Cafe Bucky

The sheep that blindly follow the Microsoft shepard will end up as so many compromised lamb chops:

JPEG Security flaw

Feeling frustrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer? There are very good alternatives. FireFox is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Or, just trust Microsoft to make all the right decisions for you …

A Happy Safari and FireFox user.

I’m searching for a new contract, gig, or job:
resume.daniel.org

I’ll say more in the coming days. This is a good time to dust off FlexiPhoto, think about ThereThen addresses, and consider how to start tying together those projects.

The family and I are now in New York City. I can easily work in NYC, or much of the SF Bay Area. With some creativity (we’re close to having our CA house set to lease out, which we look at as a block of change that pays rent elsewhere), I’m keen to do gigs elsewhere, like Seattle, Boston, London, or Sydney.

I’ve decided to try a different approach to handling bookmarks with Safari and other Mac browsers. My hunch is that the Finder can do a better job!

I just wrote up some docs (mostly to come back to, to check my assumptions). They are at:

Punting and using the finder

The gist of it is that I make a slight hierarchy of folders on my desktop, drag links into them, and supplement with aliases (so that there are multiple ways to get to some links).

It turns out that there are some nice benefits to doing things this way (like being able to drag my bookmarks into any Mac browser, and being able to easily search on the names of bookmarks). There are also a few downsides, but I think I can live with them.

See the docs, and let me know if you have any thoughts.

Part of this was inspired from a previous post:
Bookmark A Go-Go

Someday, there will be a perfect, crystal moment where all of my Web bookmarks are tucked into nice neat folders. Someday, all of the files and directories will be perfectly organized, and there won’t be duplicates. Someday, every single app on my systems will do everything asked of it, and all of my systems will talk to each other in every way imaginable.

Oh, sorry, I was just listening to Midnight Oil’s song “DreamWorld”. If, in fact, you are perfectly organized and set in every aspect of your computing experience, go to the next level - you aren’t trying hard enough! The trick is to get a lot of work done, push the environment to do more, but not break everything in sight.

On my Linux boxes back in California, I like use the KDE Konsole for my terminal program. The thing I love about it is the tabs.

On the Mac, I’ve tried Terminal (don’t like it, because I’ve been doing X11 since 1989, and I believe in using my mouse for copy and paste). I’ve tried iTerm (which is a Cocoa app, has tabs, but crashes too much). Most of the time I just punt and use a couple of xterms with the venerable app “screen”. (a little side story about “screen”… I once hacked my own copy to push a shell from anywhere - basically mapping ctrl-A-! to give me a prompt… I could do a quick command, exit the shell, and redraw the screen to be back where I was, cursor and all.. the things we’d do on a Wyse 50 terminal.. ah, the old days…)

My powerbook doesn’t have enough real estate for a bunch of xterms, and flipping through 4 sessions in screen gets confusing (maybe if I could color each one.. hmm?)

So what I really want is a tabbed terminal app that can handle copy/paste with the mouse, and not crash. Enter konsole.

Konsole is great at tabbing sessions, once you clear up the keycode snafus (you can google for “konsole mac xmodmap”). The one remaining problem is that I can’t paste a clipping into it from a non-X11 app.

So, if I could find a solution for pasting into Konsole from “native” Mac apps, I’d be happier. Google’s leading me nowhere on this one. Someone must have this figured out, right?

I like the new iMac. The design is great. If it’s as quiet and lightweight (compared to previous iMacs) as the specs say, then it warps into a “sort of” portable. Easy to take around the house.

But I think Apple blew it with configuration. Let’s look at the 20 inch 1.8ghz model: $1899 and only 256 meg of memory, NO Airport card, NO Bluetooth. Huh?

Ok, let’s bump it up to 1gb of memory, and add an Airport card and Bluetooth module (this is, after all, supposed to be a “Digital Hub”) - $2253

Don’t know about you, but this is getting pretty pricey for a consumer machine. I wish Apple would toss in these “extras” in order to garner a little bit of market share.

Of course, my fave config, including the AppleCare protection plan, would run the total up to $3422.

(but I wouldn’t do it Apple’s way.. I’d get an iMac + Airport + Bluetooth, and upgrade the memory and drive myself to save a lot of money)