Monkinetic Weblog

Design by fire: Gurus vs. Bloggers, in which the sites of the web usability gurus and the sites of popular bloggers are judged head-to-head.

John Gruber, a Mac-user and sometime developer, comments on Eric Raymond's recent Linux-usability rant. He makes some really good points. Desktop Linux is not going to grow in market share with any real speed until it's enjoyable to use. That means it looks good, gets out of your way when you want it to, and is right there with the right options when you need it. You know, kind of like a Mac.

Woohoo!! The first Beta of the new LaunchBar is out, and it's a doozy! It has a ton of features the author of this articlee found lacking, in that clean, unobtrusive interface I'm come to love and depend on.

Jim posts a great bit about growing up. As geeks, we get really attached to our tools, the stuff we spend years in up to our virtual elbows, practicing our craft. These tools can, unfortunately, even crowd out "real" relationships - geeks are notoriously bad at prioritizing. smile

I've recently added a second Python install on my OS X box, in /opt/Python. I've got a script with a shebang at the top:

I'm in beautiful Victoria, BC this weekend, visiting Jim, on of my best friends. I've been hanging with Jim virtually since 1996, and had the pleasure of meeting him several times. This time I got to meet his lovely wife Cheryl, and two astonishingly adorable kids, Cyan and Xavier. Yay!

Schubert IT has the coolest plugin - an inline PDF viewer for OS X browsers. I've tested it with Safari and OmniWeb 5. Super nice.

I had an idea tonight, inspired by a post on Bill Bumgarner's site. Actually, it was in reading Bill's RSS feed in NetNewsWire.

Using Open Firmware, Terminal, and the "bless" command to make sure your Mac boots from the disk you want it to:

Jodi and I went with my new boss David and his wife Kristy to see the live taping of NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Spa. We had a lot of fun, even if it was (relatively) cold out. Adam Felber, comedian and blogger, won the quiz, bad jokes were made, and good times were had by all.

I've got nothing on my brother Bob, who (I think) has visited something like 17 countries, but here are my 13:

Well, we got another cat this weekend! "Jake" was adopted from animal control, was already fixed and so could come home with us on Saturday.

Don't cut off a cop in an unmarked SUV who's driving his daughter to school in the morning. Bad idea.

Jim posted a useful link to a new list of all the __magic__ variables that are used in python modules to make them play nice with scripts, other modules, and documentation systems. Included in the page is a link to something I'd never used before, the "amazing pydoc module" which looks super useful. Much nicer than typing help(foo) in the python intepreter IMO.

I'm listening to mid-vintage U2 today: Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. Eventually I'll get to early-vintage: War, Boy, October. October is my fav of the early stuff: I spent many hours as a teen learning The Edge's guitar licks on Gloria on an old classical guitar. (Slipping into nostalgia...)

If you're a small developer and have found a bug-tracking or issue-tracking system that you really like, please ping me at steve AT this site. I'm especially interested if you're using it in a mainly Mac OS X environment.

Installing MovableType on Panther. May prove useful.