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Linked List: October 20, 2006

Friday, 20 October 2006

CARS on Apple’s Q4 Results 

Crazy Apple Rumors Site:

It’s easy to understand how iPod sales could drive Mac sales, as Apple shipped 360 million iPods for the quarter, with many customers buying 3, 4, even 10 iPods each, sometimes giving one to their pet.

MacBook Shutdowns: Case (Finally) Closed? 

This MacBook random-shutdown issue is enough to make me happy to still be using a PowerBook G4. Well, almost.

Rafe’s Law 

Rafe Colburn:

I’ve always fancied the idea of having a law named after myself. I don’t aspire to the fame Mike Godwin achieved with Godwin’s law, but a little fame would be nice.

Here’s the first draft of Rafe’s law:

An Internet service cannot be considered truly successful until it has attracted spammers.

I like it. I like it a lot.

Apple Profiles 37signals’s Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson 

Nice — but why is it filed under “Higher Education”?

Ruby appscript 

There’s now a Ruby port of the Python-AppleScript bridge:

Ruby appscript (rb-appscript) is a high-level, user-friendly Apple event bridge that allows you to control scriptable Mac OS X applications using ordinary Ruby scripts. Appscript makes Ruby a serious alternative to Apple’s own AppleScript language for automating your Mac.

(Via Henry Maddocks via email.)

Why CoreAudio Is Hard 

Mike Ash:

CD quality audio, in effect, has frames which are only four bytes long (16-bit samples, two channels) but which play back at 44.1kHz. This only gives you 22 microseconds per frame! Of course, the frames are miniscule, but if you miss even one, odds are that the user will hear it. If you did something terrible like take a disk interrupt that took five milliseconds to process, you will hear an ear-rending glitch in the output audio. By contrast, you can drop an entire 17ms frame in 60fps video and it’s usually pretty hard to notice.

Joyent 2.0 UI Preview 

Dave Young links to screencasts of Joyent’s updated UI. Some very slick stuff in there. I really like the adjustable-width source-list column.