I’d been getting the spinning beachball entirely too frequently using Safari lately; I even tried switching to Firefox, but didn’t feel like migrating all my bookmarks and such, so I went back to Safari. I was pleased to find a tip on macosxhints to help speed up Safari. It turns out my major headache was [...]
Through the Wire
"Hey, I'm just happy to be here…"
March 23rd, 2004
Mute Button
Matt Siber’s Untitled Project is a series of photographs of urban settings accompanied by a graphical text layout. The photographs have been digitally stripped of all traces of textual information. The text pieces show the removed text in the approximate location and font as it was found in the photograph. The visual effect is amusingly [...]
March 23rd, 2004
macosxhints: Use FileMerge for CVS diffs
Joe in Uncategorized
Learning to easily read text-based diff output is not high on my list, so I was happy to see this hint on how to use Apple’s flashy “FileMerge” application to visually compare diffs against a CVS repository. Share and Enjoy:
March 21st, 2004
Whose Dark Materials?
I heard about Phillip Pullman‘s “His Dark Materials” trilogy in the context of the Harry Potter furor; people described it as “the thinking kid’s Harry Potter.” Having grown up a voracious reader, I had found Harry Potter a bit disappointing, and lacking in comparison to my favorites, so I was interested to see what was [...]
March 21st, 2004
Justice is duck-hunt blind
Joe in politricks
Salon.com commentary by Scott Rosenberg There’s a circular reasoning at work in Scalia’s memo, a sort of recursive blind spot, that’s both amusing and appalling. The energy task force scandal itself hinges on the question of whether it’s appropriate for the vice president to conduct the public’s business as a private matter among clubby business [...]
March 21st, 2004
Sparklines
Yet another interesting Tufte-ism from the “Ask E.T. Forum”: Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics, including many sample pages from the book-in-progress. Nearly as fascinating as the idea is the energy and creativity brought to bear by participants in the forum. Share and Enjoy:
March 14th, 2004
Fire Water
Over on MetaFilter they’re talking about “American Straight Whiskey”, which I guess is the officially correct way to include both Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee whiskey in a single phrase. Just last night I was thinking of blogging about the pleasures of the heft of a Knob Creek bottle when you pour it. People on the [...]
March 14th, 2004
Groovy/BBEdit Follow-up
Well, I posted perhaps a moment too soon. Using BBEdit as a scratchpad isn’t going to be quite so tidy, since groovy cares deeply about the name of the file which contains the script. I had noticed this earlier when I named my version of “Hello World” as ‘hello-world.groovy’: when I ran it I got [...]
March 14th, 2004
Running Groovy Scripts in BBEdit
I’m finally getting around to poking at Groovy, a new scripting language which builds on Java… well, let them say it: Groovy is a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax. [...]
March 13th, 2004