$\LaTeX$ in Blogger?

Stumbled on this link Latex on Blogger/Blogspot, so I did a little search and found How to use LaTeX on blogspot? Decide to try it.
Try something simple: $x^2$
It doesn't appear in Preview, but does show up in the actual post.

First Snow -- 2011

First snow of the year -- not too much. An inch or two.

Update December 15: Maybe half an inch. Least amount of snow in years.

First snow - 2010

Gee, it's been almost a year since my last post about snow. Today was the first real snow, 1 - 3", although I did clear the dusting last Friday. More is forecast, so I will get some more shoveling in real soon.

Who do I see about "Global Warming"? Oh, that's right, it's now called Biodiversity.

Update: Shoveled twice more. Probably only six to seven inches total, but there's almost a foot on the railing on the back deck.

First Snow - 2009

First real snow: 2 - 4". It should melt over the next few days, given the forecast for weather in the low to mid-40s.

Update, November 20:
Of course, this violates the usual Global Warming conspiracy theory. "Conspiracy?", you say:

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists...

More to come on this, but the MSM will probably ignore it.

What Do People Find Challenging About Cocoa?

Stumbled on a great post by Scott Stevenson last night about what difficulties people have found while trying to learn Cocoa---What Do People Find Challenging About Cocoa?.

1. Objective-C: 19%
2. I Didn't Know ANSI C: 12%
3. Cocoa is Really Big: 11%
4. Memory Management: 10%
5. Interface Builder and NIBs/XIBs: 10%
6. I Was Used to Java or C++: 10%
7. Delegates: 8%
8. Overall Cocoa Model: 8%
9. I Didn't Know Object-Oriented Programming: 8%
10. Learning How Documentation is Structured: 5%
11. Cocoa Bindings: 5%
12. Xcode: 3%

Number 1 is no surprise---Objective-C is syntactically very different than other languages derived from C.

Items 2 and 4 are related. To be an effective programmer in C requires a fair understanding of memory. Java requires much less knowledge of memory, since pointers are not used. But it is big!

Items 5 and 12 are typical development tool issues. The more advanced the tool, the more you need to know. Apple has done a great job with Xcode, so most people can go a long way before getting stuck. The debugger has changed over the years....

Items 1 and 3 have been the biggest issues for me. I've gotten over the Objective-C hurdle for the most part, but Cocoa frameworks have a lot in them!

Gmail Problems

Not sure what is up (or down) with Gmail. The application was working a bit odd on Thursday. The problems continued on Friday, but it worked fine at the office. Yesterday and today the service continued to be nearly useless. I was able to change the theme yesterday, but that wasn't the problem (I saw a post somewhere about themes causing problems, so I thought that might help). Today I was able to delete the Spam, but was unable to respond to any message. Typical error messages: Loading.../Still working..../Trying....

Reports of Gmail down on Twitter have appeared but nothing like other outages. Is it an ISP (Time-Warner Cable) problem?

Time to start popping messages again? That seems to be working (at least for my wife).

Update June 1: Gmail worked fine at the office. It is now working at home. Hopefully the problems have been resolved.

The Reality of Blogging

From GraphJam. Obviously, this blog is in the red zone....