Category: Contemplation

»A computer hacker gains access to more than 5 million Visa and Mastercard credit card accounts in the US.« [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

I wonder what happened to Ken Bereskins Radio Weblog. He gave very useful tips on OS X – but now that weblog wasn’t updated sinc 22nd January.

»Finally, the APXL format used by the Keynote has been documented.« [Marek’s Weblog]

I have to admit I am totally irritated by this trick (implemented as Flash movie).

The Irate Scotsman rants about UI inconsistency. It’s funny, a must-read. “Meantime, last but certainly not least, I’d like to introduce you to NSSchizophrenicTextFieldAndProgressIndicator, as seen in Safari.” [ranchero.com]

Paul Nixon has a very good collection of links to info-graphics about the Columbia desaster.

»The British government’s carefully co-ordinated propaganda offensive took an embarrassing hit tonight after Downing Street was accused of plagiarism. … Channel Four News has learnt that the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles – one written by a graduate student.«

Dr. Robert Bowman wrote in October 2001:

»Mr. President, you did not tell the American people the truth about why we are the targets of terrorism. You said that we are the target because we stand for democracy, freedom, and human rights in the world.
Baloney! We are the target of terrorist because we stand for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation in the world. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things.«

»Bookie provides Rendezvous bookmark sharing. No configuration – just double-click and go. Bookie places a small icon in your menu bar from which you can globally access your bookmarks and those of any other computer on the LAN. Alternatively, you can set Bookie to publish your bookmarks, collect others, or do both (the default behavior). Bookie can also be configured to run on a single port to assist those running firewalls.«

I wonder if that is something Apple is going to integrate sooner or later anyway to push Rendezvous to their customers.

FreshlySqueezed is also offering some nice Freeware applications.

»We are delighted to see that the popular weblog application, Movable Type, is adding support for choosing Creative Commons licenses in its upcoming version.«

[Creative Commons: weblog]

Wise move! Why not really support this licensing stuff into the software – it is an important issue and should be on the screen of any weblogger when he starts his weblog.

SCI-FI-LONDON, a strictly non-geeky, serious look at science fiction and fantasy film! We take place in Feb 2003 at London’s favourite cinema, The Curzon SOHO (Time Out readers’ poll 2000 and 2001), The Other Cinema, London’s newest arthouse screen.

In a moment if critizism Jack Straw reminded Germany that it has signed the 1441 resolution and therefore should not be too explicit ruling out military action. Good to know, Jack! Needles to point out that U.S. and Great Britain have signed the UN charter as well – and that is ruling out military action without UN mandate.

And for some reason the UN carta doesn’t define such a thing as “preventive war”.

I don’t know – do you know? America is a problem. Iraq is a problem.

I just tried this little MacOS X tool: It dims the inactive applications in the background. You can switch it on and off from the menu bar. With a fast Mac, many open applications and a huge screen this may be really be an enhancement to the UI.

This is a real parody. Maybe they should ban cars and open the streets for Segways. You would even be twice as fast with 12 mph because there would be no traffic jams. In Cologne there are ground-level entrances into most of the the subways and you’re allowed to take a bicycle with you. The combination of Segways and a kind of »drive-in« subway trains would be a killer application for public transport in big cities.

Paul Everitt shows off MozTop. [ZopeZen]

It is easy to utilize a MacOS X machine as web proxy server – and it may even make sense to proxy locally on your own machine.

MacMegasite tip:

»Mac OS X’s built-in web server can act as a caching web proxy to speed up your web surfing by caching graphics and other page elements locally.«