The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday  •  California Theatre
Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: July 24, 2006

Monday, 24 July 2006

Belkin Gigabit Ethernet USB 2.0 Adapter 

$45 adaptor gives you Gigabit Ethernet via a USB 2.0 port. Buy it at Amazon and make me rich on referral fees. (Via Gizmodo.)

On Ruby 

Tim Bray is learning Ruby and liking it:

For people like me, who are proficient in Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive.

And then he sneaks in this aside regarding Python and code readability:

In theory, Python ought to do better, lacking all those silly end statements cluttering up the screen. But in practice, when I look at Python code I find my eyes distracted by a barrage of underscores and double-quote marks. Typography is an important component of human communication, and Ruby’s, on balance, is cleaner.

Now that I think about, those underscores and extra quotes are exactly why Python does not appeal to me. I find Python’s indentation-as-block rule to be quite elegant, but its use of punctuation feels clumsy.

Nudging Finder Icons Programmatically With AppleScript 

Neat scripts from Daniel Jalkut, including one that arranges your icons in the form of a sine wave.

AMD + ATI and CPU/GPU Integration 

Ars Technica’s Jon Hannibal Stokes on the AMD acquisition of ATI. (Now that Apple is in bed with Intel it seems unlikely we’ll see ATI video cards in new Macs any time soon.)

BurnAgain 2.5 

$25 utility allows you to burn multiple sessions to a single volume on CDR media, using a cross-platform ISO format that works on Windows. (When using the Finder to burn again to an already-used CDR, you get a new volume for each session, and the format is not compatible with Windows.)

Jackass of the Week: Rob Enderle 

Tells the BBC that Microsoft’s “Zune” iPod-killer will be aimed at artists, musicians, and other content creators, as though the iPod and other Apple products somehow aren’t. This is like saying Microsoft will have an advantage because its Zune players will be white and Apple’s iPods aren’t.

Runner-up for Jackass of the Week: the unbylined author of this BBC article, who described Enderle as a “respected analyst” — Enderle is respected by no one other than hack tech reporters.

Do You Want Greg’s Browser for OS X? 

I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks, detailing why I liked Greg’s Browser so much back in the day, and why I think there might still be room for something like it in Mac OS X (cough, cough the Finder sucks). Instead I’ll just link to this and say that yes, I would like to see Greg’s Browser for OS X.

John Siracusa: WWDC Keynote Bingo 

Top left to bottom right diagonal strikes me as the most likely winner.