Thoughts of the Bored

From bash.org:

cakey: Can you build websites with firefox?
imarock: can you build cars with roads?

The correct response would have been “Can you build roads with cars”?

The correct answer, of course, is “no”: You cannot build a road using a passenger car. However, using a different kind of vehicle, you could:

Likewise, you can't build a website with plain Firefox—but if you used a different browser that integrated source-code editing, live preview, and FTP/SFTP/WebDAV upload, you could.

Or, just as you could, with enough time and tools and know-how and work, mount a steamroller drum on the front of your car, you could modify Firefox or create an add-on for it to help you build websites. It would probably be ugly and not work as well as the dedicated tool, but it's possible to make it work.

A DVD holds 4.7 GB (per side). An SD card holds 4 GiB. For $20, almost as much storage as the DVD fits in a card barely smaller than the DVD's plastic hub.

On the iPhone, the user can quit a program at any time using the Home button. The program cannot keep running if it isn't one of Apple's—it must quit. (Maybe it can refuse to obey the Home button—I don't know, and that would suck if true.)

I wonder whether this will encourage game developers to allow the user to save at any point in the game rather than forcing him to save only when the developer decrees it proper, since they'll have to either quicksave when the user exits or throw away the user's progress. Throwing away progress is an even better way to piss the user off.

Awhile back, on IRC, I compared The Escapist's Zero Punctuation video reviews to the two Fully Ramblomatic video reviews that started the series, and found the Zero Punctuation videos inferior.

Well, I've continued following the series. Just now, I decided to compare them again.

I'm happy to say that Croshaw has returned to his former greatness.

I wonder how “enjoin” came to be spelled with an ‘e’. Both its Latin root and its English noun (“injunction”) are spelled with an ‘i’.

You know you're a hardcore Lode Runner geek when you can recognize its levels (and know their level numbers) on sight.

The NES version of Lode Runner is my new favorite.

I just realized why people use straws to drink from soda cans: to get that last bit of soda from the bottom.

I wonder what the iPhone simulator does when you make a call.

When I added today's unit tests, 139 of them failed (plus a few more that I added later, such as this one). Now, all pass.

That's a lot of fixage in one day.

31 Ghosts IV is, I think, the track from NIN's Ghosts that sounds the most like Quake/Quake II's soundtrack.

NIN putting up Ghosts I for free is cool, but it sucks that you have to give them your email address to get it.

Screw that.

I should come up with a custom wp-atom.php that generates a feed for my blog, one year ago. I think I'd find it good reading.

Unusual: Not only are there two free songs on the Amazon MP3 Store this week, but they both came out today rather than Wednesday.

Not that I'm complaining.

The Image Unit Tutorial should just replace the Core Image Programming Guide outright. It's so much better-written.

If you've ever wanted to write an Image Unit but gotten lost while reading the CIPG, go read the Image Unit Tutorial. It explains everything.

Why is it that cold coffee is a bad thing, but iced coffee is a good thing?

When an egg manufacturer (e.g., Eggland's Best) maintains their non-cage-free non-“organic” model of egg, as well as their cage-free and “organic” models, you know that they offer those models not out of morality, but only to make money from the markets that want them.

Depth-aware (e.g., stereoscopic) photography is cool, but we need depth-aware displays, not just [depth-aware camera sensors](http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9874436-39.html), for it to take off.

I hate it when a Beatles song's Composer tag is set to “Lenonn-McCartney”.

“Voulez Vous” is the most Village People-sounding song in ABBA's catalog.

It's interesting how much of “Love” comes from Abbey Road.

Yogurt commercials amuse me. “Mmm, bacteria!”

One problem with a paper Möbius strip is that it's easily squished.

I wonder whether they've remodeled the Carl's Jr. restaurants on Market Street yet?

I love the mouse icon on this Slashdot story:

For those of you who don't recognize it, it's the AppleMouse II, which Apple sold for use with the Apple IIc Plus and Apple IIe.

The shape was basically the same as the old Mac mouse for the Macintosh, Macintosh 512K, Macintosh 512K Enhanced, and Macintosh Plus, but there were a few differences:

• The color scheme was platinum rather than beige+brown.
• The button was flush with the rest of the mouse, and a little larger.
• I don't think it worked with the Macs' mouse port. Also, I think the Macintosh SE had come out by this time, replacing the old mouse port with ADB.

I'm still not used to hg ci completing instantly. I keep waiting for a couple of seconds for the commit to finish, then remembering that I'm using hg, so I don't need to wait because it's already done.

And yes, most of those are spam I haven't processed yet.

I just saved 17,833 bytes on my virtual key-codes table!

pngout. Five minutes could save you 15 K or more on your large PNG files.

You know what would be cool?

Animal slippers where the toes rest on the upper palate of the animal's mouth, such that, when you walk (or otherwise take your foot off the ground), the mouth opens.

(Inspired by this photo of a homicide suspect.)

I like how it's become so normal for apps to support Growl that their creators hardly ever tell us about it anymore. I just randomly run into apps that have a Growl framework inside.

