Some days I sorta wish I had a link blog, because I go through a ton of things every day I'd like to point others towards, but don't have a few paragraphs worth to say about them...
posted on January 31, 2006 at 03:04 PMFrom: Constance Mansour
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:55:42 -0700
Subject: glogg with gin?Hi I found your nice Glogg recipe!
I don't have any brandy or whiskey. But have gin in the house, however you say that would be bad to use. Pls explain. I am a lightweight, so won't be drinking much. It's for a party.Thanks,
Connie
First of all, I'm really sorry I missed this message, as I'm always happy to see someone trying to spread the Werd of Glogg. Secondly...
You might be surprised how many random instant messages I get that lead with "You bastard," such as...
I was saddened to see the unread count pass 300 the other morning, as I did have it down to 50, but my inbox has officially become a travesty.
Without a hot drunken assistant to go through it all, I'm setting aside a day this weekend to do nothing but try to catch up with it, as I already have 40 drafts to finish writing. Just been overloaded with real life, and the gaps have become chasms, and while I feel bad about falling down on the site I feel worse that good friends successfully reproduced and I still haven't touched base with them due to phone tag and schedule nightmares. If my personal life is in such disarray, don't feel bad if the persona isn't getting the love it should while I try to find my balance.
Luckily, a good 45+ of those unreads can be deleted, because from what I can tell they're just the tail end of a strange death spiral that occurred yesterday, or what would be two days ago for people who actually sleep...
Hardcore Mac users are indeed a special breed, as shown by the dude's overt happiness to lay hands on a Powerbook. Relayed via Julian.
Wiggy.
I know the pseudo-responsible thing is to notify IBM that they might want to test their website for PowerPC developers against the shipping browser of one of their larger clients, and the uber-pseudo-responsible thing would be to go through the script-age and see what's causing the wig-out...
I read somewhere that acceptance is one of the key stages one has to go through before one is able to move forward, after denial, anger, and bargaining. An open question is whether the posted job description is indicative of the mental stage management is in, or whether someone is going to get called into their office for a chat. Caught by Roland C, thanks.
I was making it through my feeds earlier, and on the F-Secure blog saw a visual structural comparison of how the newer Bagle.AG compares to an older piece of maliciousness (Brain.A) from 1992:
Can anyone spot the five small differences between these two pictures?Brain.A fits into a few sectors and consists of around a dozen functions. Bagle.AG weighs over 100 KiB unpacked and it is built from more than a hundred functions.
I'm aware of this stuff because I follow it (various forms of malicious authoring, as well as their detection and defense, are easily one of the more fascinating areas in computer research right now), but a picture really is better than one thousand words sometimes.
I'll be talking about more about this kind of thing soon, as I already meant to before MacWorld, but I've been heartened to hear Apple is actually very worried about this sort of thing internally, and trying to take some steps on the Intel build of Mac OS X that they'd ignored on the PowerPC simply because no one was targeting it in a mass way -- and they were willing to play the odds. With the skill level on x86, those odds shifted decidedly in the other direction.
Some days while I'm digging around through documentation, let alone having to sit through a presentation, I feel physically sad for platforms without access to OmniGraffle. Perhaps a type of volunteer effort is in order, pairing the have-nots on underprivileged platforms with the haves who'd be willing to help projects make their documentation diagrams not look like ass. Presentation should always be the icing, but at some point cutting corners really does harm the message.
There'll be one more programming book on the Macintosh aisle market in the next few weeks, by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster: Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh.
If you've never heard of these guys, Mark often hangs out teaching at the Big Nerd Ranch, which is famous for (among other things) teaching Apple's software engineers to use Cocoa, and co-authored Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming and Advanced Mac OS X Programming with Aaron Hillegass, both of which I own but really only take off the shelf when I've been feeling too smart that day and need to drop it down a notch...
The Google Blog has a quick rundown on their new Open Federation initiative for Google Talk, which -- as a user and a geek -- is starting to get me seriously excited as well as amused.
Admittedly some of the amused part comes from nugget-san having spent a bunch of time wiggling around in the service and getting it working and learning that Google Talk has apparently been queuing up all the authorization requests that users have attempted since they went live last August. Since he's posted about these types of things before, once the servers went hot he got over three dozen authorization requests from poor souls who now had no idea who he was, leading to his day being littered with random, "Hey, who are you?" messages from GTalk users.
It's also a little weird to hear an engineer nonchalantly mention "flipping the switch" on a network of that size, but not bad-weird, and I've been meaning to talk about Jabber a bit...
