Anyway, once I’ve sorted out MetaPost, I can later (when, or if, ever) move onto MetaFont and MetaType1, which would be lots of fun. Conceivably.
- In order to prevent myself from distractions (like the words I’m currently writing…er, never mind), I’ve developed, but not yet implemented, a system by which I mark a piece of paper whenever I would start doing something distracting, like starting out on all those unread feeds. Of course, the mark is in lieu of actually doing the distracting, so it may not prove as compelling.
Anyway, I can collate the results per day and hopefully reduce the number of times my mind wanders off. Good luck with that, I tell myself.
- I’ve been slightly influenced by Markdown in my latest LaTeX documents. I’ve ended up removing the special-ness of the characters
&,$, and#, and implemented a scheme whereby I can emphasise words with surrounding_characters.
There seem to be many such areas of simplification that I hope to collate a bunch of them and put together an “easy LaTeX” package. It’s been a long time since TeX processed pages at a rate of one per minute. Let’s spend some cycles making things easier for ourselves, huh?