Mokka mit Schlag

Steve Wiseman nails Vista. It’s crap like this that separates the pros from the amateurs. The reason I do most of my work on the Mac is that Apple and the Mac community seem to have a much higher ratio of pros to amateurs than do Microsoft and the Windows community.

The Mac isn’t perfect by any means. I could say a few unkind words about its file copying too. However, problems crop up a lot less often there than they do on Windows.

The Linux community mostly doesn’t even try. These days they’re pretty much all amateurs when it comes to user interface design. The pros all left when Eazel closed shop, and the money spout got turned off. As a rule, talented kernel hackers and server optimizers do not make great designers. However, Microsoft still has the money spout flowing. Can’t they hire somebody who knows what they’re doing?

On the plus side, at least the Aero dialogs look pretty, not the crayon colored monstrosities XP offered. I suspect this time around Microsoft hired a real artist to design the look and feel. That’s important, but it’s still just skin deep. The user interaction design is much more important than the graphic design, and here Microsoft is still sucking wind.

Anyone know off the top of their head how to get a regular HTML link to bring up the linked document in a new background window when clicked? I do not control the document being linked to. The goal is to run through a site such as Artima or Digg and click all the interesting links. Then close the window and have all the articles opened there for me to read. In my case, I can control the page I’m linking from but not the page I’m linking to. This is for my personal aggrgeator so it only needs to work in Firefox. Ideas?

Bayou Sauvage National Wildife Refuge, 2006-12-23

I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.7 to close various security holes (though I very much doubt this release closes the last of them. WordPress is still breaking one of the most fundamental rules of HTTP: Thou shalt not use GET for unsafe operations.) Holler if you notice anything funky.

The iPhone will not allow third party applications to be installed. That much we know. Does that matter? Yes, but maybe not as much as it used to.
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I am seeking tools (especially GUI tools) that will perform regular expression, grep like search and replaces. Ideally the tool would be open source, multiplatform and would provide the functionality of BBEdit:

Requirements include:

• Transparent handling of line endings
• Able to recursively descend through various directories
• File filters to determine what to search
• Autodetection of character encodings

I could write this myself in Java, but not by my deadline. Any suggestions?