Cocoa Gestures adds mouse gestures to any Cocoa-based OS X application. At first, this struck me as a neat trick, but not something particularly useful. I've been using it for a few weeks now, though, and it really does make a difference. When I'm in the middle of doing something mouse-based, mouse gestures are convenient in the same way that keyboard shortcuts are when working with the keyboard. Just as I'd hate to have to reach for the mouse just to open a new terminal window, it's very nice not to have to go back to the keyboard, or even the menu bar, to change tabs in my web browser. If you use OS X, you should definitely give this a try. It's free software, so there's really no reason not to. I find that it goes particularly nicely with Chimera.
_
respond?
07:35:26 PM,
Tuesday 3 December 2002
-
MetaKit might be just what I need. Not quite as heavy as a full-scale RDBMS, but more structured than the filesystem, and more easily searchable than ZODB.
_
respond?
03:33:35 PM,
Tuesday 3 December 2002
-
As reported on Slashdot, the first reviews [2, 3] of the Two Towers movie are out. They sound reasonably encouraging, but tend to reinforce the impression I had from the first movie: Jackson is brilliant with the images (Hobbiton looked exactly like I had imagined it), and tells the story well when he stays close to Tolkien, but he just isn't competent to rewrite things from the books. The changes in this movie sound much like those in the previous one: unnecessary subplots added in an attempt to create 'tension', and clumsily explicit presentations of things that were shown more subtly--and more skillfully--in the books.
_
respond?
(6)
02:47:04 PM,
Tuesday 3 December 2002
-
"They eat it up. It's like a B&D relationship. There needs to a psychosexual analysis of the Mac community."
_
respond?
(5)
03:43:03 PM,
Monday 2 December 2002
-
Thinking of reading up on philosophy of science. (I'm skeptical of whether it can be done usefully, but I seem to do a bit of it, so it would be irresponsible not to look at the best of what's been done already). Will need to read Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabend's Against Method. Anything else?
_
respond?
(9)
03:27:11 PM,
Monday 2 December 2002
-
How long an English sentence would I have to write for it to have enough entropy to be a decent passphrase?
_
respond?
(1)
02:53:45 PM,
Monday 2 December 2002
-
How did I miss this until now? (Of course, now that I know, I'm not sure I really want to.
_
respond?
02:46:42 PM,
Monday 2 December 2002
-
My life is complete, now that I've heard the Crash Test Dummies singing Jingle Bells. Just one more reason to love listening to KPFA on Sunday.
_
respond?
04:18:16 PM,
Sunday 1 December 2002
-
Derek, do you still read this sometimes? Could you... could you remind us of the details of the flaming chicken story?
_
respond?
(15)
12:40:40 AM,
Sunday 1 December 2002
-
Tonight on JohnnyChat, Moss fields questions on the moral issues surrounding the anthropomorphization of computers and other inanimate objects.
_
respond?
12:36:30 AM,
Sunday 1 December 2002
-
Google Hilite is the coolest PHP script I expect to see this year.
_
respond?
09:44:26 PM,
Saturday 30 November 2002
-
Disable Flash ads in Mozilla-based browsers. From MacOS X Hints, but the same technique should work on Windows or Unix.
_
respond?
09:09:45 PM,
Saturday 30 November 2002
-
I want to take his... face... off.
_
respond?
(4)
01:09:04 PM,
Wednesday 27 November 2002
-
"Are you sure they're English? I thought English people were uh... gentler... than... uh... normal... people."
_
respond?
(7)
12:29:05 AM,
Wednesday 27 November 2002
-
Marzipants!
_
respond?
(3)
11:33:13 PM,
Tuesday 26 November 2002
-
I can't tell when I'm overintellectualizing something, because the philosophizing and the engineering and the actually doing things and relating to people, when I really seem to be understanding it, it all feels like the same thing.
_
respond?
01:34:27 AM,
Tuesday 26 November 2002
-
Spider! He is our hero.
_
respond?
(7)
02:43:39 PM,
Monday 25 November 2002
-
If you're in Annapolis, consider going and laughing at the middies.
_
respond?
(6)
01:53:16 PM,
Monday 25 November 2002
-
"IndexedCatalog is an extension to the Zope Object Database that provides indexing and allows queries for objects based on attributes."
