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Today Freshly Squeezed Software is releasing iWipe. What's it do? Basically, nearly everything that this thing does. The only thing it doesn't really do is offer as much customizability because, frankly, we think it's pointless.

We overshot my initial $8 estimate. Brad spent a lot of time working on the thing, and the Unix commands given in that entry are much simpler than the functionality provided in iWipe.

We still wanted to charge $8, actually, but then we weren't sure if people would regard it as a "serious" app, so we settled on $14. It's "less than half the cost" of the $30 previously mentioned without being "less than half as serious."

Plus, it's metal, and we felt we should discount the price at least a little because of that. 😀

MPT has long hated Yes/No dialogs, and I must throw my hat in the ring. On the Mac, developers typically do a good job of applying the HIGs (which, in part, state that you should use a verb for button titles). Entourage, it seems, doesn't:

This is the worst dialog box I've seen in a while. Instead of saying "emails" it calls them "items." Instead of having "Open" and "Don't Open" buttons, they say "Yes" and "No." Instead of telling me why it's warning me (i.e. what the downside to opening 19 "items" may be), it tells me nothing. The dialog box would be three hundred percent better if it said:

You are trying to open 19 emails. Doing so may cause one heckuva mess. Are you sure you'd like to open them? (Don't Open) [Open 'Em]

But hey, that's just wishful thinking. 🙂

Question: What is the best breakup you've ever had?

My Answer: I've "broken up" with all of one person. It took me a month to figure out how to do it (I'd dated her for five years), but in the end it basically came down to "I can't make you happy anymore, I haven't been able to make you happy for awhile, and I'm not sure I can in the future." In other words, I blamed myself, even though I really felt she had a lot of issues. We tried to be friends but she eventually decided "I can't get over you if we still talk all the time." So, the best and the worse.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

What began as a battle of the sexes ended as a battle of the sexes: Matt vs. Jenna. Sanity vs. Insanity. Brawn vs. Beauty. 6 to 1? Nobody in our group predicted Jenna to win let alone to walk away with it so easily. What follows is a random smattering of parting shots before I wrap things up.

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Question: Will Jenna pose for Playboy? Will Heidi?

My Answer: There's a good chance that one or both will. She won't need the money, I guess. Grrrr. I'm irked.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

My prediction: Rob or Matt will win. I've been saying "Rob" for a long time now - he's played the game "the best" so far. However, last week Matthew made the first comment about "being in control" that I think he's ever made. This made me wonder if he wasn't smarter than he's let on so far.

This article on Survivor Fire .com gives ten reasons why Matt is the Man. Will he win? I dunno. But the ten reasons listed are interesting, and worth a read.

This is why I like reality TV. I'm a big, big fan of psychology, and this show is so damn interesting. The dynamics of a group of people are awesome to behold, especially when it's (by its vary nature) condensed into only the interesting parts. Survivor night!!!

The CSS on my site now validates 100%. It did before but it was always throwing warnings:

You have no background-color with your color

Reason? From the CSS Validator FAQ:

If you don't specify color and background-color at the same level of specifity, your style sheet might clash with user style sheets. To avoid this, specify always both of them, see Section 9.1 "Color Contrast" in the W3C Note "CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" or the article CSS Color Issues by the CSS Pointers Group for a discussion.

FWIW, I currently use background instead of background-color. As I understand it, it's six of one, half dozen of the other.

P.S. Would it be mean of me to point out that they've misspelled "specificity" as "specifity" (the #link gets it right, though)?

While reading an article on Kevin Fox's site fury.com, I noticed a link on the left and took the Gay-O-Meter Test. Turns out I'm 26% gay (or 74% straight, I guess), putting me squarely in the middle of the red "too straight" area.

Loosen up my straight mate. These days women like a man with some softer edges to grab onto.

Okey dokey… or not. Other items in Kevin Fox's "meme drawer" include Dictionaraoke (funny as hell) and Weeeeeee, the latter of which reminded me of Spoon Guard and the Insanity Test.

