Domain of the Bored

• To Brent Simmons and Mike Lee.
• To Matt Drance, who gave me a ride back to my hotel tonight.
• To Colin Barrett, who gave me a ride back to my hotel (more or less) on Tuesday. (We did not go directly to the hotel.)
• To Bill Bumgarner, who brought 33 pounds of delicious pork. I think our row of tables needed two more to seat all the people who came for it.
• To Blake C., who is still the biggest fan of this blag.
• To everybody, who knew exactly what I was talking about every time I said “blag”. I loved that.
• To Wil Shipley and Brent for picking up a couple of tabs.
• To Brent, for supplying me with Yellow Cab's phone number, so that I could call us a cab back to the hotel. Also for paying the fare.
• To John Geleynse for the invitation, and to Evan Schoenberg for forwarding it on.
• To everybody who helped me with stuff at the event (including, but not limited to, Deric Horn, Michael Jurewitz, and Peter Ammon).

Let me know if you did something for me this week and I forgot to thank you, or if you want me to remove you from the list for some reason.

And despite Google Transit's insistence, I cannot legally cross all those lawns:

Those of you who listen to MacBreak Weekly are familiar with the imaginary unit of currency, the Alex.

For those of you who don't listen to MBW: Alex Lindsay, one of the co-hosts, typically goes in for very expensive software—upward of a kilobuck. So his co-hosts defined one Alex as equal to $700 USD (roughly the price of Photoshop at the time). With this, the hosts express the prices of the software that they spotlight each week in fractions of an Alex: a $10 program, for example, would be stated as costing “¹⁄₇₀th of an Alex”. Something that is free costs “zero Alexes”.

To that end, here's a table of prices expressed in both USD and Alexes. If you ever have an urge to tell a friend how much some piece of software costs, simply look up the price on this table and give it to your friend as a fraction of one Alex. Alternatively, use this converter service, which I created with ThisService.

If you want a more complete table, here's one from $1 to $14,000.

USD	Alex
1.00	¹⁄₇₀₀
2.00	¹⁄₃₅₀
3.00	³⁄₇₀₀
4.00	¹⁄₁₇₅
5.00	¹⁄₁₄₀
6.00	³⁄₃₅₀
7.00	¹⁄₁₀₀
8.00	²⁄₁₇₅
9.00	⁹⁄₇₀₀
10.00	¹⁄₇₀
15.00	³⁄₁₄₀
20.00	¹⁄₃₅
25.00	¹⁄₂₈
30.00	³⁄₇₀
35.00	¹⁄₂₀
40.00	²⁄₃₅
45.00	⁹⁄₁₄₀
50.00	¹⁄₁₄
55.00	¹¹⁄₁₄₀
60.00	³⁄₃₅
65.00	¹³⁄₁₄₀
70.00	¹⁄₁₀
75.00	³⁄₂₈
80.00	⁴⁄₃₅
85.00	¹⁷⁄₁₄₀
90.00	⁹⁄₇₀
95.00	¹⁹⁄₁₄₀
100.00	¹⁄₇
150.00	³⁄₁₄
200.00	²⁄₇
250.00	⁵⁄₁₄
300.00	³⁄₇
350.00	¹⁄₂
400.00	⁴⁄₇
450.00	⁹⁄₁₄
500.00	⁵⁄₇
550.00	¹¹⁄₁₄
600.00	⁶⁄₇
650.00	¹³⁄₁₄
700.00	¹⁄₁
750.00	¹⁵⁄₁₄
800.00	⁸⁄₇
850.00	¹⁷⁄₁₄
900.00	⁹⁄₇
950.00	¹⁹⁄₁₄
1000.00	¹⁰⁄₇

Backstory: I had moved the method being called there from a file of NSCalendarDate additions to a file to NSDate additions, so I needed to remove “Calendar”, and wanted to also take out the now-extraneous alignment spacing. One rectangular edit did the job, thanks to using spaces for the alignment.

Of course, you should always use tabs for that initial indent.

On the X.org XDarwin page, Ben Byer of the XDarwin team is providing a fixed-up version of Leopard's X11 for download. I've installed it and I'm pleased so far.

It's a mixed bag so far, but then, that's why it's alpha. Let's go through the items from my X11 on Leopard is broken post and see how far they've come in the week since the Leopard launch. I'll list the fixed ones first, then the unfixed ones:

• Option-click [and ⌘-click] is broken

  Fixed. Both work as expected: option-click middle-clicks and ⌘-click right-clicks.

• Windows don't stop at the menu bar

  Fixed.

• Applications menu doesn't work with arguments

  Fixed.

• xterm ignores .Xdefaults when invoked through the Applications menu

  (I never got around to adding this one to the previous post; sorry.) Fixed.

• Wireshark is broken (from the comments on the previous post)

  Fixed, according to Bert JW Regeer's comment.

---

• .xinitrc is ignored (sort of)

  Not fixed.

• xterm ignores .Xdefaults when invoked by login

  Not fixed.

• Two X11s

  Not fixed. I'm not sure that this is fixable; it's just an unfortunate side effect of the factorization of X11 into an xterm-launcher and a server.

• It still looks like Tiger

  Not fixed.

• X11 doesn't activate like it's supposed to (reported by Alan Boyd)

  Not fixed.