Linked List: February 2005

Monday, 28 February 2005

Includes two new visual displays. (Via Drunkenblog.)

Macworld Expo Boston 2004 Keynote MP3 ★

Jason Snell:

When I first heard the news that Jef Raskin had died, my mind flashed back to last July’s Macworld Expo in Boston, when Raskin joined fellow Mac innovators Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Jerry Manock in a keynote panel discussion led by David Pogue of the New York Times.

Macworld has posted an MP3 recording of the entire keynote.

LeanCalc 1.0 ★

LeanCalc is a new freeware Mac OS X calculator app by Marc Liyanage, based on the open source ‘calc’ library.

Unicode-Processing Issues in Perl ★

Solutions to common Unicode problems in Perl. (Via Buzz Andersen.)

Sunday, 27 February 2005

Regarding Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) ★: Dan Benjamin likes Ruby on Rails, but says beginning programmers shouldn’t start with Ruby as their first language.
Jef Raskin Dies ★: Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple in the late ’70s. He died Saturday from cancer at the age of 61.
Google Maps Now Works in Safari ★: And Opera, too.

Friday, 25 February 2005

New York Times Profiles Podcasting Start-Up ★: What’s the deal with Evan Williams’s hair, though?

Wednesday, 23 February 2005

FireWire Cables No Longer Included With New iPods ★

Larry Angell reports for iPodlounge:

The new iPod photo models no longer include iPod photo Docks, iPod photo AV cables, or cases, and more surprisingly, Apple has also apparently dropped both FireWire cables and FireWire Power Adapters from the iPod photo boxes. Each iPod photo now includes only a single USB 2.0 cable and a USB Power Adapter, recently reviewed on iPodlounge, for wall power charging. Each of the other items is available separately.

Wow, this sucks — USB 2.0 is definitely slower than FireWire. (The same goes for the updated iPod Minis, too.)

Very Dynamic Web Interfaces ★

Drew McLellan writing for XML.com, on using JavaScript’s XMLHttpRequest object. It’s all about reducing page views — web apps that do more with fewer page reloads provide a better experience.

Protect Your Site From Google’s New Toolbar ★

Zeldman:

You can’t stop a juggernaut in pursuit of its own increase, but you can do something about the part where they mess with your website, adding links you didn’t create.

Namely, you can download this script from Threadwatch, install said script on your server, and link to it from the <head> of your web pages.

Google Introduces ‘movie:’ Search Operator ★

Google Blog:

Just in time for the Oscars, we’ve created a new “movie:” operator that enables you to find movie-related information faster and more easily, whether you’re looking for titles or actors, director or genre, famous lines or obscure plot details.

Works like a champ. (Via Daniel Bogan via AIM.)

How to Sell Your Book, CD, or DVD on Amazon ★

Kevin Kelly:

I’ve had numerous requests from readers for the secrets of getting their self-published material on Amazon. It’s no secret, but here is what I have learned in the last few years about how to get your book, CD or DVD listed on Amazon.

(Via Dan Benjamin via AIM.)

Waferbaby: The “Decadent” Post ★

Quotes regarding the tenth anniversary of Daniel Bogan’s Waferbaby, including from yours truly.

New iPod Minis and Photos ★

New iPod Minis come in 4 and 6 GB capacities, for $199/249. Battery life is up to 18 hours on both models. iPod Photo prices have been cut, the 40 GB iPod Photo has been replaced by a thinner 30 GB model, and the regular 40 GB iPod is no more. Lastly, Apple has announced a new Camera Connector (available in March) that will let you connect a camera directly to an iPod Photo to import pictures.

Tuesday, 22 February 2005

Kottke Goes Pro ★: He’s quit his web design job to write kottke.org full-time, funded by direct support from his readers, no ads. I think he’ll do well.

Monday, 21 February 2005

Woz on Tiger Leak Defendants ★

Drunkenblog has assembled comments from a bunch of Mac nerds, including Steve Wozniak, regarding Apple’s lawsuit against the guys who bootlegged a beta of Mac OS X 10.4. There’s a comment from me in there too.

URI::Fetch ★

Perl module by Ben Trott, designed for fetching XML feeds with support for GZip compression and ETag/Last-Modified support.

Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide ★

Associated Press:

Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.

Fuck. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made me realize I wanted to write.

Sunday, 20 February 2005

Netflix Freak 2.0 ★: Lots of UI improvements and new features, including support for Netflix Profiles.
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications ★: Jesse James Garrett has given name to the new web application model of JavaScript-driven XML data interchange. A little buzz-word heavy, but a good essay nonetheless, and I like the name.
Witch 1.0b3 ★: Witch is a keyboard switcher that allows you to switch between windows the way Command-Tab lets you switch between apps. Freeware, donations accepted. (Via Tao of Mac.)