By the way, the Applications with Growl catalog is up to 200 apps now.

Stereo MC's: “What's the word?”

Beatles: “It's the word ‘love’”

• It requires 1.1.3. If you still have an earlier version of the OS, you need to update before you can upgrade.

• $20 is worth it for Maps and Mail. The other apps are gravy.

• The Dock looks different after the Upgrade. (UPDATE 2008-01-23: It's the same Dock the iPhone has [source].)

• The Dock is configurable, too. You can do more than exchange tiles with the launchpad; you can also move tiles from the Dock to the launchpad, thereby reducing the number of tiles in the Dock. You can even empty the Dock completely, although the Dock doesn't disappear if you do this. (And yes, I just submitted this to Mac OS X Hints.)

• I wonder how Maps figures out my location. I don't have an iPhone, so it can't be using cell towers. IP address could take it down to county or maybe even city level, but certainly not right down to my house. Wired's liveblog says they use Skyhook Wireless, but doesn't get more specific.

  … Apparently it's some kind of Wi-Fi version of traceroute.

2.0 GB of 2.0 GB … 6 minutes remaining

It's interesting how the style of an artist can evolve over time—sometimes rather quickly. Compare Ape Lad's Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #2:

to his Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #626:

The two strips above are just six months apart.

Remember CD caddies?

From the Core Animation Programming Guide, in the Layer Classes section:

The CALayer class introduces the concept of a key-value coding compliant container class–that is, a class that can store arbitrary values, using key-value coding compliant methods, without having to create a subclass.

That sounds like NSDictionary.

My prediction for the end of this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

With each successive version of Mac OS X, Core Foundation includes a little more of the API from Foundation. For example, Leopard adds CFError, a CF class toll-free bridged with NSError, and Tiger brought CFAttributedString. Also, the Leopard release notes for Core Foundation contain a lot of mentions of Foundation: for example, the CFErrors that CFBundle can return all have error codes with NS* prefixes. (Didn't they make CF synonyms?)

I predict that Apple will one day work a great irony upon the world, by rewriting CF in Foundation.

Just committed Sparkle Plus to the CPU Usage repo. 0.5 will have automatic updating!

Here's the update feed. 0.5a3 is already listed there, only for experimental purposes—there is no such version yet, though the release notes so far are accurate.

… that RAM disks don't survive sleep—even on laptops—anymore on Leopard.

Andy Ihnatko on the blurred translucent menubar in Leopard:

… the new translucent menubar is a big Costco-sized box of Suck. And look! There’s a free prize inside: a travel-sized tube of Fail.

Found on the DFLL.

…that you can no longer install Mac OS X while running Mac OS X from another volume. You have to boot the DVD now.

In WordPress 2.3, they removed the preview iframe from the post editor, replacing it with simply a link that opens the preview in a new window.

I've always preferred it in a tab; clearly, they've disliked confining the post to an iframe just as I have. (It's not a very faithful preview if it's scrunched. Besides, having the editing tools surrounding it was distracting.) The old way was (in OmniWeb) to right-click in the iframe and choose “Open Frame in New Tab” or “Open Frame in Background Tab”.

I still do prefer it in a tab, but that's easy enough to do: just ⌘-click or middle-click the Preview link instead of just plain clicking on it.

…when people send FREAKING HUGE attachments to the Adium feedback list.

Case in point: This one about a Yahoo! error. Did the user attach a freakin' DVD of it or something?

It doesn't even download successfully. It gets to the end and then Mail gives up.

(If you're the user in question: Sorry about the rant, but you really need to send us a PNG rather than a TIFF file. I'm assuming it's a TIFF file, though I haven't gone to mail.google.com to check yet.)

UPDATE: It finally downloaded, and it turned out to be two full-screen PNG screenshots that the user had sent us before. Argh.

Drew Thaler, in his blog post ZFS Hater Redux:

(Fun fact: The space that would be consumed by fatzap headers for these resource files comes out to just 235 MiB, or roughly six and a half Keyboard Software Updates. Again: not nothing, but hardly a crisis to scream about.)

I hereby propose that we all start using the Keyboard Software Update 1.2 as a standard of file-size. The KSU is equal to 37,030,222 bytes, or about 35.3 MiB. Adium 1.1.3, for example, weighs in at 0.398 KSUs. The fat-binary version of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 combo updater is just under eight and a half KSUs.

… when one of the rubber feet comes out of my Laptop Chill Mat, resulting on my laptop teeter-tottering on it.

Fortunately, it came out into my backpack, so I was able to retrieve it. It is not sitting on the floor at Google or something.

Here's a moment of “it just works”: in wondering where I should put my Import Ticket menu item for the Growl Registration Dictionary Editor, I typed “import ticket” into Google. (Yeah, I know; I didn't think about my query as deeply as I usually do.)

The #1 result was, of course, the Growl Trac ticket for an Import Ticket menu item.

It just works. ☺

A paint bucket cursor for the 21st century!

What can I say? I'm a sucker for the little things.