YuviSense: Codin Kid

Here’s a demo of some non-super-awesome non-innovative code that’s been lying around on my hard-drive for sometime. I call it Fudge, after Cornelius Fudge from the Harry Potter Series (yeah, call me a kid). It basically determines the Part of Speech of each word in the text, and replaces it with a synonym from a thesaurus. It tries to keep the meaning the same, but, well, it tries. Here’s the original, and here’s the “fudged” text:

When I went AWOL from piece of work while losing my idea, I knew I had to spend a penny a few changes. One of those changes was to de-crazy myself (failed), and the early was to strain and dissever my personal living from my oeuvre animation.

Working at Microsoft is a self-aggrandizing thing. You’re never quite trusted what your line is or when you’re supposed to cause it. You might pose hired to encipher your little fingers off, but then obtain yourself in the midriff of a merchandising exploit that has you working until midnight for a couplet weeks.

You just. Don’t. Know.

That can follow fun and exciting and neat-o, but it can turn overpowering. You finally tire of thinking through piece of work related problems while you shower. You don’t want to mark off your study e-mail at 11:00 PM, but you’ll coiffe it in any case.

It’s easygoing to present your animation and idea over to the company.

I wanted to puzzle my aliveness and brain backwards. And that isn’t an furious persuasion - I was the one who allowed it to chance. cipher at Microsoft always asked more of me than I was uncoerced to consecrate, and had I said ” No ” more ofttimes, I may never give reached a stop at which I knew things had gone likewise far.

step one was to come forth from Windows. I work in Windows. I live in Windows. I have various machines across all of which I have Windows installed. At piece of work and at home base, it’s Windows.

Windows, Windows, Windows.

At the first of my skittish dislocation (or whatever it was), I switched to my iBook. Living in OS X was a sound style to get down forth from what reminded me of piece of work.

It was fancy, but there were also many things I even needed my Windows machines for, thence another answer was needed.

During a conversation with my pappa, I mentioned that I was thinking about getting a MacBook Pro. He had scarcely picked one upward and loved it. as soon as I told him what the design was, he offered to bribe me one.

That’s near as effing coolheaded as it gets.

I told him I’d permit him subsidize the purchase, but that I wouldn’t admit an all paid for MacBook. He agreed, although after the thing was purchased, he nonetheless gave me a chip for the good amount.

Like I said, about as effing cool as it gets.

It’s one of the fifteen inch models. An assload of memory, big grueling ride, blah rant rant.

And Parallels.

as nice as the thing is, I even so couldn’t bear used it as a entire replacement for everything else since there were all the same those few Windows apps left that I needed.

If you haven’t seen Parallels, and you’re a nerd, and if you’re a grind who wants to utilize a Mac but all the same needs a Windows machine, and so I pity your unlettered somebody.

When I foremost heard about Parallels, I thought it sounded like yet-another-virtual-machine-app. And it is, but it goes a few steps further than anything else I’ve used. To the full point that it’s one of the single most impressive pieces of software system I’ve e’er seen.

For the technically-challenged (who in all probability aren’t yet reading this), the simple-minded explanation for what Parallels does is ” It’s this software matter that let’s you run Windows as an applications programme on your Mac. ”

not on the nose rightful, but in appearances, this definition should be ripe enough.

When I started it up, I expected dull, rotten performance. That’s what VMs are for. My persuasion might live tainted by having had to behave a mint of the form of work where you keep three VMs open at in one case, but there you proceed - corrupt feeling.

What I got alternatively from Parallels wasn’t merely all the amphetamine I’d need, but a style that allows me to persist Windows apps without seeing Windows. That is, as though they were Mac apps. only as I can sneak over the dockage and embark on a native OS X app, I can flick on Windows bouncy Writer - in the docking facility - and it’ll pour down up as an app without the rest of Windows.

It’s therefore outer-space tasteful. Fetch me my robot-suit, Jeeves. Entering hyperspace forthwith, chieftain. define your flazer to Incapacitate. Plot a course of study to Tarragon V, and somebody prep my birdie.

OUTER.

SPACE.

NEAT.

You can also configure ” default ” applications. For exemplar, if I’m running a Windows app and I click on a URL in a written document, the default app is going to constitute I E, and this goes for Parallels, also. Under Parallels, though, I can configure it and so that Safari (my preferred browser) opens the links - the links I’m clicking inside the Windows VM.

