My cats are really feeling the heat today. Letheragy and cats go together so well that I usually can't tell, but I wasn't rousted out of bed this morning to make breakfast for the furry critters and that's unheard of.
I was trying to think of ways to help them cool down and the garden hose seemed to be a non-starter. Then I hit on this trick:
I've wanted to move my blog from Radio for quite a while. It has served me well and I've had fun with it but I feel those days are gone. It's been a while since I saw Radio as a product with a viable future and I have no more interest in working with Usertalk despite having a number of blog ideas I'd like to develop.
However a working, developed, blog platform with a large chunk of content creates a pretty strong gravity well. Migrating to another product is going to be hard. I've not found a product which could give me the escape velocity I need.
I love working with Ruby. I'd love to have a blogging platform that was written in Ruby. But, then again, now that I have a Mac I can finally use Tinderbox and, apparently, Mark Bernstein is working on making Tinderbox a 1st class blogging tool.
Maybe this time next year I'll be using a new tool and developing new ideas again.
All the previews I have seen of Longhorn have looked terrible. The Windows UI is like Frankensteins monster in the movies. The special effects get better but it still looks like your worst nightmare come to life. I think it was Freewheelin Franklin who used to sayTake a look at this beta image of Microsofts latest operating system. It makes me want to throw up. I am so happy I own a mac. First of all, having everything transparent makes it hard for my eyes to focus on the content, they are going all over the place trying to look for solid ground.
Second, there are artifacts of the old look and feel WITHIN THE NEW ONE. How confusing can you get when you have a pair of Xs, both which look like they should close the window and both in different styles. It is amazing how little can get done with billions in the bank. [Microsofts Complete Lack of Taste - Technoblog]
"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.".for Microsoft dope could read vision. Longhorn appears to be a testament to the failure of throwing money at a problem.
At the risk of confirming my status as another boring born again Mac zealot I'm finding the Mac UI a very productive environment (Okay Terry you can shoot me now!) Switching from Windows has largely been a matter of relief rather than confusion. This thing works.
About this time last year I was realising that Lisp probably wasn't the language for me. It introduced me to metaprogramming with macros, new ways of looking at OOP, and generally blew fuses in my mind. But it was also arcane and irregular. I could have handled the brackets if it were not for the generally cruftyness of the whole thing. Like Lucas I also found the naming ugly although I don't think his strategy of aliasing is going to work out unless he only deals with his own code.
I think that's why I like Ruby so much. It's full of metaprogrammingy goodness but with 80% less cruft. Also the regular syntax style makes it great for DSL's which is not, I would hazard, going to be the case for Lisp.
Business firms have been the principal forces behind the promotion of governmental regulation of the economic life of the country. Through competitive and trade practice standards; licensing and other limitations on entry into the marketplace; tariffs and taxation policies; government research subsidies and defense contracting; and various other uses of the coercive powers of the state to advance private interests, the business community has fostered rigidities that help to insulate firms from the need to remain creatively resilient and adaptive to change. My book, In Restraint of Trade, documents the development of such behavior between 19181938.
As I have previously observed, a number of historians have shown how such institutionalizing practices contribute to the decline of civilizations. If a society is to remain creative and viable, it must encourage not simply tolerate the processes of change. At this point, the creative interests of society (as people) come into conflict with the structuring interests of institutions (as organizational systems). Whether the autonomous and spontaneous processes of change will prevail over the preservation of established institutional interests, may well determine the fate of the American civilization!
The forces of institutional dominance with their centralized, vertically-structured, coercive systems of control have encountered the decentralized, horizontally-connected, voluntary methods of cooperation. Mankind is in a life-and-death struggle not simply for its physical survival, but for its very soul. The contest centers on the question of whether human beings shall continue to be servo-mechanistic resources for the use and consumption of institutional interests, or whether they shall be their own reasons for being. Will institutional or individual interests be regarded as the organizing principal of society? [Saving a Dying Corpse - Butler Shafer]
By the way, everyone bored of my droning on about how cool my new PowerBook is should go flame Paolo. He was the one who planted this seed. Oh, and Beth, who watered it!
Okay here's something bad. It seems that the Tiger 10.4.2 update has done something funky (in a bad way) to the Airport extreme in my PowerBook. I'm connected to my wireless network but the OS thinks I am not. It shows no bars in the network level meter and shows me as having
No network selectedIt could be worse, it might be saying these things with me not actually able to connect.
Browsing Apple's forums it's clear I am not alone in having Airport problems with the new update but it's not clear what to do about it. Some people appear to be overwriting the Airport kernel extensions with those from their 10.4.0 CD. I'm not confident enough in my mastery of MacOSX to attempt this kind of thing yet.
I guess I'm hoping for 10.4.3 soon.
Update: No sooner do I post this than someone in #macosx tells me that the Airport 4.2 update is available. I installed that, logged out, and now my Airport is singing all 5 signal bars again! Totally cool :-)