Saturday, 19 February 2005

Forbes.com: Class-Action Suit Filed Against Apple ★: Led by disgruntled former resellers who lost business to Apple’s own stores.

Friday, 18 February 2005

Interview With Fired Google Blogger ★

Gelf Magazine:

Even now, weeks after he was terminated, Jen doesn’t know what led Google management to decide to fire him even after he had complied with their requests.

(Via Waxy.org Links.)

WordPress 1.5 ★

Big upgrade with lots of features and improvements. Also, WordPress now ships with built-in support for Markdown.

Thursday, 17 February 2005

Typographica: Our Favorite Fonts of 2004 ★: Who says it’s too late for “best of 2004” lists?
Microsoft Guide to ‘133t5p33k’ for Parents ★: This is so square it’s hilarious. (Via John Siracusa via IM.)
Google Kills Googlefone ★: A while back Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch created googlefone.com, a simple front-end to phone book lookups powered by Google. Google doesn’t want people using domain names containing “google”, and so they sent him a seemingly auto-generated legal nastygram.
PDFLab ★: PDFLab is a nice little utility that allows you to split and join PDF documents. Freeware, donations accepted. (Via Jonathan Rentzsch.)
Google Gets Away With What Microsoft Couldn’t ★: New features in Google’s toolbar are reminiscent of Microsoft’s much-despised “Smart Tags” feature from a few years ago.
LaunchBar 4.0 ★: I switched from LaunchBar 3 to Quicksilver a while back, but version 4 looks like it’s worth checking out.
iPod Shuffle Tips and Tricks ★: Excellent iPod Shuffle review by Scott Knaster, including this bit regarding the effects of Apple’s decision to format the Shuffle as FAT32 (the Windows disk format), rather than HFS+:

Apple’s support for FAT32 has a list of seemingly innocent characters you can’t use in file names, such as * and [ . If you try copying a file with any of these characters in its name from an HFS volume to your shuffle, the Finder will complain. (The details are provided here.)
FlySketch 1.0 ★: Flying Meat Software’s FlySketch is an intriguing $20 screen capture utility. It’s not like Snapz Pro X at all; rather, FlySketch focuses on capturing a portion of your screen and allowing to draw, doodle, and annotate right there in the capture window.

Wednesday, 16 February 2005

SpamSieve Scores ★: Michael Tsai, with more details on how SpamSieve scores are assigned, and how you can use them.
JWZ on Software Design ★: Jamie Zawinski:

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
Transmit 3.0 ★: Tabs, column view, zoomed previews, server-to-server transfers and more.
Google Cheat Sheet ★: Great collection of Google tips on one page.

Tuesday, 15 February 2005

Read/Write Web: Weblog Authoring Tools Market Share ★

Interesting stats, even if they are just rough estimates. (Via Waxy.org Links.)

Delicious Monster on TV ★

Mike Matas and Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster were profiled on the local NBC affiliate in Seattle. (Via DrunkenBlog.)

Update: Whoa, I just watched this again, and I noticed that as they show Matas and Shipley walking down the street past the Omni Group office, the reporter says, in voice-over, “Every day Mike Matas and Wil Shipley walk past the company they say they were fired from, on the way to their new company they founded, DeliciousMonster.com.”

Fired?

List & Record Tools Scripting Addition 1.0.1 ★

Bug fix update to Late Night Software’s excellent freeware AppleScript extension, which allows you to do all sorts of useful things with AppleScript records (including, most importantly, accessing the keys of record dynamically at runtime; it’s inexcusable that AppleScript doesn’t offer built-in support for this).

See also: Property Lists Tools 1.0.3, a bug fix update to Late Night’s freeware OSAX for reading and writing property list (plist) files.

Dave Shea on IE 7 ★

Dave Shea:

The question we all want to know: any chance of rendering improvements?

Microsoft Announces Internet Explorer 7 ★

The empire strikes back.

Monday, 14 February 2005

1 GB Memory Cards Drop to $100 ★

Richard Shim, reporting for CNet News:

Underscoring the dramatic price drops in the market for memory cards, flash memory specialist SanDisk said Monday that it will sell a 1GB mini SD card for $100.

(Via Mike Davidson, via email.)

Saturday, 12 February 2005

Jason Calacanis on Ask Jeeves’s Bloglines Acquisition ★: He doesn’t think there’s a business model for web-based aggregators.
LokiTorrent Owner Fined One Million Dollars ★: LokiTorrent didn’t host copyrighted material — it just tracked BitTorrent files that could be used to download copyrighted material hosted elsewhere. (Via Waxy.org Links.)

