• [Samba] File xfer speed issues with MacOS X 10.2 and 10.3 – I’ve been suffering from interminably slow reads (writes were fine) w/ my Panther system and my home file server. Sure enough, doubling the socket buffers brought speed up to regular Mbit speeds. Quite strange.
• /proc on Mac OS X – cool beans
• What is Mac OS X? – really really great writeup of low-level Mac OS X tech (kernel, file system, boot loader, etc) — surprisingly accessible
• Re:Carbon’s roots are older – Carbon history from former QT engineer
• The War On Terror’s Blind Spot – Steve Johnson on how no one’s paying attention to the right-wing terrorists
• Locke, Property and Software Piracy
• Internet Archive Opens Crawler Code Under LGPL – Gordon Mohr (blog) has been a busy guy
• Friends foil Olympia man’s home – looks like $100 of foil well spent
• SACD Outputs Analog – interesting, current Toslink connections don’t have bandwidth for SACD

Ringing in the new year by writing Netscape 4 code fixes. Yes, in the year 2004. Writing workarounds specific to a 4.76 CCK build no less. Still being distributed here on campus (along w/ Netscape 6.0.2; remember, the 6.0 branch? so bad that it can’t even be found in the Netscape Product Archive?). Hoo-f’in-ray.

• normal-flow DIV spaced improperly placed after absolute DIVs, click-plane problems of course also apply
• JS parser will die on certain CSS (no surprise)
• most bizarre: within a function, testing for document.getElementById doesn’t return false value

• RareWares Debian GNU/Linux Repository for Sid/Unstable – for your Debian Linux encoding needs
• Eloisa to Abelard, by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
  

  How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
  The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
  Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

• Cybergreen, Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future – Reason interview by Mike Godwin (yes, that one)
• Massive Change: Bruce Sterling – radio interview
• Bush Grabs New Power for FBI – in our country
• Thorough post on CPU cooling by tiger99, an avionics designer who works w/ sub-zero component cooling

• Unicode spaces – list of Unicode white space characters

So, this iTunes Opener is my first foray into the world of AppleScript. Originally, I was trying to fight w/ the GUI scripting, but in the end, I realized that was pointless. What I have now is actually pretty much a slightly beefier version of Better iTunes handling of M3U files at Balnaves.com. I’ve associated my MP3s and M3Us to this so that when I open these, it loads all of the files into a new playlist and plays it (instead of lumping all the stuff into the Library and playing only the first song). I’ve also written a bit so that it automatically deletes my netjuke M3Us. There might be someway to generalize temporary M3Us (maybe by file location), but this is currently good enough for my purposes. I’m no longer constantly pissed at iTunes.

Todo: Needs some work getting icons and association stuff working (works fine as a droplet currently)

• Mondo Rescue – comprehensive Linux-based disaster recovery
• Stealitback.com – police auctions online. wackiness

• Date String Handlers – fast AppleScript date handlers (including ISO date handler)
• Date String info – all you wanted to know about AppleScript Dates
• Getting Short Dates – not as good, alternate methods
• Droplet for Processing Dragged-on Files – AppleScripts for processing filetypes
• Handler Info – how/when to use handlers
• AppleScript Primer: Subroutines/Handlers #1
• AppleScript Sourcebook
• Apple: UI Element Inspector

Stupid IE DOM note: to appendChild() table rows, must be attached to tbody, not table

Entering CasualSpace… – John Barlow muses about how zero-cost calls (iChatAV) changes things. For me, having presence information is a big plus. Also, I hate making phone calls because it’s so intrusive; dropping an IM seems much better in that regard.

Of course, the presence doesn’t really work that well for me because I’m always signed on w/ multiple computers (still not sure I like AIM’s new routing algorithm), and of course if you’re using iChat, then it does the AIM client thing of popping up incoming messages directly onto your desktop, which is quite intrusive (but at least you can still multitask while that conversation goes on.

(perfect im routing algorithm for me: route based on least idle time, that’d get a message to me 90% of the time; also, cache on server – I should just run my own Jabber server, will be getting hip-deep in that stuff soon anyway)