What
· Technology
· · OS X
Tab Sweep · I guess there’s no harm in an occasional links+commentary dump; after all, everybody does it. Item: Bits at the Edge is the blog of Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior. The entries are too long and dip into marketing-speak, but there’s good writing and original thought in there too and I’ve subscribed. How could anyone in computing not need to know what Motorola’s CTO is thinking? Item: Via Joe Gregorio, PDF slideware on The EBay Architecture. This ought to be required reading for everyone in this business whose title contains the words “Web” or “Architect”. I wonder if this sort of wisdom is being taught in universities? Item: Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Specifications has crossed my radar a few times recently. If you really believe in loose coupling and asynchronous messaging (as we all claim to), then you believe in something like this. Item: How to find out which font has which characters; something I’ve never known how to do on OS X. Item: Ugandans grab ‘pig-for-name’ deal; it’s hard not to have complicated feelings about this one.
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woof! is My Hero · I have often griped about Mail.app’s completely-braindead selection behavior (for example here), and in John Gruber’s excellent Standing in Line With Mr. Jimmy, he agreed. John also argued that the way to fix this kind of problem is not, as I proposed, for Apple to open-source its apps, it’s for them to be sufficiently scriptable that you can just put a bandage over this kind of bleeding neck wound. Well, someone has. The blog’s called woof! and it’s at “end.com/speth”. While its authorship is carefully unclaimed, my awesome powers of detection aided by fifteen seconds at the nearest search engine suggest that one Jim Speth is da man, or maybe da dog. I installed the patch and it works. Hey Apple, get a clue and just stop this pain. Mr. Speth, next time we’re in the same town, beers are on me. Does this mean John Gruber’s right? Maybe; but Apple would still come out ahead by open-sourcing its apps.
New Mac · Two years, one month, and twenty-three days ago I got a new PowerBook. Yesterday afternoon I got another, which I’m now using to type this. (The shipping route was Shanghai to Anchorage to Memphis to Vancouver. Whatever.) Herewith news, both very bad and very good, on Apple’s product line, plus some miscellaneous low-grade problems ...
