Quarter Life Crisis

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Computer nonsene¶

912 words

• Pierre Igot on a problem in Apple's Mail. I know that one and am quite astonished that it exists.
• iTunes needs indies. People making their voice seen. Vote for your local iMix asking for indies!
• Standards bragging rights – yeah nobody really cares about all the little XHTML 1.4.4 strict badges. If someone cares for the formats, they'll be able to run the page through a validator anyway. And few things are more embarrassing than pages that claim to be valid but aren't...
• And validation is for wankers anyway.
• Strip, Pix, Burn – taking on Apple's iPod ads and Iraq.
• Of all the servers our provider has, ours had a bad hard drive and has been down for a while, while things are being restored. Bum.
• Putting a cable across my room is ugly but means that I can change tracks in iTunes while sitting in bed typing this (I usually prefer the record player but sometimes laziness prevails to an extent that I prefer not having to get up. See, there is room for Airport Express, even in my small room. (I hope Airport Express can play music on one base station while being connected to the internet via another wireless network – or is this why they have a repeater built in?)
• After having fallen off my radar for a long time, my attention was drawn to the wonderful SideTrack once more. It is progressing nicely: a better UI for the pref pane and the ability to tap the corners of your trackpad for additional mouse buttons. Think 'open in new tab' or Exposé.
• The current SideTrack version also has an option for 'Redmond style' pointer acceleration. Try it for fun. It will reinforce the suspicion that Windows feels crappy in part due to it's mouse movements feeling like you're on slippery ground.
• Germans – their jokes may not be funny, but at least they're well organised.
• Two hours of web pain – documented.
• Something on Unicode Normalisation. Not that I've really needed it so far, but it may be an interesting and tricky topic.
• Looks like Google doesn't use 'four letter normalisations', btw.
• Crazy Japanese Shit. Open Source even.
• David Hyatt gives an apology for extending HTML for Dashboard. Now I could hardly care less as far as yet-another-extenstion to HTML is concerned. The question I asked myself upon seeing the Dashboard demo was Why HTML at all. It's not that it's particularly well suited for this task. For easy to craft (as Hyatt says – I simply have to mock that impression, hearing the design-impaired teenagers prepare Slashdot-widgets across the internet already) widget, my first intuition would have been Interface Builder and a nice nib file. And if making this work on the basis of AppleScript would be too obscure, why not drive it by JavaScript (to 'enable' more of the aforementioned teenagers)? Hasn't there even been a JavaScript OSA extension around at some stage?
• Could you imagine any situation except dealing with legacy Mac files where defaulting to Mac-Roman encoding (instead of Latin-1, say) if no encoding is specified looks like a good decision?
• And a question for .htaccess buffs: When using Redirect of some kind and I want to redirect to an URL with a question mark in it – how do I encode the question mark? The obvious ways didn't work.
• The Vatican library using RFID tags for their inventory. Much quicker for inventory apparently. I suppose this also means that you can steal a book and drop its label somewhere, so your theft goes unnoticed for longer. Fun.
• I redirected all my pages to an error message HTML page in the past days. I hope that using '302' redirects was the right thing to do in this case. How do aggregators behave in that case? They expect some XML goodness and ask for an URL whose name suggests that they might be some flavour of XML but they eventually receive an HTML (which is hopefully signified as such by our server). This case may be another hint that a one-line command where you enter an URL and receive a string just doesn't cut it when retrieving files if you don't want your software to be confused in some situations. Checking status codes and MIME types may be helpful – and that's probably where things start being a bit tedious...
• Who can say something helpful about Cocoa's NSClassDescription class? Where, why and how to use it, say. Dwelling on topics where Google only gives a handful of results and that aren't covered in Apple's examples can be a bit frustrating.
• While Apple's developer documentation has improved over the past years, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It feels like you only have to scratch the surface lightly to arrive at underdocumented places. Even more helpful would be rich example applications. The examples given frequently only illustrate the more basic features. A bit more depth would be helpful there.
• My computer froze the other day. No joke, no kernel panic either. I could still move the mouse cursor but that was that and nothing happened for ages. So I had the hard restart the machine (sorry). I was downloading a song from iTMS at the time, which wasn't there when I used iTunes again. Thankfully iTunes can handle this, using the Check for purchased music command in the Advanced menu.
• Richard has cool band photos once more. Including Ikara Colt.

July 10, 2004, 13:31