Says David Hyatt:

Erik Barzeski has done a redesign of his blog. I'm pointing it out because I think the fadeout effect at the top of the page is so cool. I'm assuming it's a fixed positioned block with a transparent PNG background?

He is correct. I left a comment there - the first one - and mentioned some issues with bottom: 0px and so on. The /dave blog is his personal blog (as opposed to /hyatt), so I don't expect much to come of that. Rather, I've filed real bugs on the issues that I've isolated.

I mention off-hand that I'd like Safari to support gzip. In my tests on this site, which is gzipped, the results are quite stunning:

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A collage is a group of pictures or things, but I am always reminded of "college" when I see the word. I'm not sure why. A collage is something you can't really do online - nobody can really create a photo collage with pictures. You can't rotate thigns in HTML and then have the text wrap around them properly. Text wrapping in HTML is a tremendous sucky area. Why shouldn't I be allowed to define rectangles to wrap text around pictures? I can create imagemaps of odd shapes.

This 60-second entry was brought to you by today's word from OneWord™.

My recent Perly Gates entry made mention of a tcsh alias that I use: lsf. I thought I'd share - with commentary - some of my other favorite tcsh shortcuts (aliases). If you're using Mac OS X, pop these into ~/.tcshrc if you'd like.

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My first ever entry was called I Hate Perl. I don't really hate Perl, but man, sometimes I'm just not a big fan. The CLI is fun and fine and all, but today I installed Perl 5.8.0 to try to get Time::HiRes (it worked of course, MTTimer needed it).

Of course, then I got to venture into the lovely world of CPAN. Let's just say I had to force install DBD::mysql. Hrmph. After all that work, NetPBM still doesn't work. Who knows why? MovableType is of no help whatsoever, of course.

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Question: What's the best Mother's Day present you've ever given (or received)?

My Answer: I gave my mom a digital camera last year, and she's made decent use of it. Her birthday is also around Mother's Day, so I guess I only gave her half a digital camera last year. 😀

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Unreal Tournament, when introduced a number of years ago, was one of my favorite games of the time. It still is, even though I've played a lot of Quake 3 lately.

Fortunately for Mac users, Unreal Tournament was just released in demo/beta form. Only fourteen years (okay, I exaggerate) after the Windows and Linux versions! Wooo! Go Mac users!

Anyway, I've just spent an hour playing, and I was constantly reminded at every point why this game is so much better than Quake. The weapons in particular are simpy awesome. Alternate fire modes (and even more, if you count holding down the fire buttons). Wow.

I'm blown away, and I'm fairly impressed with how my "old" G4/800x2 handled it. Wow.

I was curious earlier today (as I rebuilt my site for the umpteenth time today) about where MovableType was spending its time. Were my RSS feeds taking five seconds? How about the archives? The main index? How long is MT spending doing each of these?

Unfortunately, there's no way to know. What I'd like from MovableType, in the "back end" admin area, is a printout like this (and yes, correcting a single typo and rebuilding can cause all of this):

Rebuilt individual archive 712 in 0.39 sec
Rebuilt individual archive 711 in 0.28 sec
Rebuild individual archive 713 in 0.41 sec
Rebuilt main index in 0.91 sec
Rebuilt master archive in 5.80 sec
Rebuilt daily archive in 0.87 sec
Rebuilt monthly archive in 14.42 sec
Rebuilt category archive in 29.49 sec
Rebuilt RSS 2.0 feed in 0.18 sec
Rebuilt RSS 1.0 feed in 0.17 sec
Rebuilt RSS 0.91 feed in 0.09 sec
Rebuilt Comments feed in 0.98 sec

The best you can really do is putting time stamps on each page with MTTimer, which I've installed into every template (except the RSS ones). I'll be keeping an eye on the times. Because commenting and TrackBacking can both be affected by rebuilding, I want speedy rebuilds.

Where oh where is MovableType Pro?