Notable¶
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- In The Guardian, read what is an unusually non-extremist perspective on Islam these days.
- Courtesy of Dave: musicplasma. How very cool. I have thought about how nice it'd be to have a very similar tool for navigating bands by proximity rather than by classification. I haven't quite understood yet how it works, but in many cases the results seem appropriate (while a bit disappointing for bands like Tocotronic, which lead to Console, who strangely isn't associated to The Notwist, despite being part of it…)
- While Safari's annoyingly persistent Downloads window has grown in version 1.2 – at least it being open won't keep Safari from spawning a new browser window when its Dock icon is clicked. Other notable improvements include printing, certificates and support for IDNA – making Safari a member of the exclusive company along UnicodeChecker of applications that are able to handle international domain names: Just try opening litfaß.de or ä-test.com in Safari… David Hyatt is kind enough to give more detailed information on the changes in Safari 1.2. I still think Apple should at least give information of that detail with their release notes – in this case at least it's nothing to be ashamed of.
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The past few days have been surprisingly warm considering that technically it is still winter and that there was snow just a week ago. I saw temperatures indicated at around 15 degrees, even in the middle of the night. That's very smooth and I'd say
the air is like silk
if I were bad novelist. In fact it's so warm that a few little pink flowers have started coming out on the lawn in front of my office window. Something they'll regret soon, I suppose as there are bound to be some more sub zero temperatures. -
As seen somewhere on the web – we kill the Dock while windows are in the process of minimising: The windows will remain in their distorted shape afterwards and they are live, i.e. they are still working in principle, including scrolling &c along the distorted lines but mouse navigation is hard to impossible as your clicks seem to go to the window's original frame of reference. Frozen in space but not Frozen in Time, if you wish.
In total, I'd say that this tells us that all the window distortion magic in OSX is actually quite solid and cool rather than just a shiny trick. Looking at my screenshot also makes me believe that having Quartz Extreme may make this prettier. In addition I was reminded that the Dock is a rather big player in OSX, dealing with all of window minimisation, Exposé and desktop backgrounds. Invoking Exposé after this will not move the distorted windows, btw – which makes sense. So when are haxies coming that let you simply scale or distort arbitrary windows at will?
- The I-Search Plugin is a neat addition to Cocoa text views for instant finding by Michael McCracken (of Bibdesk fame). And those of us who are more Mac than emacs people may even try to change the key binding to Control-f.
- I guess this has been linked widedly already – but Bleep seems to be 'music downloads done right': No special software, no DRM crap, serious rebates for buying whole albums. Now, if only Warp records had more music of my liking…
- A piece about the future of the 'semantic' web and Google. Also there: How computing could be if the Nazis had won WW II. All amusing and well written. Something hilarious on tits and asses in The Guardian.
- Bruce Tognazzini on how e-commerce sucks. Sounds familiar to me.
