random($foo)

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

• [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

Last November, I found out that sysctl was reporting that my Powerbook was running at 2/3rd speed. After fiddling it with a while, I finally gave up because 1) the speed kept resetting, and 2) because Xbench didn’t report anything funky (similar CPU score either way).

Reading the ‘What is Mac OS X?’ writeup inspired me to do some Open Firmware digging and figure out what was going on. So, went about booting in, and connecting via telnet (very cool, see also telnet downloading) and got some perplexing numbers:

name                    PowerPC,G4
cpu-version             80010303
state                   running
clock-frequency         1fca0554
bus-frequency           07ef4594
config-bus-frequency    07e8fe70
timebase-frequency      01fbd165
l2cr                    80000000
force-reduced-speed     00000001
min-clock-frequency     032d4b20
max-clock-frequency     33ad5ec0
processor-to-bus-ratio*200000008
rounded-clock-frequency 1fb5ad00
recalced-clock-frequency1fbd1650

According to the Open Firmware, the current clock-speed *is* running at 533MHz, however XBench CPU results are exactly in line with what’s expected (I get a score of ~104). Weird, no? (actually, the weirdest part is the force-reduced-speed, that shouldn’t be one, maybe I’ll muck w/ this over the weekend.

In other hardware regrets, I got a Netgear WGR614 802.11g router a while ago. While it works fine and has given me very few problems, I wish I had gotten a Linksys WRT54G instead. Why? Mostly so that I could throw Linux on it. I would kill for the ability to do some traffic shaping right now.

• SeattleWireless: LinksysWrt54g – lots of info
• Linux on the WRT54G

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)

• Unicode spaces – list of Unicode white space characters

Linkdump:

• ftrain: Graph Narratives
• NYTimes: So Much Clutter, So Little Room: Examining the Roots of Hoarding
• notfriendster – Social Networking Community Alternatives
• Social Networking Vendors Aim for the Enterprise
• Defenses lacking at social network sites – defense goes further than protecting logins. how does one protect the trust network, and more importantly, restricting propagation of personal data (encrypt data, hook up to decentralized credentialing system, say using keyservers [subkeys vs crl].)
• The Circle – an open source scalable decentralized peer to peer application (IM, IRC-chat, file sharing, trust-based news service)
• PLINK – FOAF searcher
• Visualizing Blogs – with Treemaps
• JavaScript OSA – JavaScript OSA is a port of the Mozilla JavaScript 1.5 scripting system to the Macintosh in the form of a OSA (Open Scripting Architecture) component. You can use JavaScript OSA as a scripting language in any Macintosh application supporting OSA languages, such as the Script Editor included with the MacOS or our own Script Debugger product
• X vs XP: Scriptability – hard to decide which is more retarded
• America ®: The Ultimate Killer App
• Scanning Tunnelling Microscope Construction Kit – build your own
• Can’t lose with bargain DVD player, but low cost carries price – $30 DVD players carries moral price tag
• Amazing Amount of Time Wasted Repairing Computers in December – logging amount of time spent troubleshooting computers in 1 month; I should try keeping track of that, although some of it I get paid to do

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)

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

• 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