General

From MacFixit:

Comcast Gunning for NAT Users? Meanwhile, a posting on Slashdot states: “A co-worker of mine resigned today. His new job at Comcast: Hunting down ‘abusers’ of the service. More specifically, anyone using NAT to connect more than one computer to their cable modem to get Internet access… Comcast has an entire department dedicated to eradicating NAT users from their network.” There are numerous replies, mostly exploring the extent to which Comcast is even able to detect NAT use.

I doubt if they can detect whether someone is using a NAT device, such as a LinkSys router, as I’m using to connect my iBook, G3, and G4 to my DSL connection.

Separated at birth?

Here’s the Mozilla icon (flipped upside down) and Word X’s icon. Conicidence?

I downloaded & Installed Mozilla 0.9.7 this morning. I like it a lot better than Netscape 6.2.

I find Netscape 6 renders pages faster than any other browser (including IE 5.1), but the application itself feels so sluggish that it’s nearly unusable. Mozilla, on the other hand, feels fast & responsive (but not as fast as OmniWeb or IE) and renders just as fast as Netscape 6 (as it should, since they share the same rendering engine).

14162 ª January 25 11:22 AM. WA Lawmakers try to remove “repugnant” Theory of Evolution from schools . Yes, this is the 21st century, and yes – we in Washington State now have two bills, (Senate and House) before our congress that propose “All textbooks and curriculum that teach the theory of evolution shall be removed from the public schools forthwith and replaced with textbooks and curriculum that teach the self-evident truth of creation”.

I don’t know whether this is a legitimate effort to change the law, or a (hopefully) doomed effort to curry favor with conservative voters. [originally via fark] [MetaFilter]

I can’t believe people like this are still living in the dark ages. Sheesh!

Distribution of people named Cohen in the US from the 1990 census

Hot off the press releases, “Econ Technologies announces

ChronoSync, their latest Cocoa based Mac OS X product that

synchronizes or backs-up files and folders in a variety of ways. ChronoSync will be available February

8th, 2002 for $19.95. [Mac Net Journal]

This looks very promising. I’ve been looking for a good file sync utility for MacOS X but I’ve been disappointed so far. Synchronize Pro comes close, but the current betas are still so buggy I can’t use them, and it’s overpriced at $99.

A .NET primer for Mac users: It’s the end of Windows as we know it, and I feel fine.

UPPER:

As a runtime, Upper is designed to allow processors to be elegantly integrated into a single server program. This allows handling of mixed-language projects to be improved, and allows the descriptive scope of any single language to be expanded beyond the limits of the current standard, C. Upper also serves the general function of a framework, easing the process of writing new compilers by its defined standard classes. Upper’s services center on a general representation of programmatical and compiler-internal objects and object classes. Because compilers use these variable-representations and data types to both interface with each other and to process data internally, the services as a runtime and a framework share much in common and mesh well. The acronym Upper stands for Universal Processor Programming Environment and Runtime.

I really wish CodeWarrior‘s debugger had an option to view data as an IP address. Instead of showing the value as 0xC0A80101 or 3232235777, it would show it as 192.168.1.1.

Whatever happened to the idea of a centralized database at the core of the operating system that would store commonly used data like contact information and could be used by other programs – personal information managers, e-mail programs, etc.? OS X includes a very basic contact information application, Address Book, but no one other than Apple, with its free Mail program, ties into the Address Book to make use of the information.

The alternative is a mess. I have addresses stored in my Palm Desktop beta for OS X, addresses stored in my e-mail program PowerMail – bits and pieces of data strewn across the computer and duplicated here and there because there is no sensible way to tie it all together.

While Mac OS X is a big improvement over OS 9.x, it is examples like this that point out the shortcomings. There is plenty of room for improvement. Still. [Mac Net Journal]

This is something that really annoys me. I keep most of my contacts on my Handspring Visor Prism, which I sync to Palm Desktop. I use Entourage for my email, which has its own contact list. I also use FaxSTF X, which uses the built-in MacOS X address book. This means I have to enter anyone I need to send faxes to into my OS X address book (which I don’t use for anything else), keep all of my email contacts in Entourage, and have copies of everything in Palm Desktop to sync to my Visor. Why can’t all 3 of them share the same data? Why can’t I enter an address once and have it usable in all 3 places? Wasn’t AOCE (PowerTalk) supposed to take care of this years ago?