...more recent posts
I took the advice of Craig at booknotes and picked up a copy of the Rhino Records Christmas compilation Blue Yule. Great solution if you have to play some holiday music but can't stand the usual fare.
Saw Moulin Rouge last night on DVD. About a third of the way through I was thinking it was the best movie I had ever seen. Of course I'm prone to hyperbolic thinking in the moment. By two thirds through I thought it was running a little long. By the end I was completely bored. Visually stunning. Very clever use of songs. I just wish there had been a little more to the plot.
OK, now I'm even more happy. My least favorite thing about the OSX desktop is the look of finder (file system) windows. Each one has a toolbar across the top with helpful one click navigational icons that point to often used system resources. That's nice. But the icons are ugly. Or worse. That heart for favorites? Come on. And the faux 'A' with the paintbrush and pencil and ruler for 'Applications' is not much better. These images alone would have kept my graphic design friends from switching. Here's a detail from a screenshot.
But of course it's all customizable. I knew it would be, but I wasn't looking in the right place. And not only is it customizable, but you can get rid of the icons all together in favor of just text. Right on. As they say: a picture is worth a thousand words, unless it's a picture of a word. I almost always find this true. 'Home' is plenty descriptive enough (it will take me to my home directory.) I don't need a little cartoon rendering of a house. Thanks.
Anyway, you can change it all to text through 'Customize toolbar...' in the view menu (while in the finder with a finder window open.) Plus you can select what links you want in the toolbar. Here's the same detail of the toolbar after customization. And here's a blurry shot of the whole desktop. I keep the dock on the right, set to not hide, with no magnification, and no genie effect. I might put it at the bottom if I had a bigger monitor. Magnification looks sort of cool (the icons magnify as you mouse over them) but it makes the trash a moving target. Similarly, the genie effect looks cool, but that wears off pretty quick. It still takes some getting used to if you are an old hand at classic Mac OS, but I think you can change it enough to satisfy almost anyone. The biggest thing missing if you're coming from an older Mac OS is springloaded folders, and they are set to return in 10.2.
An amazing security hole found in Windows XP. Arguably the largest security hole in an OS ever. Merely connecting to the internet puts your entire computer and all its contents at risk. But I no longer see the point in mentioning these stories. It really isn't news. Now if Microsoft ever made a secure product - that might be news. But until that happens I'm not going to mention these reports any more.
OSX 10.1.2 is out. Mozilla 0.9.7 is out.
I've noticed (at least in 10.1.1, we'll see if .2 fixes it) that when I try to connect to other machines on the appletalk LAN in the office, 10.1.1 won't see any machines that are asleep! That's not very convenient. In 9.x (and 8.x) you could hear all the machines wake up automatically when you look for available machines in the chooser. This isn't so bad for me since all the machines are physically close. I can just walk over and wake up the desired machine from its keyboard, but still...