The one big problem I've had with ZODB is that it doesn't do indexing. It's great for persistence, but it makes it hard to search for things and such. This fixes that problem. Could be very useful.
[via David McCusker]
_
respond?
03:29:14 PM,
Friday 22 November 2002
-
autopsy-turvy
_
respond?
(11)
01:34:01 PM,
Thursday 21 November 2002
-
I've heard those things are really loud.
_
respond?
(2)
01:27:27 PM,
Thursday 21 November 2002
-
I'd be happy to see him change his party affiliation, just to break the Republican majority in the senate, but I wouldn't support him for president. There's room for moderates or conservatives in the Democratic party as a whole, particularly in the senate, but the Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to come off as something other than just Republican Lite.
_
respond?
(4)
06:29:40 PM,
Wednesday 20 November 2002
-
Wee folk.
_
respond?
(2)
05:18:04 PM,
Wednesday 20 November 2002
-
This link, from jwz, reminds me of something I've been meaning to point out: Jamie Zawinski, Warren Ellis, and Bruce Sterling form this amazing sort of weblogging Axis of Weird. If you ever begin to think that the world is a remotely sane, quiet, and normal place, spend a few minutes reading their blogs, and find links to things in heaven and earth that are undreamt of in your philosophy.
_
respond?
(2)
03:38:43 PM,
Wednesday 20 November 2002
-
While talking to Mirabai about this book on Cattle Mutilation (found via boingboing), I was struck by one remark in the article. A librarian was quoted as saying, "It's one of the most stolen books we have." This got me thinking...
"You know," I said, "I'd really like it if libraries would publish lists of their most stolen books." Seven minutes and three Google searches later, this.
_
respond?
03:11:59 PM,
Wednesday 20 November 2002
-
This story says things I wish I could express about trying to talk over the internet. It is beautiful. Go read it.
_
respond?
(2)
06:08:15 AM,
Wednesday 20 November 2002
-
"I think you have not been candid with me, Septimus. A gazebo is not, after all, a meat larder."
_
respond?
(5)
11:07:38 PM,
Tuesday 19 November 2002
-
One of the rewrite conditions you can apply in Apache's mod_rewrite is "apply this rewrite rule only if this file doesn't exist". This could be quite handy if you're using a CMS that's capable of generating some pages dynamically, but not others. You could just have it create static pages for path requests that can be conveniently rendered statically, and store them under a "/static" directory, say, and then teach Apache to look first at that directory, and only then at the script. You could also, for example, have Apache talk to the script for all POST requests.
This would make the script simpler, because it wouldn't have to handle the use of cached pages itself, and would also improve performance, because static pages would be handled by the webserver alone, avoiding the (severe) overhead of spawning a CGI script.
_
respond?
(2)
08:09:30 PM,
Tuesday 19 November 2002
-
There's something funny going on with my blt's reporting to teasmoke.net blt. So I'm investigating it.
_
respond?
(19)
07:22:41 PM,
Tuesday 19 November 2002
-
Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.
_
respond?
(3)
04:47:41 PM,
Tuesday 19 November 2002
-
"Ah, no sir, we do not have a do not call list. If you like, I can give you a number for our company where they can explain the difference between opinion research and telemarketers."
"Oh, okay. Could you hold on a moment?"
_
respond?
10:46:55 PM,
Monday 18 November 2002
-
Really quite sad.
_
respond?
08:09:42 PM,
Monday 18 November 2002
-
Have you stared at the sun lately? (See also: article at CNN.)
[via Dave, my coworker]
_
respond?
(7)
07:59:55 PM,
Monday 18 November 2002
-
Kikkoman!
_
respond?
(1)
02:27:20 PM,
Monday 18 November 2002
-
Further reading: Richard Nixon page at whitehouse.gov, The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, obituary by Hunter S. Thompson.
_
respond?
05:25:58 PM,
Sunday 17 November 2002
-
Which leads me to this thought: if I had to pick the worst president we've had in the past thirty years, I'd go with either Reagan or Bush the Younger. And yet, Nixon is the only one I can really imagine eating babies.
_
respond?
(3)
05:22:29 PM,
Sunday 17 November 2002
-