It’s been a long clip since I’ve wanted to fray an app in somebody’s grimace and state, ” L OO K, YOU - LOOK - THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE, DAMN IT. YOU WILL value THIS SOFT WARE. YOU WILL turn YOURSELF PROSTRATE BEFORE IT. AND, NO, IDON’ T MEAN’PROSTATE’ - I MEAN’PROSTRATE.’ IF YOU WANT TO become PROSTATE BEFORE IT, THEN THAT’S YOUR OWN BUSINESS. ”

Speaking of how it’s done, I’ve been backward at employment a lilliputian over a workweek, and I’ve gone rearward to spending my days in Windows and my evenings in OS X. The change from OS X all daytime to dividing the day between Window and OS X has been shocking. There are things I’ve tolerated in Windows for a retentive clip - things that genuinely didn’t disoblige me before. Or, possibly, things I had been exposed to therefore often that I no longer registered it when one came along.

I have a tilt. And it’s not then much a inclination of what I find ill-timed with Windows as much as it is a list of what I find right about OS X. It won’t embody phrased as such, but that’s the general purport of it.

These are things which, if the Windows team were to follow through them, would spend a penny Windows far better than it is today.

1. Stop stealing pore

When I’m going about my merry footling means in OS X, if there’s an app in the ground that needs my care, it’ll realise itself known, but it won’t hijack my whole experience.

In Windows, it doesn’t count what I’m doing - I could constitute focused on authorship (as I am at present), and some early app will happily do along, z-order its path on upper side of everything else, and refuse to spend a penny off until I’ve clicked on something I don’t even deal about. I’ve been dealing with that this workweek, and it drives me nuts. It doesn’t ask you to ante up care - it pushes everything else out of the way of life and forces you to fetch involved.

not cool down.

2. bar with those bothersome little bubble messages

After my machine starts up, I hardly want a clear place to sour. What I have or else is a horde of trivial bubble messages in the lower right-hand box, telling me things like ” Your protection is stupefied ” or ” please chink on this message to fix rid of this messag east. ”

I.

Don’t.

concern.

If my surety is stunned, it’s because I set it that manner. I don’t remember nagging a exploiter to interchange a circumstance that was deliberately set is a good direction to make things good.

3. Stopping hardware

When I have an external strong thrust hooked up to the Mac, I just drag the drive’s picture to an eject button on the pier to discerp the connection between the laptop and the driving force.

In Windows, I have to right-click on this dark icon that most people will never even know close to, pawl on something (” arrest hardwar due east “?I forget the phrasing), and then choose from a tilt the spot of ironware I want to halt. Problem is, there’s cypher intelligible in the bloody tilt. There might constitute five things, all of which look as likely as the others.

I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s however confusing.

What’s the liberal heap?Drag. D rop. Done.

On the Mac, this is a one-click matter. Under Windows, it’s at least four clicks. And they’re confusing clicks at that.

4. Never, of all time, EVER boot my automobile without asking

This one really gets me.

Non-existent on my Mac, but my Windows simple machine blithely reboots itself whenever the fancy strikes.

I was writing a forum Post for Channel 9 a twosome days ago, and it got up on that point in duration. not so many words that I sobbed over the red, but enough employment lost and enough defeat gained that I called it a sidereal day and went place.

To my Mac.

There’s no excuse for it. Yeah, security system, whatever.

Bad.

5. Stop asking me to reboot - I’ll boot when I’m dependable and ready

Another rebooting job. My auto grabs some up dates, installs the up dates, and wants me to restart my simple machine so they’ll hire result. I’m ok with that, but I want to reboot on my own metre. I hate having a whiny dialog pop up every few minutes to remind me to rebo ot.

I KNOW. I KNOW IT’S metre TO REBOOT. I KN OOOOOOOOW! immediately LET ME WORK.

When I write, interruptions are a Very Bad Thing. I get into a menses of idea that can disappear if I and then very much as walk three feet for a glass of piddle. Having that stupefied ” Reboot straight off?Well, how around now?Or straightaway?” window appearing every few minutes is decent to make me shout.

That’s all.

Five simple things which, if changed, would pull in Windows a much nicer environs in which to spend important amounts of fourth dimension. Windows is dashing, but the things that piece of work are the things I won’t notice. When something happens with hence little flash that I’m not really aware that it’s happened, and so it’s in all probability a expert thing. unluckily, when my care is repeatedly - and we’re talking about over and over every mean solar day - drawn off from my work, and so all I’m going to remember is the plaguy behaviour. The good material doesn’t even get down a fortune.

For directly, at house, I barely run XP on my Mac with most of the machinelike features turned off.

And I like it that direction.

It is fun to do this sometime, but can get boring as well. I’ll put up the non-awesome non-innovative code as soon as it’s clean enough to be non-sucky. There are a lot of bugs in there that need to be worked out as well, but this one proved to be good enough to win my school’s computer science exhibition price (We demoed fudging Shakespeare there(Imagine the Horror))