A few days before I left for MacWorld 2006, MacUpdate posted the following on their site as part of a promotion giving away free memberships for the year during the month of January (I've dropped a screenshot for posterity):
"Giving away free 2006 Memberships comes at an interesting time because we just lost our largest financial advertiser, SmallDog. This means that financially, MacUpdate will be a tight position for 2006. But we still wanted to make the move and send the message that we are here for the Macintosh community. I hope this promotion grabs the attention of review writers everywhere and they start posting more reviews of software titles on MacUpdate." -Joel Mueller
You may recall that not long ago MacUpdate turned some heads by running a rather bizarre full-page ad involving Jesus, Steve Jobs, and iPods you had to click through before you could get to their site. What specifically caught my attention, or rather readers who saw it and passed it onto me, was the mention of Small Dog pulling their sponsorship for 2006, as with the timeline, it certainly looked like there may have been some repercussions because of it...
The Suitcase of Doom™ (amusing dragging around something all day the airline decided to put a tag on saying "heavy") and I made it home safe late yesterday evening from MacWorld 2006, which was a crazy time, and getting back to Chicago on a flight landing at 6:45am from Seattle just added to it. When I finally got to it, the Blue Line never looked so good. Sometimes you just need decompress, and trains let you do that in ways driving and flying just can't for some reason.
Much to share, but I still have some odds and ends from real life to deal with, a ton of backed up email (I sort of gave up on email while I was there, as it was too crazy during the show and the wireless at the hotel was giving the shitty Wi-Fi reception in my Powerbook little love), and a few posts I have to get out before I'll let myself yap about MacWorld at all.
However, a quick site-related thing: Trackbacks are officially gone. I mentioned this earlier and threatened they'd go the way of the dodo before, but I kept putting it off while I tried different things, because they were above the comments for a reason and there isn't really a suitable replacement...
Note to Self: The global spellcheck built into Mac OS X can be contrarian, but with my propensity for typos there's enough irony in my not being able to trust it that the pain is eased to a dull ache.
Note to Readers: The first person to say theirs works fine, and to then suggest that perhaps ShapeShifter is affecting the spellchecker gets their IP address thrown in the firewall as -drop, as it's that kinda morning.
So it's looking like I won't be able to check the EAA redux post off the list before I hop on a plane, however I can knock out one part of it. I'd gotten a bunch of pings asking who did the music used in the Evening at Adler video, which you would have known if you'd sat through the credits to be rewarded by the half-naked girl (her idea, I swear) with the site link...
Cabel over at Panic finally started a blog (Steve has had one for awhile), and unfortunately neglected to actually tell anyone about it. I'm sure you can find room in your feeds, because there's always room for Panic.
Things you need to know for the following to make sense:
- Constellation is a highly beta experimental plugin for Quicksilver trying to do some UI stuff via radial wheels. If highly-beta-and-experimental interests you, Garoo has the best tutorial for getting it up and running that I've come across.
- I always get asked a lot about MacWorld and WWDC and all those things, and whenever I get badgered enough I usually try to spin it towards the absurd and rub it shiny-weird. Since I wasn't going to be going, there was talk of a scavenger hunt involving The Cow and various developer booths with prizes for the top finishers.
The dev of QS wouldn't be having a booth, was amusingly down with being the "mobile Cow" and walking around MW with a Cow on his back just to introduce some randomness. I realized it'd take a lot more effort than I wanted to give to take it past the lame stage into the absurd, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.
Anywho...
Sorry, I've been trying to work that phrase in somewhere all day, the title box was empty, and the video of the Snakes and Rubies event that was put on around a month ago is online for downloading.
The original event site had posted the slides from the talk which I didn't link to, but they're at the video download page. To warn you so you don't wig when you have it, this is propeller-head territory, but if you're interested in Python, Ruby, or programming languages at all it should be up your alley. It's very large, so if you can, go for the .torrent and do help seed. They've got a good pipe, and a few co-los are being thrown at it by nugget-san, but it all helps.
I really need to find a good Bittorrent for OS X guide, so those with an interest can at least go learn how to forward their ports and such.
I don't normally post about software updates regarding various apps, because:
- There are better places to keep track of that type of thing, even if some of the options are arguably retarded (in a sling-blade way, not the cuddly way).
- You start doing it for one, then you have to start doing it for everyone.
It's worth mentioning Growl v.7.3 though, because:
- I said I would (like
xdays late, but still). - It primarily just fixes one bug -- but I gave Chris a lot of hell over this bug in person (not on the site), so good to note that it's fixed.
I've actually got a bit in my head regarding Growl, and other things, that's built up to the point where I want to dump it out...
Interested in time?A friend of mine is quite interested in accurate time keeping, particular with reference to NTP. You probably know that we got an extra "leap second" added between 31-Dec-2005 and 1-Jan-2006 and he has written a detailed assessment of how the leap second propagated through the NTP network.
The short answer is "not as well as it should have", but I recommend that you look at the lovely graphs.
Your sort of thing right :)
While it would greatly disappoint Tufte, I am and probably always will be a sucker for a pretty graph. So cool, and not just because seeing someone stalk a second with such verve makes me feel better about my own obsessive tendencies...
