NSLog();

From Mac Net Journal comes this:

CNET notes that Salon has received more funding to the tune of $800 million, which hopefully will be enough to keep the online magazine alive for a while. Now let's hope the site can reach its goal of breaking even, which would be a win for selling quality writing and reporting online.

If they can't exist for a decade even on $800M, they deserve to be taken offline and beaten with large plastic spatulas for the remainder of that decade. $800M is a helluva lot of money. Mac Net Journal got it wrong: it's $800,000, not $800,000,000. Big difference. In the words of a friend of mine, "that's almost three orders of magnitude difference." 🙂 As for how I feel about Salon, well, I have their RSS feed in NNW, but every day I consider removing it.

I bought Cool Whip and some glazed Krispy Kreme donuts last night, and dipped the latter into the former.

Mmmmm that's good.

As if we didn't have enough of an uphill battle fighting off the REALbasic developers out there, MacCentral reports that:

REALbasic creator REAL Software Inc. will soon offer its developers a new tool that may help ease the conversion of Visual Basic projects to the Macintosh. VB Converter enables Visual Basic programmers to port their code to REALbasic. It automatically coverts Visual Basic forms, projects and code into REALbasic-compatible code, comments the changes, and also flags code that wasn't converted.

Great, so now we have to worry about Windows VB apps on the Mac too. Woe is me, woe is me!

From somebodydial 911 comes:

This is an insipid notion that discounts what actually occurs -- when the RSS aggregator that I use (NetNewsWire, shown above) refreshes and displays the latest content from the RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I then follow links to the stories on their site that I'm interested in reading in full. It's free dissemination of information about the content that's available on a website to drive traffic.

I rarely visit some sites I used to visit daily, while others - like XLR8YourMac, which added an RSS feed after I'd asked for one, are getting far more of my attention lately. I used to visit MacDesktops.com daily, and now I almost never visit. MOSR? ThinkSecret? Where are your RSS feeds? What about my other humor sites? 🙂

Point being: I like NNW, I like aggregating RSS feeds, and I visit a wider variety of new sites because of it. I read more news now than ever, not less, and I use my browser more as well. I just don't hit my "Dailies" bookmark folder nearly as often as I used to.

From inluminent comes a pretty nifty résumé. These are the kinds of résumés you can put together when you're unemployed for a week or two, I guess. 🙂

I interviewed with Apple yesterday and realized my own résumé hasn't been updated in about a year. Since then, I've added quite a bit of knowledge and experience - working for Apple, starting my own software company, etc. Oh well, no reason to update it. That's one of those things I do when I need to.

P.S. As to the title of this entry you'll have to see the résumé.

Is NetNewsWire AppleScript Stupid? Rather, am I? I'm trying to do something very simple: compile a list of blogs that have not been updated in the past x days (so that I can delete them from my subscriptions list).

set oldies to {}
set cutoffDate to ( (current date) - (15 * days) )

So far so good. Then all hell breaks loose.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 641); »

I previously wrote about the national "do not call" list for telemarketers, and today I found an update on Ars Technica:

In case you didn't know, the FTC is setting up a national Do-Not-Call Registry that telemarketers must consult before compiling their call list, and despite legal attacks, the Registry is still on track.

Good to hear that it is still on track. Surely the telemarketers have a lot of money to throw around and spend on lobbyists, so here's to hoping that the government does the right thing instead of what pays them the most. My only question is: how will I be able to report anyone that violates this? Most use blocked numbers.

I hate rubbernecking. On a 35 mile drive home from a pal's place this morning, I encountered two separate incidences of RubberNecking™. Both caused 4-mile backups that took delayed me by 10 minutes apiece. On a 35 mile trip. Both times the cars involved in an "accident" were 100 feet from the road in the middle median area. Do people expect to see severed heads or something? When do you ever see anything at an accident? How many retards hitting their breaks are necessary to cause a 4-mile backup?

The shitty thing is that the people causing the backup - the ones hitting their breaks to do the first RubberNecking™ - get away without penalty, for they're effectively at the head of the backup. They just drive off. Grrrrr… Great start to the day. >:-o

"All Your Base Station are Belong to Us," my new t-shirt declares. The t-shirt, from Geek Culture and Cafe Press was a birthday present from the fabulous^* Jamie, along with a seasoning packet and a card with a monkey!

While I'm posting on this, I may as well link to the official "All Your Base are Belong to Us" site. This was a running joke in the first group of Cocoa programmers at the Big Nerd Ranch in March 2001. Well, that and saying "If you had read my boooook…" (which I've misappropriated into "If you had read my bloooooog…"). Fun times.

^* Obligatory footnote for the Jamesmeister.

R.E.M., my favorite band, has a stream of a war-track The Last Straw on their site.

If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow
And forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge
There's a hurt down deep that has not been corrected
There's a voice in me that says you will not win.

Reminded via Betalogue - I'd forgotten about this one for awhile. And to Pierre, it's a stream because it's the rough take, as I understand it. A more polished version will be available soon (methinks).

P.S. I don't necessarily agree with R.E.M., but I don't necessarily disagree either. I will say that they've always been fairly political, but that's just pointing out what's obvious to many.

Someone today emailed me (I'll keep his name and MUG out of this) to ask to distribute Recent Tunes, some Freshly Squeezed Software freeware, to his MUG. I granted the approval, but took issue with part of his email:

We compress the programs as self-extracting archives (sea) in order to save space and reduce the amount of entries into our CD cataloging program. Also, we do this so our members do not have to have a separate program to unstuff the archives.

Funny, but our .dmg files are already compressed, use a tool on every Mac (Disk Copy), and are for Mac OS X, whereas .sea files only operate in 9 or Classic (right?). I told him that he could distribute our file as a .dmg only. Self-Extracting Archives? No reason to cling to those things. DMG is the way to go on X.

OSNews reports on (and gets feedback on) the widely reported possibility of all of Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) being metal. Matt and I have railed about the Mac UI Consistency for quite a number of entries (currently that search nets you three of the better results, and will be four soon with the addition of this entry).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Ugh. If Apple continues to ignore their own HIGs, well, just "ugh."

This week was one of the funniest episodes ever. I wrote everything below last night during the show (live, with commercials, ugh - I like my TiVo and hate having to watch it at Gabe and Daria's). Stupid me forgot to change the status to "Publish" from "Draft." D'oh! I'll jerry-rig the time here to be current… There we go.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 2627); »

From Somebody Dial 911 comes a ruler favelet that measures distances in your browser - something that can come in handy when you're doing some work. It works fine here in Safari (mind the note not to drag the link - ctrl-click and copy it instead).

It shows the mouse's current position in the browser window, and allows you to measure distances via a draggable marquee.

Definitely an interesting little doo-hickey. I'll have to investigate to find a way to turn it off though, once enabled. It's a pain in the ass to have to close the browser window just to get rid of it.

No really. And I entered the essay contest a few times in college. But hey, my subscription to Playboy (gotten for me by my ex-girlfriend, along with my Maxim subscription) has now served a new purpose: helping fellow Mac developers realize a few seconds of their allotted fifteen minutes.

Incidentally, Jordan (the UK babe) featured in the September 2002 issue ain't that grand. But then again, I'm not really a fan of humongous, overdone, or fake breasts. Pffft.