The Most Sensible License Agreement I’ve Seen in a Few Years

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

From Delicious Library 1.6.4:

LICENSE AGREEMENT

DELICIOUS LIBRARY IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES THAT THE PROGRAM IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, OR FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

which means… don’t sue us if something goes wrong!

Believe it or not, that’s it. Would that most payware licenses were this simple and obvious.

Removing a Sears Antitheft Device

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

I’ve been running short on dress pants, so Sunday I stopped at Sears to take advantage of their Memorial Day sale and upgrade my wardrobe. I bought about a dozen assorted items, and when I left the store the door scanners started beeping. The security guard and I both looked through my bag, but didn’t find anything. However when I got home I found this:

Dockers with security tag

Seems the clerk forgot to remove a security tag from one of the pairs of pants. Anyone know how to get this off of the pants without tearing them or going back to the store?
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Polish Blog Spam

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

There seems to be a small epidemic of blog spam coming in from apparently Polish sites. The comments take a variety of forms, but usually look something like this:

Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings

Sometimes they ask for permission to translate the article into Polish.

You may want to keep an eye out for these. Akismet seems to be missing a lot of them, and at first glance they seem like a real comment. However Googling some of the phrases makes it apparent that they’re spam. The exact wording varies.

Red-eared Slider

Sunday, May 27th, 2007

Baby turtle in hand

Red-eared Slider, Trachemys scripta elegans, Prospect Park. 2007-05-25

These are common in Prospect Park and other New York area parks. They’re not native. The colonies are all the results of released pets. These cute little guys grow into much larger turtles, and turtles just can’t hold a child’s interest as long as a dog or cat.

In many places, they’re crowding out the native turtles. I rarely see any other turtle species in Prospect Park these days.
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Mac Mini to be Discontinued? Say it isn’t so!

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Apple Insider is reporting that Apple plans to discontinue the Mac Mini. I can only hope they’re wrong. The last two Macs I’ve bought, including the one that powers this site, are both Minis; and I’ve assumed I’ll be able to buy more in the future.

The Mini is a wonderful apartment computer: fits in a small space, draws little power, makes almost no noise. I’m tempted to replace my dual G5 tower with a Mini next go round. The expandability of the tower is nice, but to be honest all I ever do is plugin one USB or Firewire device after another. I’ve never actually bothered to pop the hood and install a new drive or ATA card or anything.

If I were buying a new desktop today, a tricked out Mac Mini with 2 gigabytes of RAM and 160 GB hard drive would cost $1249. By contrast the minimum Mac Pro (1GB, 250GB) starts at $2200, and goes up to $2499 when I add enough RAM to run Parallels. I could use the bigger hard drive in the Mac Pro and might want a more powerful graphics card (though I’m not sure about that) but otherwise the Mini is adequate for my needs.

Small is beautiful. More importantly, small is convenient and cheap. Add an HDMI port, a cable card, and DVR software; and the Mac Mini could become the digital hub that AppleTV so much isn’t. We need more Minis, not less. Please Apple: don’t kill the Mini.

NetBeans 6.0 M9 and JavaFX Script

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

Quick tip: if you’re playing with JavaFX Script, stick to NetBeans 5.5. The JFX plugin is pretty throughly broken in 6.0, as are several other unrelated features. 6.0 M9 is way too buggy to be used in production just yet.