Friday, 11 February 2005

Two-Finger-Scrolling With Pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks ★

Daniel Becker:

This is a hack to activate two-finger scrolling on supported pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks (i.e. those with a “W-Enhanced” trackpad, including most AlBooks and recent iBooks) on OS X 10.3.

(Via Tao of Mac.)

43 Folders: In Further Praise of Markdown ★

Merlin Mann has gotten so accustomed to Markdown that he’s found himself using it even when writing in longhand. Same thing has happened to me, especially with *asterisks* for word emphasis.

Boing Boing: MPAA Shuts Down Lokitorrent, Obtains Server Logs ★

The MPAA has taken over a popular BitTorrent tracking site, replacing the home page with a stunningly Orwellian piece of anti-bootlegging propaganda (“YOU CAN CLICK BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE.”) Plus, they’ve obtained the server logs, presumably to determine individual users who used the site to bootleg copyrighted motion pictures. Question: Why in the world would a site like this keep logs?

Apple Announces Two-for-One Stock Split ★

Apple’s board obviously expects the good times to keep on going. (Via MacMinute.)

The Web Design CD Bookshelf ★

~~Six O’Reilly web design books are now available for free on the web.~~

On second thought, I suspect the owners of this site have simply posted the copyrighted content of these books illegally. A Google site query turns up two more O’Reilly titles hosted at the same domain. And if this is legit, why are they hosted at “monkeytools.com” instead of “oreilly.com”?

Thursday, 10 February 2005

ADHOC Conference Papers ★: Conference papers presented at ADHOC (née MacHack) from 2001-2004. (Via Jonathan Rentzsch.)
How Google Maps Works ★: Nice overview by Joel Webber, including how they avoid refreshing the entire page when you submit a search while a map is loaded. (Via Kottke.)

Wednesday, 9 February 2005

Secure Wireless Email on Mac OS X ★

Another terrific in-depth article from Doug Bowman, this time explaining how to use SSH tunnels for secure access to email over insecure networks (like, say, Wi-Fi). (I use SSH tunneling not just for email, but for posting to Movable Type with MarsEdit as well.)

Using Universal Access’s ‘White on Black’ in Low-Light ★

Tom Yager has an interesting tip:

When I use my PowerBook in dark spaces like conference sessions, I find that even the dimmest backlight setting is too bright. Control-Option-Command-8 switches the display to greyscale, then inverts it (in other words, black text on white becomes white text on black). The light output falls by half or more. It looks strange — the Dock icons are a really a trip in negative grayscale — but the entire GUI is perfectly usable.

(Via Nat Irons, via email.)

Google Maps Tour ★

Check out the keyboard shortcuts.

Tuesday, 8 February 2005

Google Maps Features ★: Aaron Swartz:

Search results from Google Local — To find a wifi hot spot in a local area, users may type [wifi hot spot] and their local zip code to see wifi locations on the map. They will see phone numbers for each location appearing on the right side of the page. When users click on locations on the map, they will also find address information.
Rafe Colburn on Google Maps ★: Today I heard that Google had launched a mapping service, and I thought to myself, how much better could Google Maps be than Yahoo Maps, or MapQuest, or any of the other mapping services out there? Well, it turns out that Google Maps is much, much better than any mapping service I’ve ever used.
Taste for the Web ★: Paul Graham parody regarding Google Maps. Extremely clever, but you won’t find it funny at all if you’re not familiar with Graham’s essays. (Again, via Andy Baio.)
Lather, Rinse, Reboot ★: Ditherati quotes Microsoft “spokesblogger” Robert Scoble:

I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I’ve been using computers for 20 years and have learned that’s the best way to work.
iPod at Microsoft Developer Conference ★: Ina Fried, reporting for CNet News:

One thing that many of the exhibitors had in common was the raffle prize item they used to lure people to their booths: Apple Computer’s iPod.
Working with Xcode 2.0 ★: Xcode 2.0 preview from Apple. It’s the version that’ll ship with Tiger. (Update: the articles on Apple’s developer site are never bylined, but it ends up this one was written by James Duncan Davidson.)
Mark Fletcher on the Bloglines Acquisition ★: Mark Fletcher, the guy behind the wildly popular Bloglines, writes about selling Bloglines to Ask Jeeves. (Via Andy Baio.)
Google Maps ★: In beta, and doesn’t work at all, yet, in Safari. But it’s very cool in Firefox — dragging the map around is intuitive, and their implementation is very fast.
Napster Ad Least Popular Super Bowl Commercial ★: According to USA Today’s focus groups, Napster’s ad finished dead last.
David Pogue: The Problem With Digital Versions of My Books ★: Rampant bootlegging has led Pogue not to release downloadable versions of his books.

