Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

DaringFireball has been going on for a while now about the Apple vs. ThinkSecret case. (ThinkSecret is an Apple rumor site.)

It’s a corporate version of Celebrity vs. Tabloid, except that in California corporations have the law firmly on their side.

Lately I’ve noticed a few pop-ups sneaking into Safari. After more than a year of popup-free bliss, the sight of those unsightly windows is distressing. Todd Dominey thinks it’s being done with Flash, but I’ve also seen speculation (from Mike Soloman, the PithHelmet guy) that they’re being popped up using links that contain both a real URL and a javascript onclick event.

Trek quote of the day: “I mean, we started out with 13 million viewers on the pilot, and we somehow managed to drive 11 million of them away.” –Jolene Blalock

CherryOS, a vaporware Mac emulator that died back in November has risen from the dead. Slashdot has links. Apparently the fresh-risen zombie is still a ripoff of PearPC.

[Update] PearPC.net has a CherryOS Roundup.

I finally got around to the MacOS X 10.3.8 upgrade. It installed fine, but it disabled uControl. I just downloaded the latest version, but I need to reboot before I have my caps-lock-as-control-key back.

On the fun side, I found a link to the Perturbed Desktop movie somewhere today (probably on /.) and checked out the associated essay about new PowerBook motion sensors.

iPod link of the day: Shuffle tips and tricks.
Bonus link: Playing audio books on a shuffle.

Phil Ringnalda linked an interesting post about who owns blog comments. While I agree that the commenter owns the copyright on their words, I think that by posting them in a public place commenters lose their control over that particular copy.

I think of this as the “bathroom wall” principle. If you write a poem on a bathroom wall, the owner of the restaurant isn’t obliged to erase it at your whim. Nor should he have to let you back into the bathroom to edit it yourself. He can stick a neon Guinness sign in the bathroom next to your poem. If he happens to hoist his double-wide restaurant onto the back of a trailer and move it to another city (or country), then the bathroom goes with him and he’s still not obliged to do anything about your poem.

The same goes for comments. Once you’re posted them somewhere, you’ve not only fixed them in a medium but also implicitly licensed that particular copy of your words to the owner of the wall where you wrote them for use as a wall decoration.

True T Tale of the day: We lost half the train at Arlington. The power went out, we sat there for a while, there was a big clunk, then the power came back and we were moving again. When the train went out of service at Park Street, only one of the two cars we’d started with were there. I wonder what happened to the people on the second car. (Cue Twilight Zone music.) It goes without saying that it was a Breda train.

Jerie forwarded me this tale of a mini-switcher. Mini-switchers think they’re only mini-switching…mwhahahahaha!

Ahem. So here are my personal software habits/recommendations, exposed for all the world to see and emulate:

• Quicksilver (http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) for keyboard-based navigation. If you’ve used ActiveWords for Windows, it’s something like that. Technically it’s still in beta, but it’s wildly popular. Another popular program along those lines is LaunchBar.
• NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) for news feeds.
• OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle (http://www.omnigroup.com/) are hard to describe, but you’ll find something useful to do with them.
• CandyBar (http://www.panic.com/candybar/) for fun. The boxed version came with Pixadex for icon storage.
• iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/) for a tabbed terminal.
• CyberDuck (http://cyberduck.ch/) is a free FTP client. There are good commercial ones, too, but I’m cheap.

I’ve heard good things about Keynote and the iLife/iPages/i-other-stuff, but I don’t need them enough to pay for them.

Everything else I use regularly either came with the OS (Mail, Safari, iChat, iTunes) and/or is standard Unix software (Emacs, LaTeX, the built-in Apache server). If you need additions to the standard unix stuff, the place to get them is from Marc Liyanage (http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/) or with fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/), in that order.

Link of the day: stuffed face-hugging Aliens.

43 Folders linked a couple of handy Quicksilver tutorials for beginners and intermediate users.

Apology of the day: The management has received counseling about her blogging habits and will no longer be apologizing for missed entries. You get what you pay for.

It’s been a while since my last lego link, so here’s a slightly belated Steve Jobs in Lego. I especially liked the itty-bitty shuffle in his plastic hand. Buy your own iPod-themed lego at PodBrix, or decorate your shuffle at shuffle art or the shuffle art archive.

Apology of the Day: The management apologizes for having a life.

While I was off having a life, the spam trackbacks kept coming in. Most of them get moderated, but I’m tired of the zillion trackback spam moderation emails which have replaced my zillion comment spam moderation emails. So I tried some advice from the wordpress wiki - the SQL to close trackbacks on all old posts:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status="closed";

Trackbacks are open on this post and the last. I so rarely get trackbacked that I don’t expect this change to affect anyone.

It’s rare that a new newsreader comes out, since newsgroups are so 1995. But there’s a beta out of OSXnews so I’m trying it out. It’s looking very beta so far. I think I’ll stick with MT-NewsReader.

For those of you with stranger tastes (Veronica), there’s Shivering Kittens, a cross between Tetris and Hello, Kitty.