Monkinetic Weblog

Tinderbox is a Mac OS (Classic only for now) application that lets you manage information in a multiview graphical way; including an outline view and a very cool-looking map view. Tinderbox is also a sort of content-management system and can be used to generate HTML, XML, and syndication files (RSS feeds), as well as consume RSS feeds. As soon as the Mac OS X version comes out I'm gonna seriously check this out.

NewForge is reporting that AOL is going to switch users from IE (or their own woefully behind browser) to a browser based on Gecko, the core browser engine in Mozilla. (Mozilla being the open source browser project quasi-funded by AOL/Netscape). From the article on the switch:

"With Gecko, we have control over the client software and don't have to worry about Microsoft screwing up our streaming [audio and video]," says one AOL sysadmin And later: A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers...

For those that need it.

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Macrobyte has released one of the core components to Conversant (which runs redmonk.net), the Attribute Search Engine. If you're a Frontier developer, check this out. Seth has been a Frontier developer since like, the stone ages, and is Smart³.

I was wondering whether Python had the concept of interfaces, like Java does, when it hit me - what I want is a search engine that will let me search using formal analogies, they way they do in the SATs back in high school. "a is to b, as c is to ?" I was really good at those, probably because I think in the abstract very well (and was destined to be a programmer -)). Anyway, I want to ask Google "Show me anything that has the same relationship to Python that Interfaces do to Java".

Jargon file, under clue-by-four:

...your editor once heard a hacker say "I smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!"

Working on Mac OS X for the last year and a half, I've come to the following conclusion, again: writers of unix utilities have an interesting idea of "usability" - "Fail Hard, Fail Fast, and Fail Painfully. That way the User more quickly gains the ability to do it right."

Has anyone worked out embedding the mozilla html editor component in a webpage, in place of the usual "textarea"? This would make a lot of webapps/webloggers wery wery happy.

Wil Wheaton in this article:

"I picked dot-net because in the original creation of the Internet, dot-com meant a commercial venture, and dot-net meant a network of people, or a personal thing or organization..."

I'd never used MPW, so when I (almost accidentally) opened up one of BBEdit's new Shell Worksheets, I was a bit perplexed as to what I was looking at. It looked like a lot of text - a document - but there were commands in there as well - and the type of document I was looking at suggested that you could do something with them. Indeed, say the instructions - put the cursor at the end of one of the lines containing a shell command, and BBEdit AutoMagically behind the scenes runs the command in a shell, and dumps the output right into your document. OMG. This is... amazing. Hm. Combine this with a command-line xmlrpc client, and strange (and frightening?) things could happen... Muahahaha -)

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