General

I spent the day at my new place, buying lamps & a dining table (which I discovered didn’t include chairs after I got it home), assembling stuff, installing various fixtures, cleaning up, etc. I’m pretty exhasted now.

As I drove home I listened to “Mustt Mustt” by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and I thought about what a great singer he was and wished I had the opportunity to see him perform live before his untimely death a few years ago.

I probably won’t be posting much for the next week or so. I’m getting ready to move a few days, and I’m now frantically packing, cleaning, and doing last minute stuff.

David Brown: “It’s not as important to actually BE fast as it is to SEEM fast.” So true.  [Scripting News]

A good rule for application design.

Morons in the News: Museum Visit Leads to Satan. The Salem Witch Museum educates the public about witchhunts around the world. Cromwell Middle School’s field trip is suddenly cancelled because apparently even seeing the word “witch” sends fundie parents into convulsions. [Morons Dot Org]

Dave Winer of Userland Software: Ominous words from Steve Zellers for all developers who use AppleEvents (like us). “A future release of the AppleEvent Manager in OS X may break some applications.” Oy.  [Scripting News] [Mac Net Journal]

You must not use AEGetDescData or AEGetDescDataSize to extract data from an AERecord or AEList. Trying to do anything with the dataHandle of a desc that contains a list or a record will result in Very Bad Things. Use the AEGet* APIs to get the data from a record or list.

Guilty! I’ve done that in System 7 Pack. oy! is right.

Intel’s Concept PC gallery. This is not a joke.

Some of these machines look absolutely ridiculous. They miss the whole point of the iMac – it isn’t just about looking “weird” or “cool”. Form follows function. The iMac doesn’t have any extraneous gadgets or decorations. It’s an efficient, tasteful design.

These machines are designed to look weird just for the sake of being weird. Under the surface, you’ll find the same clunkiness & cost-cutting design you’ll find in any PC.

15159 ª February 28 10:26 AM. Absolutely the crummiest website ever made. I’m sure this may be a much-maligned type of front page post. I know many of us are web developers and it’s easy to get snotty and to think that every site under the sun is horribly designed and to poke fun at the blink tag users and frontpage developers of the world. But this is just unbelievable. Sue me. [MetaFilter]

Argh!!!!! It really is awful. Everything on the page moves for absolutely no reason. Try to click on the entertainment link and it runs away from you. Letters & words keep flowing around the page. The designer should be fired.

If you want to go directly to the page, here it is. Warning: take a motion sickness pill before you do.

15151 ª February 28 7:10 AM. Sigh. In case all this talk of foreign crazies was stealing the spotlight from our homegrown malcontents. [MetaFilter]

I always believed our own wackos are just as dangerous as any middle eastern terrorists. Thankfully most of them are too stupid to do any harm

Somehow I missed Nat Hentoff’s second piece about the Patriot Act, the one that discussed libraries. Big John Wants Your Reading List outlines the slippery slope librarians have been warning against.

“As I often do when Americans’ freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I’ve covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.

As she has often said, “How can anyone involved with libraries stand up and say, ‘We are going to solve problems by withholding information’?”

I called to talk with her about the FBI’s new power to force libraries to disclose the titles of books that certain people are reading÷and she, of course, knew all about this part of the USA Patriot Act. And the rest of it, for that matter.

Accordingly, the press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI’s harvesting lists of what “suspect” Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers.”

Judith continues to fight the good fight – more power to her. Thanks to Library Juice for pointing this one out.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Kristallnacht for the Pepsi Generation?. Over the past few months, there has been a great deal of discussion in the American, European, and Israeli conservative press about an alarming group of events taking place in Europe. These events — seeming anti-Semitic* language from Europe’s “chattering classes” and anti-Semitic attacks from the shadows of Europe’s Muslim community — hearken back to the shattered glass and yellow stars of blackest days of the 20th Century: Nazi Germany. The mainstream media has slowly picked up on disturbing reports of still-smoldering synagogues and of sniper fire, however there are many who suggest that these events have more to do with anger over Israel’s policies than they do with Jews themselves. Are the events a natural response to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, or are they a symptom of something deeper brewing within Europe? [kuro5hin.org]