By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: December 22, 2006
Friday, 22 December 2006
- ‘2001’ Photoset on Flickr ★
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Terrific collection of stills and posters from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Via Jim Coudal, of course.)
- Great Last-Minute Gift Idea ★
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Kottke’s Ikea-style instructions for Dick in a Box.
- Big Nerd Ranchs Burns Down ★
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Aaron Hillegass:
On Thanksgiving, I gave thanks for the 16 students who had signed up for the Cocoa class that was going to happen in one week. That night, the lodge we rent for our classes burned to the ground with all our equipment inside.
The good news is that no one was hurt.
- VMWare Fusion Public Beta ★
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VMWare:
The new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion, allows Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X.
In other words, Parallels now has a rival.
- Explaining the Quartz Composer / QuickTime for Java Security Hole ★
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Chris Adamson has written an outstanding explanation, complete with demo code, of the Quartz Composer / QuickTime for Java security hole addressed by Apple’s Security Update 2006-008.
In a nut: the trick that allows a self-contained QuickTime movie to display live footage from your iSight is and always was safe (the footage never goes over the wire back to the server); it was the combination of that same trick with the QuickTime for Java APIs that allowed the footage to go back to the server, and that hole is now closed.
- Feedback on the CS3 Iconography in John Nack’s Comments ★
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Tons of comments on John Nack’s weblog regarding the new icons and branding for CS3. Highlights include this one from former Adobe product manager Kevin Nathanson, which he apparently intended as a private message to Nack personally, and this one where Nack, in an editorial comment, reveals that the branding is the work of “the design team from the former Macromedia”.
- Cocotron: Open Source Objective-C Runtime for Windows ★
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David Young and Christopher Lloyd have released Cocotron, a BSD-licensed clean room clone of Cocoa (more specifically, Foundation and AppKit) for Windows. The point being that you can use Cocotron to develop, from within Xcode, .app bundles that work on both Mac OS X and Windows.
The big question, I suppose, is how this compares to GNUStep.
- Inkjet Refills at $10,000 Per Gallon ★
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Michael J. McNamara:
Currently, HP’s Magenta ink for its Photosmart 8200 series sells for $9.99 at most stores along with the required Y, Lc, Lm, B, and C inks at the same price. However, HP only puts 3.5ml in the M cartridge, 4ml in the C, 5.5ml in the Lc and Lm, and 6ml in the Y. … There are 3,785 ml in a gallon, making the final price for magenta ink an astronomical $10,788/gal!
- Cork’d: Now With Buddy Icons ★
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Cork’d Blog:
What’s any good, self-respecting community site without buddy icons?
There are a couple of other nice improvements, as well, including a much improved buddy search.
- PreFab UI Browser 2.0 ★
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Nice update to PreFab’s essential utility for developers working on accessibility and AppleScripters writing GUI scripting code. New features include a nifty live Screen Reader mode (with constant updates showing whatever element is directly beneath the mouse pointer), better AppleScript generation, and a bunch of improvements to UI Browser’s own user interface.
- Mark Pilgrim on DVD Copy Protection ★
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A terrific little primer in a comment on Dave Shea’s weblog, after Shea posted a question about a “This DVD is copy protected and may be played only on licensed devices” warning on the back of the boxed set for Rome: The Complete First Season.
Pilgrim’s “HOWTO Back Up Your DVD Movies” has saved me, as the father of an almost-three-year-old who insists on putting his own discs into the DVD player, quite a bit of money.