
The new puppy, Charlotte

If you’re still having trouble deciding on a costume, these ideas may help.
I found those old posts of mine thanks to a comment spammer.
Ever since a Mozilla plugin first introduced the concept of tabbed browsing to the world a few years ago, the tabbed interface has been growing in popularity and has been used for all kinds of applications. Several applications I use daily have tabbed interfaces and it’s been bugging me for awhile that they don’t all use the same keyboard commands for switching tabs. Safari uses shift-cmd-[ (and ]), Adium uses cmd-[ (and ]), iTerm uses cmd-left (and right), etc. Well, I read a recent blog entry (I know, I know: bloggers reading other blogs and writing about them is weird) that reminded me about Mac OS X’s ability to configure any keyboard shortcut for any application. Well, it works!
Open the Keyboard & Mouse preferences, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, click the little plus sign to add a new one, select ‘Adium’ as the application, enter ‘Previous Chat’ as the Menu Title and then hit the keyboard shortcut you want. The Menu Title has to exactly match what the application itself uses, but that’s the only trick. It seems like most (all?) applications need to be restarted for it to take effect but once restarted it works exactly as expected. Now all of my keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs are the same and I can move on to worrying about other more pressing issues, like registering to vote today!
It’s really fun to watch this Bush ragdoll bounce around on the balls. Grabbing him and flinging him around adds a whole other level of fun, too.
Grandaddy is one of my favorite bands, and some random geek has made a sort of video for one of their songs on an old Apple ][+ (pre-Macintosh!). It’s fun to watch once or twice. Check it out.
If you’re wondering whether you should buy an HD DVD player soon, a Blu-ray Disc player in a little while, or a dual-format player in a little while longer, I recommend you just wait a year or three and see how things pan out. Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray are competing formats vying to be the one that replaces DVD. They both hold a lot more data than current DVDs allowing for movies encoded in higher quality High Definition. From a technical perspective Blu-ray is generally considered superior, but the technically superior format doesn’t always win and there are significant benefits to HD DVD that may prove to be enough to beat out Blu-ray in the short term. Unless you have a very nice HD television you likely won’t notice much of an improvement over standard DVDs with either format, and if you do have a very nice HD television you can probably afford to waste a little money on a losing format so knock yourself out! In another few years every television sold will be fully HD-capable and that’s when this whole game will really start to play out.
“They killed him, you know? They killed Janice, too.” That was said by a middle-aged man with long greasy greyish hair carrying a guitar to a 30-ish woman wearing a lot of loose fabric wrapped around her. I overheard it as they walked by me on Harrison Street in San Francisco.
After dealing with the problems caused by the big power outage today, I left my office to discover my bike had been stolen from the entryway of my office building. There was a painting crew there painting the outside today and I suspect one of them left the door open at some point. I was dumb and had not locked my bike. I figured inside would be safe enough. Silly me!
DreamHost’s network and all of our servers were taken down for about 4 hours this afternoon due to a major power outage in the Los Angeles area. The building housing our data center has redundant battery and diesel generator backed up power, but it didn’t work as expected. When we moved into this data center space we were reassured several times that the power supplied by the building was fault tolerant and would stay up even in a major power outage. We haven’t yet heard their side of things but I’m sure it will be interesting.
As seen on ARS Technica… The next generation of High-Definition (HD) content will be significantly harder to crack and may require a commercial license to be playable on a device or computer. A technology called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) will encrypt the signal at the last point of transmission to the television or computer screen. Hardware will have to support HDCP to be able to play the content, and any cracked keys can be revoked so no future content will play. Unless some company decides to try selling a commercial video player to Linux users, the next generation of High Definition DVD content may not play at all on operating systems other than Windows and Mac OS X. Likewise, most of us would have to purchase a brand-new television or computer display to be able to see the content at its native resolution. Additionally the encryption system in the next generation of DVD technology is being designed to be very difficult to crack. All of this doesn’t bode well for our rights to fair use as consumers. Maybe these developments will provide an opportunity for independent content developers to gain a foothold in the industry, but most people will still just want their Will Smith and Jennifer Lopez.