Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Mac link of the day: free icons for OS X developers

Due to an unexpected snowstorm, I’m prematurely back in Boston—almost, but not quite, ahead of the snow. When I checked my email, I found that the comment spammers had been at my sample color-rotation blog. All comments were held up for moderation, but it’s a pain to delete them all.

Since I don’t expect real live people to comment in a demo blog that’s all in fake Lorem Ipsum Latin, I took the easy way out of WordPress comment spam: I deleted the wp-comments-post.php file. Anyone who tries to comment will get a 404 error.

From SpaceWeather: the Christmas Moon will be the smallest full moon of the year.

Firefox extension of the day: FlashBlock stops Flash ads from flashing

John Gruber has updated Markdown and explained the new licensing. Pardon the late link.

This will probably be my last fresh entry until Monday, as I will be AFK for the weekend. There may or may not be canned stuff for your holiday consumption.

Firefox extension of the day: LiveHTTPHeaders

Slashdot is having a field day over Genetic Savings & Clone. You can now clone Fluffy for a mere $50,000.

Psych link of the day: A precious case from Middle Earth (via GNXP)

I’ve added some bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks that do cool things) to Firefox. Most of them came from from CowboyScripts, especially from playing with the Size-Align Bookmarklet Generator.

I’m not so concerned about getting the evil PC to look like a mac, but I do want it to act like a mac. I want to hit my usual Mac key sequences and have the usual things happen. Lovely user interface things like QuickSilver (command-space) are just a dream (but for a not-so-cheap imitation see ActiveWords). Cutting and pasting is a day-to-day activity.

In short, I wanted a command key so I could hit command-c and command-v for cutting and pasting. This virtual command key would actually be a control key in disguise, since control-c and control-v are the cutting and pasting commands in the evil OS.

Windows does have a rip-off of the command key—the Windows key—but no one uses it. (Apparently it’s so unpopular it’s even left off the keyboard on some Windows laptops.) In any event, it’s in the wrong place (in Alt territory), and the Alt key is where the command key goes on a Mac. So I had a lot of rearranging to do.

Before I get into sordid things like regedt32, I should mention that in the OS of Goodness and Light, you swap keys by downloading the free keyboard mapper uControl.
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For the 800th anniversary of Maimonides’ death, JNUL has made a collection of manuscripts available on-line.

Today is the 800th anniversary, in the sense that it has been precisely 800 solar years since the sad event, which occurred on December 13, 1204. You may object that today is in fact the 20th, and you’d be right. But when looking at a date from before 1582, one must always consider the possibility that it is a Julian date and not a Gregorian one. The Julian calendar had drifted 7 days by 1204; I’ve corrected for the drift.

How did I know the date was Julian? I checked it against the Hebrew date of his death, 20 Tevet 4965. You can do the same thing at this handy calendar site. This year the 20th of Tevet will fall on January 1st.

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I just watched “Birthright,” the Season 7 Stargate/Xena crossover episode. I didn’t recognize Jolene Blaylock as a blonde, until she opened her mouth and I started getting splinters. (Ba-dum!)

But seriously, the best thing about the episode was the cheese. I love it when the faux-Elizabethan Jaffa-speak comes out, and having the women dressed like refugees from the Thunderdome was a nice cheesy touch. The conflict over harvesting your fellow Jaffa for parts was interesting, too; the Amazon babes seemed more in Jaffa character about that than Teal’c and Drey’auc.

It’s a shame it’s so hard to find Firefox extensions, even when you know they exist. ColorZilla is very cool, but it took me forever to hunt it down at home after installing it at work.

Warning: Geeking ahead!

So I’ve been trying to reproduce a real operating system on Windows. The very first thing I did, of course, was install Emacs. Today I noticed that Emacs wasn’t finding RCS (my favorite version control system) even though I have Cygwin installed. I found the answer in noniq’s .emacs file:

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