embedded in
ars technica’s

exhaustive panther review

, there’s a great bit on something that i’ve been doing for a very,
very long time, something that is so deeply embedded in my way of
doing things that i hadn’t ever thought about it –

spatial

window management

:

“That’s right, Mac users actually manually arranged
their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The
height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won’t bore you with the
details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well
of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of
boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen.”

cool. i’ve added the appropriate lines to my css
file from

“Link Markers: CSS Generated Content”

and now i’ve got an easy way to visually indicate when i’m linking
to a pdf file.

here’s a sample link

. if you don’t see the little pdf icon, try forcing a reload of the
browser to pick up the new css file.

immediately after i wrote

“disintermediating technical publishers”

, i thought about how i had failed to stress that i was primarily
writing about the reference books as epitomized by
the camel book

, and that the future for
oreilly

lay in the
hacks series

and their
pogue press offerings, which have attracted my attention and dollars lately.

.

kellan

comes
to a similar conclusion

and makes an astute observation about the
hacks series

:

“The Hacks books are short, relevant, and fun. They
build on the what I consider to be the best O’Reilly book ever, the
Perl Cookbook, but corrected for the accelerated, networked world
we live in.”

i upgraded to
panther

today and my first impressions are generally positive. wierdly the
install took a lot longer on my 700 MHz 14″ ibook, as compared to
kris’ 800 MHz 12″ ibook. obviously clock speed has something to do
with it, but i’d be surprised if it accounted for most of the 30-40
minute difference. it’s probably a coincidence, but my power cord died during the upgrade process. it’s now making a faint clicking sound and not producing any juice. kris’ power cord works fine.

expose’

looks like it has the potential to be useful, but i’m not sure how
much i’ll use it. as
noticed by others

, expose’ exposes a “hidden window in both
firebird

and

thunderbird

.

i’ll pre-emptively post some links related to perl and mysql that
look like they may save me a headache or two over the next few
days.

here

,

here

and
here

.

relatedly, after a
long blog hiatus

ken bereskin

is back in action with a
panther
blog

that does a good job of highlighting new features.

i finally got around to

taking my ipod apart

by following the directions in

“complete ipod dissembly”

. if i gently shake the drive, i can hear a loose, rattling
sound, so i’m assuming that it’s foobarred.

unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it looks like the
ipods

have a

magick partitioning scheme

, which prevents me from just putting in a plain-vanilla

toshiba 10 GB (HDD1262) hard drive

, which is what’s in there now. harrummph. it looks like the best
you can do is try to scavenge a properly formatted drive off
ebay

. as luck with would have it, there’s a

30 gigger

for sale at a fairly reasonable price [ at least at this point and
relative to getting a new 30 GB ipod ], but i’m not sure if it’ll
fit in my 10 gig case. the specs between the

10 gig

and

30 gig

look identical, except for a 3mm difference in the height of the
drives [ and yes, all you smarty pants in the peanut gallery, the
pin-outs are

the

same

too ].

i’m tempted to just risk the hundred bucks or so for the 30 gig
properly formatted drive, but i wish i has something to test the
old drive beyond the “shake test” to ensure that it’s really the
root cause of the dead ipod and not something else. if anyone has
successfully upgraded a 2nd generation 10 gig ipod with a 30 gig
drive, i’d love to hear about it.

don’t mind me, just tossing this php/foaf tutorial into the annotated bookmark bin:

“This article is a guide to using PHP to parse FOAF documents. FOAF stands for Friend-of-a-Friend and is a fun application of RDF that describes people and their relationships to one another. It assumes that the reader is familiar with XML and PHP but that they have little or no knowledge of RDF or FOAF and how to parse them.”

[ via laughingmeme mlp ]

Multiple IE’s in Windows

:

“Essentially this whole thing was stumbled upon out of
necessity and a lawsuit that Microsoft lost.”