Living in the Future

Now that I’ve announced the return of the old blog posts, let’s talk about the rest of the changes around here!

You may have noticed the new URL: apontious.com. With any luck, this will be the “last URL you ever need” to get to my writing. Old links with the subjectiveobserver.wordpress.com will still work as well — I plan on supporting them indefinitely — but please use the new URL whenever possible.

The blog’s name has also changed. I’m pleased to announce that this blog is the top hit on Google for “Weaponized Fluff,” which means my branding’s on point, right? Even if the name didn’t originally come from me. And if you come to the website, there’s a new black and white design that I’m pretty happy with.

Be warned: this will be more than just a technology blog. I may talk entertainment, I may talk politics (with comments off), I don’t know yet. If you just want the tech stuff, subscribe to https://apontious.com/category/programming-tech/feed/ or bookmark https://apontious.com/category/programming-tech/.

Living in the Past

Oh, we won’t give in,
We’ll keep living in the past.

— Jethro Tull

Lots of other stuff going on in the world, but for a moment, let’s go living in the past, shall we?

Let’s go back to a time when I wrote a website with a godawful color scheme and a prescient name. When Subversion was new, Unix was still old (but new to the Mac), and I used terrible puns for post titles — well, that hasn’t changed, has it?

When I closed down helpfultiger.com, I removed its posts from the Internet entirely. Now, with the relaunch of my blog on apontious.com, I’ve brought ’em all back, under the tag “From Old Helpful Tiger Blog”.

The technical how-to posts are mostly out of date, but there are lots of philosophical posts I still agree with. Have a look!

Edit: forgot to mention that the comments came over, too!

New Linked Blogs!

I’m adding a couple of developer blogs to my list:

Theobroma Cacao, by Scott Stevenson. At first glance, I thought the blogger’s name might be “Theobroma Cacao,” but that’s just because I didn’t know that it’s the Latin name for the plant from which chocolate is made. Mmm, chocolate. He has a bunch of posts about WWDC 2005, though, to be fair, no shirt pictures.

Xcode Experiences, by Marshall Clow, his blog about moving from CodeWarrior to Xcode, since CodeWarrior will not be supporting the Universal Binary format required to run on Intel Macs. Marshall’s blog was the impetus for my last post about CodeWarrior and Xcode.

Ridiculous Fish, by Peter Ammon, an AppKit developer. Buzz Andersen, also on my list, introduces Peter’s blog here.

Though Buzz also seems to have changed his RSS feed URL sometime in the last 3 months, from http://www.scifihifi.com/?flav=rss to http://weblog.scifihifi.com/feed/, which caused my NetNewsWire feed of his blog to go dead. Bad Buzz!

Welcome, everybody!

Getting All Shirty

When I first created this blog, I didn’t work for Apple, and Mac OS X 10.4’s codename, “Tiger,” hadn’t yet been announced.

So when it was, I prided myself on being ahead of the curve. Perhaps…evening inventing the curve?

Now, at WWDC, my prescience has once again been demonstrated for all the world to see:

Very orange t-shirt with white WWDC2005 text

Apple even borrows my blog background for such important things as its engineering shirt color.

Next thing you know, they’ll have an application called “Help”….

Joining the Party

You may have noticed something if you regularly read the weblogs that I read:

They

have

something

in common.

I’m a little late to the party, both getting there and telling the world about it, but I got my umbrella-topped pink drink (or membership card, depending on your metaphor) on June 21, a little over two weeks ago.

There will be things I can’t talk about, but considering the silence round these parts, it’s not like that’s going to cut off a vital flow of information you’ve come to depend on!

I’m hoping to be able to post more here, since, after all, it’s so well-named.

Wish me luck!

Welcome to HelpfulTiger!

Welcome to the Grand Opening of the HelpfulTiger weblog!

Why am I having a Grand Opening now, when I’ve already been posting for months?

For one, HelpfulTiger now has a new look! The new look is courtesy of Mark Abrams of look! designs, to whom I owe many thanks.

For two, I’m also officially re-introducing the Membrane library, something I’m very excited about.

For three, I’m introducing a new topic, “About a Blog”, where I’ll be discussing weblog news (like this).

And for four, I’m unveiling a new look, also courtesy of Mr. Abrams, for this weblog’s sister site, Umbar.com, where you’ll find Web pages devoted to some of the topics touched on in this weblog as well as my other projects. If you ever find yourself rummaging through the posts on this blog trying to find that download or list I mentioned, you should probably check out Umbar.com first.

And as always, enjoy!