iDallas!

If you’re still having trouble deciding on a costume, these ideas may help.

Some good ideas

Some bad ideas

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!

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.