Monday, 7 February 2005

Disk Inventory X ★

Says Nat Irons, via email: “If you like WhatSize, you’ll love Tjark Derlien’s Disk Inventory X. Here’s a list of reasons why: (a) Treemaps; (b) also free (GPL).” Treemaps are, indeed, a very cool way to display this sort of information.

Sony Paying $25,000 Per Month to Sponsor New Weblog ★

Sony is paying $25,000 per month for exclusive sponsorship rights to LifeHacker, a new weblog in Nick Denton’s Gawker micro-media empire, edited by Gina Trapani. Holy crap, that’s a lot of money.

See also this article in AdAge with more details, but which requires you to register for a free account to read it.

Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads ★

It’s insane that Kazaa is so popular in the PC world — it installs spyware and adware on your computer, and the company admits it. It’s P2P software designed to take advantage of the uninformed and ignorant.

WhatSize ★

Klajd M. Deda’s WhatSize is a free utility that shows how your disk space is being used. A free alternative to OmniDiskSweeper. (Via Tao of Mac.)

Sdef Editor 1.1 ★

Mac OS X developer tool for editing ‘sdef’ XML format AppleScript dictionaries. Freeware from Shadow Labs.

Stopdesign: New Photo Galleries ★

How Doug Bowman publishes photo galleries from iPhoto to Movable Type, by way of Photon. Great tutorial.

Why Napster Will Be a Fully-Integrated Flop ★

Ashlee Vance writing for The Register.

Sunday, 6 February 2005

Memento 1.0b4 ★: Joakim Nygård’s Memento is a little app that lets you search through Safari’s cache. Interesting. (Via Merlin Mann.)
James Duncan Davidson on Pages ★: In just the short amount of time that I’ve had with it, I’m comfortable saying that Pages is going to become a tool that I use all of the time.
Danny Goodman’s AppleScript Handbook ★: Danny Goodman’s AppleScript Handbook was once widely regarded as the best book on AppleScript, but it’s been out-of-print for many years. He’s updated and revised the text for Mac OS X, and a new edition is now available as a $15 e-book. A free 28-page sample is available. (Via MacScripter.net.)

Saturday, 5 February 2005

Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines ★: So reports Mary Hodder. It’ll be interesting to see what their plan is for making money with Bloglines, because if it’s ads, site publishers are going to revolt. (Via Dave Winer.)
Joe Clark on Opera 8.0 Beta for Macintosh ★: Joe Clark’s excellent overview of Opera 8.0 beta for Mac OS X:

Well, God love ’em for trying and all, but what’s wrong with Opera for Macintosh 8.0 beta? Lots.

Friday, 4 February 2005

Charles Arthur on ‘Napster to Go’ ★: Charles Arthur, on why subscription services aren’t really a threat to Apple:

If rival music sites seeking to drag in revenues from other areas make the concept of subscription music work, then Steve Jobs will have no qualms about standing up and announcing “a great new way to listen to music”.

Thursday, 3 February 2005

Goban ★: Very nice Go game for Mac OS X. Freeware.

Wednesday, 2 February 2005

Shuffling Lightly ★: Michael Sippey:

[...] I’ve come to the conclusion that the most interesting thing about the Shuffle isn’t its lack of screen, or its “pull tracks at random from iTunes” feature, or its price point or its button placement. The most interesting thing is just how light it is.
MSN Redesign ★: Douglas Bowman on MSN’s move toward standard markup and CSS for layout.
NeXT Applications and Interface Builder ★: Michael Tsai, commenting on a DrunkenBlog post pointing out how little Interface Builder has changed since NeXTSTEP a decade ago:

Interface Builder was ahead of its time. And, yes, the ability to set outlets and actions is still cool. But aside from adding support for layout guides and bindings, it doesn’t seem to have changed much. It could even learn a few things from PowerPlant Constructor, circa 1996. The last time I complained about Apple’s developer tools, it wasn’t long before they announced Xcode. So hopefully there’s already a project underway.
Panic Now Selling T-shirts ★: I’m trying to resist the urge to craft a pun using ‘softwear’.

Tuesday, 1 February 2005

Matt Groening Apple Ad ★: 1989 promotional brochure for the Mac illustrated by Matt Groening. (Via Buzz Andersen.)
Skype 1.0 ★: High-quality cross-platform voice chat and instant messaging.
Wal-Mart + Apple = Sitting in a Tree ★: Wal-Mart is selling iPod Minis in “a limited number of stores”, and rumors abound that they’re about to start selling iPod Shuffles nationwide.