Entry on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Cocoalicious Screenshot

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 10:41:19 +0000

Showing the star ratings, searching, live preview, and tag list.

NetNewsWire has killed Surfing for me!

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 13:09:11 +0000

I’ve become addicted to NetNewsWire. The first step is admitting it’s a problem. I only realized that it had become an addiction, when I hit command+L in Safari to start going to a site, when it hit me.

I have already seen all of the updates on every single website that I care about. In NetNewsWire. In a couple of minutes.

There is no reason to surf aimlessly through the several dozen of websites that I used to view daily (or at least weekly). I have 81 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire, and they cover the entire range of sites that I regularly check.

Classic vs. MacOSX

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 15 Feb 2003 13:07:18 +0000

My home Mac is an old, creaky 8600/300. It was one of the fastest machines around when it was new, but it’s too antique to properly run MacOSX. I’d actually relegated the machine to being a “media hub” a few years ago - it was acting as our basement TV through the ATI Rage Pro card with cable tuner. Worked great as that, and I have my TiBook from work for any real work at home, so it’s not a big deal.

Forget North Korea... North Dakota's next!

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 08 Feb 2003 13:04:48 +0000

The Onion, that last great bastion of true reporting power left in North America, has identified a potential rogue nation which may require UN and/or Shrub action… North Dakota!

Perhaps that Canadian MP who was suggesting that the UN should send weapons inspectors into the USA may have been onto something…

Full article here.

My first iMovie

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:01:42 +0000

Wow. That was easy. (of course). Not having a digital video cam, I brought in a bunch of photos from iPhoto, and a track from iMovie, and used the famous Ken Burns Effect to make a slide show.

Went pretty easily. MUCH faster than the old way I used to do this. Several years ago I had to do a couple of slide shows, and used Director and Premier. The result was effective, but consumed about 2 weeks of my spare time. That sucked.

Blapp Links

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 27 Jan 2003 13:01:07 +0000

I know this is on the Blapp homepage - there’s even a screenshot of it working - but I never tried it out until now.

Dang, that Links window is cool! It scans all blog entries for hrefs, then presents a simple interface to list and search them, so you can reuse previous links. Well done. Dragging an item from the Links window into a new blog entry even generates the appropriate HTML element. Slick.

Blapp - Blosxom Blog Editor

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 24 Jan 2003 12:58:35 +0000

I’ve been using Blapp for a while now to manage the entries for this blog. It’s pretty cool, and I just saw that Michael McCracken now has a badge for his cool software.

Anyhoo, here’s credit where it’s due:

It’s good to see that Michael plans on continuing development of Blapp, even though NetNewsWire Pro will have integrated blog edting. I like Blapp, it’s a neat little program. Could use some tweaks, but it’s not bad at all. Oh, and it’s free, which is a Good Thing.

Blosxom 1.0

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 24 Jan 2003 12:56:46 +0000

I’ve just “upgraded” to Blosxom 1.0, and it was (of course) a smooth process.

Congrats, Rael, on hitting the mythical 1.0!

I finally figured out where to modify blosxom.cgi so that it doesn’t render the entire freaking blog with each static rendering of the site… Easy change in line 167, to remove the first condition (if dynamic, pay attention to the entry count limit) - after removing that condition, all pages will obey the entry count limit.

Blosxom 1.1 revisited

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:57:58 +0000

Looks like it’s working properly now. Not sure why it was acting up before, but it looks like Operator Error (code ID 10 T, most likely).

Thanks to Rael for double-checking my copy of the blosxom.cgi file, to rule out any kind of serious problem.

I’ve now limited the number of entries on each page to 15, so it’s not a 50K hit each time. There’s also a category index on the left side now, as well as indices for each category (just change the index.html URL to index.index, and you’ll get a list of entries).

iCommune speculation is misdirected

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:55:56 +0000

This is just my take on it, but I’ve just about had my fill of the “Apple is Evil” rants regarding their actions toward the developer of iCommune.

It seems like a clear-cut case: iCommune violates the device-plug-in-API license agreement. It has NOTHING to do with what iCommune does. Apple isn’t saying “you can’t do that”, they’re saying “you can’t do that with that API”.

They have a history of doing this kind of thing especially around APIs that are either half-baked (i.e., incomplete, not half-assed), or on the way out (planned deprecation), or about to be superceded by something better.

NetNewsWire Pro (almost) supports Blosxom!

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 12:55:10 +0000

Just grabbed the latest beta of NNWP (beta 12), and it has better support for my Blosxom blog. It looks like it’s still a little incomplete - only sees one level of the folder hierarchy - but that’s definitely a step forward, since it didn’t see any folders before…

Tabs in Safari - Possible Implementation

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 16 Jan 2003 12:53:13 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the whole “I need tabs in Safari” issue, and have come to realize that no, in fact, I don’t need tabs in Safari.

What I need is a way to manage multiple open web pages in a single window. Tabs are only one implementation of this. And they tend not to scale well (open 15 pages as tabs in Chimera to see what I mean).

What would work is some way to list any number of pages associated with a single window. Something like the Bookmarks mode in Safari is a good start. It makes it easy to list pages, but it’s modal.

Hidden Safari Trick

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 12:52:26 +0000

I just stumbled across this little gem…

If you have pages in your bookmarks bar in Safari, hit Command+1 to open the first one, Command+2 to open the second, etc…

My bookmarks bar is mostly full of folders, but there are a couple of pages, and the Command+# maps to their non-folder order from the left side

Quite cool. Wonder what other goodness is hiding in there… Already have mouse gesturing thanks to Cocoa Gestures. Slick.

Resources for getting into MacOSX

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 12:51:04 +0000

I was just asked for some online resources for a Windows admin getting into MacOSX. Here’s what I came up with:

On a MacOSX Box:

just hit Command+? (or go to the help menu)

On the web:

I’ll add any others that I come across.

New entry in the Battle of the Ancient Games

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 08 Jan 2003 12:49:50 +0000

Just came across Strike Force, linked from MacUpdate.com.

Holy crap. That’s one complete mod for Unreal Tournament. I’ve tried it for a couple of minutes, and it looks even better than UT:Infiltration (which is a pain in the #SS to get running on OSX, but Strike Force just plain worked).

Links: