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Happy 48th

Happy 48th Stevie J! Yes, folks, Steve Jobs' birthday is February 24, uhhh (mental math), 2003-48, take away the 1… 1955. Actually I just wanted to make the post longer than a few words.

I think it'd be cool to compile a list of all famous tech people's birthdays.

Safari Gets Tabs

If this is true then I think I'm going to puke. Not only does this indicate even more custom controls (see all the recent coverage of inconsistent UI), but… Ugh. I'd rather not have tabbed browsing at all than have even more bad UI shoved
on us.

safari_tabbed_browsing.jpg

Apple, wake the hell up! >:-o

Subscription Software: REALbasic

Some people think subscription software is the future. That - eventually - we'll all be paying for our software by the hour, month, year, whatever. Guess what? For some, it's already here: REALbasic 5.0 is out.

REALbasic seems to have seen yearly upgrades since it's 2.x release or so (1998: 1.0, 2000: 2.1, 2001: 3.0 & 3.5, 2002: 4.0 & 4.5, 2003: 5.0). Who wants to bet we'll see 5.5 around July of this year? This far outpaces several other standard applications, like Office, Photoshop, the Mac OS, etc. Guess what? You sucker RB developers are already using subscription software, and REAL Software has you hooked, raking in two upgrades per year that run as high as $250 (and as low as $30). I'm looking at paying $50 to upgrade version 4.0 from less than a year ago to the cheapest license available just so I can release a freeware app for Sound Set Central.

I previously wrote about RB once on this site, and didn't get a letter from Lorin or Geoff, so let's see if I can pull it off twice. Long story…

Apple Bug Filing Day

Today I filled out about 40 bug reports at http://bugreporter.apple.com/. Here's the list, from our previous articles on the "inconsistencies" we find creeping up in the Mac GUI. If you have any bugs that you'd like to add to this list, let me know (me@nslog.com). I'll post an updated list with your UI bugs in a few days. Submit bugs at the first link (you need a free developer account at least).

Without further ado, the 38 bugs submitted today…

Grrrr – Site Organization Favor

Okay, having goofed up something earlier, I decided to forge ahead with the new formatting. Yay. Ugh.

You are here because you tried to get to something with "http://nslog.com/000" in the URL.

The document you are looking for moved. It still exists, but it was moved. Feel free to use the "Search" on the left to find it. If you want to be so kind as to let me know where you came from or what you were trying to find, I would appreciate it.

I apologize terribly for the inconvenience. My current site structure will be a good one going forward, though, and should not necessitate any future changes.

Grrrr – Site Organization

I was looking over my blog directory on my server and I realized that I've got about 400 files in one directory (the "archives" directory). Why? Every article goes there. Every category, every daily and monthly archive. Every .xml file for the TrackBack system. I have 282 entries and 396 files in there (prior to this one).

I desperately want to move everything to a /2003/02/22/title.php format to reduce clutter (MT can do this I believe). At this rate, I'll have a folder with a few thousand items in it in a few months. That's ridiculous.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the etiquette is. People have links to my articles. Even I have links to my articles. "PermaLinks" are not very permanent. I don't want to ruin the links other people have coded up, but I have to do something.

What should I do? Please let me know.

This is a Good Ad?

bad_ms_ad.gifThis is a good ad? So much for reliability. But hey, it's good to know that at least Microsoft can help you with all of these problems (the ad concludes with the "we can help" message).

P.S. Robert Scoble, pay attention. Even MS knows they have problems. The horror! The pain!

~/Library/Scripts/Applications/

script_menu_applications.gifIf you create the folder ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari/ and drop AppleScripts into it, they'll appear as I've illustrated to the right. This is a great way to clean up your AppleScript system menu (y'all have one, right?). No longer must you have a long list of AppleScripts in that menu just to use them in all of your apps.

This is pretty handy, really. It seems to work with any application - just get the name right (i.e. "Microsoft Entourage" instead of "Entourage"). More experimentation is necessary. Most of my Entourage scripts, for example, will remain in their script menu, but my iTunes scripts will migrate to this menu.

Britney and Christina

No, not your typical Britney and Christina (the pop stars). This is a whole different kind:

britney_christina_spam.gif

sigh 😐 >:-o Spam sucks.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Well I finally watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Finally because so many people told me I'd like it, but I never had the urge to see it alone. Well, alone I did watch it today, and it was indeed quite amusing. I can see why it's a cult classic, but at the same time, it never had me rolling on the floor in laughter. I typically need to be with friends for that to happen anyway.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Super Hearing

I just cleaned my ears (squirting warm water up there with one of those bulb thingies). Now I have Superman hearing. I can hear my tower fan from a few rooms away. I can hear my fingerprints rubbing against each other. I can hear the carpet scrunching under my feet as I walk around. They're really super sensitive, and it's weird. I think some of that wax has been in my ear for a decade or so judging by how much better I can hear now than I remember having heard in the past. Maybe it was just the warm water, playing tricks on my eardrums, but I doubt it. Hmmm, kind of an odd post, but it's the weekend. C'est la vie. C'est ma vie.

WWDC + Rendezvous + Safari

I saw this today and I immediately began trying to think of the page or files that I'd like to serve up at WWDC. I think a general "who am I" résumé should suffice: I could link to Cocoa Dev Central and Freshly Squeezed Software and this site. I could put a picture there so that people sitting near to me could come speak to me (reading name badges is difficult and somewhat awkard). Hmmm… I'm not sure what I'll do. That will be interesting. One more thing to add to the WWDC checklist.

Dream: Me and Catherine

So I took a nap :-zzz today to try to wait for some goop in my ear (goop that was supposed to - and normally does - clean out ear wax, but has, this time, simply gelled up inside my ear or something - and no, you can't fish it out with a Q-Tip, that just packs it in more… anyway).

So I took a nap today and woke up an hour or so later having just had the strangest dream. I dream very rarely, but they say everyone dreams about the same, and if you write down your dreams or share them with people after you have them, you'll remember more. This is like my diary as well, so, here goes…

Giving More than 100%

From Dave, If we take the alphabet (A-Z) and assign every letter a numeric value equal to their position in the alphabet (A=1, B=2, Z=26), we get some interesting results.

H A R D W O R K
8 1 18 4 23 15 18 11 = 98%

K N O W L E D G E
11 14 15 23 12 5 4 7 5 = 96%

But, A T T I T U D E
1 20 20 9 20 21 4 5 = 100%

And, B U L L S H I T
2 21 12 12 19 8 9 20 = 103%

So, it stands to reason that hard work and knowledge will get you close, attitude will get you there, but bullshit will put you over the top. Never thought about it like that before, did you?

The One that Bugs Me Most

This one bugs me most: The % of computers sold per year does not equal the market share for use of that computer. If Macs last twice as long, on average, as PCs, the numbers are off by a factor of 2. This Robert Scoble guy is supposed to be smart in some way? Today I lumped his blog into my "Humor" category in NetNewsWire. He is the ho and MS is his pimp.