Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

As hinted in previous entries, I have a new job. This will mean more True Tales of the T and also assorted Windows at Work horror stories. Now you, too, can experience the clashing blue/green infamy of Windows XP from the relative safety of your RSS reader or friends list.

Today’s horror story is brought to you live by the OS. When I was AFK, innocently assembling my lunch, Windows decided to update itself (fine so far) and also reboot itself (not so good). I had all sorts of programs and Firefox tabs open at the time. Fortunately I got back to my desk while it was still counting down and stopped it. It tried again just a few minutes later. Next time I’m going to let it and see whether it really dumps all my stuff and reboots. More to follow…

Jerie said I couldn’t do a 4-word blog entry, so instead I bring you Web Design in 2005. Brown is the new black, and the worn look may be hanging on just a little longer—perhaps until it’s tattered or shredded.

iPod accessory of the day: the iPod shirt

Despite John Gruber’s attempts to squelch flash-based iPod rumors (Flash Gordon, Dec. 2), mock-ups abound. The Cult of Mac has posted pictures of both a round yo-yo iPod and a credit-card sized iPod. John Gruber dismisses the yo-yo as well as yet another design, the screenless milano cookie.

Browser of the Day: forget Firefox - Camino is up to 0.8.2.

InterfaceLIFT has nifty Mac icons plus instructions on changing your system icons manually for those of us too cheap to spring for CandyBar.

But not my geeking. ZDNet UK has an article up about the inner workings of Google. Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the link.

Give it a whirl: Google Scholar.

Rocky left me a poem in my comments, which revealed that my WP line-break fix was fixing a bit too much. I still need the fix for weird old Blogger and MT entries, but I didn’t want it “fixing” the linebreaks in comments.

So the line break fix is just replacing br=1 with br=0 in the wpautop function in wp-includes/formatting-functions.php. The trouble came up when my altered wpautop was loaded as a filter in wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php. I needed the old one there. If I really understood the functions, maybe I could have stuck a br=something into wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php, but I was just there to hack. So instead I made a copy of wpautop in wp-includes/formatting-functions.php, called it wpautopp, and changed the filter name in wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php to wpautopp.

It works, but upgrading to WP 1.3 is going to be a nightmare for me.

Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty Laptop (with fuzzy pink mouse)

A few more links to dump:

• 43 Folders offers QuickSilver help and advice.
• Firefox 1.0 is out but it’s not quite aquafied yet, which means it ain’t Safari. It’s not even Camino.
• Mac Rumors notes iPod Projections of 4 million this quarter (iPods, not dollars).
• RetroPlayer will play your mp3’s like 33’s.
• Fun Sky Captain icons

• OSXplanet is up to version 0.78, but I haven’t risked running it since my initial dock-killing experience.
• CherryOS - …you have a choice! That choice is actually PearPC, a mac emulator that can run slower than any Mac ever made.
• Humor from the Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Apple Blocks Older Patrons From Retail Stores.
• Daring Fireball on the lack of mac viruses: For Whatever Reasons. Slashdot on a study recommending Mac OS X as safest OS. Here’s a mac virus for you, but you’ll have to install and propagate it yourself.
• Delicious Library - even if you don’t need personal library software (and who does?) the website is cool.
• Lately I’ve been sucking sites with SiteSucker, but I may go back to wget.
• iPod troubles? Defrag your iPod. Contemplate some rejected limited edition iPods.
• What Do I Know OS X tip: spelling suggestions
• Need to zip? YemuZip for Mac OS X - The Missing (Free) Zip Tool didn’t actually work for me. I could zip, but Seema couldn’t unzip on the PC end.
• Late at night, Mail.app scares codepoetry.
• The ifo Apple Store provides news and information about Apple’s retail stores
• Safari and If-Modified-Since is an old caching issue that may or may not have been fixed. All I can say is that my Safari wasn’t caching my stylesheets (for this site) until I upgraded to 10.3.6. Now it’s all better!

[Update] And how could I forget? VLC 0.8.0 is out. I’m downloading it now.

I came across Jumsoft’s Process in the Apple downloads RSS feed. Process claims to be a “fresh face in the tired throng of outlining applications,” but I’m not tired of OmniOutliner yet, and as an outliner Process is mostly PR.

Process does look like a great organizer, though. If you want to organize a project and you have $25 to blow, Process may be for you. The 7-day shareware evaluation period wasn’t nearly long enough for me to take a chance on Process, not when I already have an OmniOutliner file set up for NaNoWriMo. I’d recommend that Jumsoft extend the evaluation period to the standard 30 days, and start advertising Process for what it is.