Kevin Basil

I am so far removed from the world of PCs and Microsoft operating systems that I have never even played with Vista. For which blessing, I send a grateful prayer to God. I mean, he could have afflicted me with Vista. Instead, he only smote my beloved Jeep. A fair trade.

While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we’ve all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.

Read the rest: “Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself”

Check Your Computer for 2007 Daylight Saving Time – Fri, March 09, 2007 – WorldTimZone

Tim has a little chunk of Javascript that checks your computer to see if you’re ready for the new and improved Daylight Savings Time. Check it out.

I’ve got a Mac, so no pain. My Palm is already letting me down: It only sent me an email about the issue this morning. Yet, according to Tim’s article, people have known of this for quite some time now.

We’ll see if the Palm update is lots of pain or relatively painless.

Ask me some other time why I think Daylight Savings should be abolished.

If you know DrBacchus, you can just hear him saying the following:

For a while, he said, he had lights programmed to flash when someone looked at his Web site (Mr. Bowen has a blog at DrBacchus.com), “but that got annoying very fast.”

Read the rest: The House on Autopilot – New York Times

OCA – Orthodox Church in America News Release

Take the Survey

“For more information, click here.” Where does this link go? Well, in this case, that link goes straight to hell. Actually, hell.com. The “click here” link is about the most useless way of providing text for a hyperlink. It tells me absolutely nothing about what’s going to happen when I activate it. Is my computer going to blow up? Am I going to be asked to register for some service? All I know is that the web author wants me to click it.

In this category for exactly the same reason is the “this page” or “this site” or “this post” link. It means, roughly, “click here.” Vacuous and useless.

Web authors, please stop. Tell me more information, so I know if that’s a web page I want to load before I activate your link. Also, this makes web search engines like Google work way better.

Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers – New York Times

In a surprising move, the NYT uses the word “hacker” correctly in a sentence and gives a surprisingly accessible definition for it.

In related news, four horsemen were seen today in the Valley of Megiddo.

Mac users and free software folks: I need a Free (as in speech) news and feed aggregator for Mac OS X. I’ve been using NetNewsWire 2.0b25 for what seems like forever; I’d forgotten it was a beta. So, when a couple of feeds stopped working — related, it appears, to being valid Atom feeds — I went to their website to get an update. I was shocked to find that it wasn’t Free or Open or anything even similar. I mean, I downloaded the beta without charge! Doesn’t that mean it’s Free?

Stop. I know the answer, and I already feel like enough of a dweeb.

How To Become A Hacker

vikram writes that he wants to learn hacking. The link above is a good start.

I recently installed a WordPress plugin that lets me look at my stats, and “writing bookmarklets” is pretty high on the list of search strings. In fact, I come up on the first page of a Google search. Crazy. “Better Living Through Bookmarklets” has some good information to get someone started. “Tips for Writing Bookmarklets” has some really good tips for writing bookmarklets once you’ve gotten a feel for it.

I highly recommend hacking the bookmarklets of others to see what makes them tick. Good targets are Jesse Ruderman’s bookmarklets and Tim Powell’s.

I saw one article in my Googling that advised using “ugly variable names,” ie, random alphanumeric strings, to avoid namespace interference. Ick. Encapsulate your bookmarklet in a function to restrict the scope of your variables. This is also a helpful trick to dispense with void().

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.0. There was some fiddling around that I still have to do to make it work, but things look relatively stable now. Also, the links to kevinbasil.com over in the sidebar should start working properly over in the sidebar, for the first time since the IP address of the old server was changed without notice several months ago.

The new dashboard interface seems very nice, except that I must agree with DrBacchus: The new writing interface, which imitates Blogger by hiding the HTML from the user, leaves a lot to be desired. I understand simplifying, but multiply pop-ups when all I want is to add a bloody link is OUT OF CONTROL.

I’ve always thought it cool to broadcast my current song selections to anyone and everyone, so the MiniStore controversy meme currently raging in the blogosphere rates less than a 0.1 on my GAS-o-meter, especially since the broadcast can be disabled easily. What does bother me is a fundamental borking of the user interface.

iTunes’ UI is designed to look like a music player, whether CD, DAT, or cassette tape. Up until 6.0.2, the controls acted like music players, too. The reverse control, when operated once, reset the current track to its beginning; operated twice, it reset the current track to the beginning of the previous track. With 6.0.2, this simple, intuitive behavior is degraded if you’re listening to a podcast. Reverse changes the current track to the previous track. Forward or double-click on the track you were listening to takes you to the position last played in that track/podcast, unless the track is marked as unplayed, in which case it starts at the beginning.

Unclear? Reverse — the back, the two triangles pointing to the left, or your left arrow key — used to take you back to the start of the current podcast. Now, it takes you back to the start of the previous podcast.

This is an improvement, I suppose, if you’re a moron. For the rest of us, this breaks a consistent and intuitive expectation of music player user interfaces — one that is met by nearly every other software music player on the market.

If I were the guy who suggested this UI change, I’d be embarassed that someone took my suggestion seriously, when I thought it was clear that I’d had one too many shots of Jaegermeister. If I were the superior who took this suggestion seriously, I’d be making sure my résumé were in order.

On the other hand, this has the stink of Jobs all over it.

Excerpted Feeds are Evil at Binary Bonsai

I hate excerpted feeds. If you’re only showing me part of your post, most of the time I’m not reading it unless it piques my interest. The worst offender is Ortho-Dixie. I always want to read his posts, so only getting an excerpt is just a huge waste of my time.

However, some of the commenters on the bit-post above have good points. Perhaps there’s a way to have both excerpts and full feeds? Maybe a WordPress plugin or something?

MozillaZine article on Firefox 1.5 release

I’ve been using the beta versions of Firefox 1.5, and I’m very happy. I thought we were going to lose Greasemonkey, but I downloaded the updated plugin for Firefox 1.5 this morning. Security issues make continuing to use Explorer worse than playing with obsolete kid’s stuff; it’s dangerous.

Get Firefox 1.5 now. You’ll be happy you did.

Update: More fuel for the fire.

Motorola E815 – Features, Specs, and User Reviews – Mobiledia

You can’t transfer ringtones or wallpapers to the phone. Again, the phone could do this, but Verizion won’t let you[,] to make you use “Get it Now” (aka “Pay me Now”). To add insult to injury, Verizion’s selection of mp3 ringtones and wallpapers is weak, and you can’t even preview most of the wallpapers without paying a fee. You also can’t use a PC to review and buy ringtones and wallpapers (much more convenient than using your cellphone) and have them sent to your phone. Oh yes, and if your phone dies or is lost or stolen, you’ll have to pay for them all again. Worst of all is Verizion’s pathetic excuse for why it won’t allow you to add your own ringtones and wallpapers. The real reason is greed. We all have our own musical tastes, and wallpaper preferences, but Verizon insists we pay for the privilege of sharing their taste.

This summarizes my current anger at Verizon. I purchased the phone described above at full price for exactly the feature that’s been disabled. Now, had I purchased a new service plan and a discounted phone, I would not feel so bad. Having paid the full $300US, I feel like my personal property has been intentionally broken. I am angry enough at the entire system of cellular phones and service, that I would almost be willing to engage a class action lawsuit.

I have a $300 phone and 5.5 days worth of music on my computer, nearly all of which I paid for. Do you think I want to pay $1.95 to $2.95 per ring tone?

It may be time to bring fone phreaking into the 21st century.

How do I convert between Unix and Mac OS text files?

I’m mostly blogging this so I can remember where to find this stuff in the future. Thanks to lsald on ##mac (irc.freenode.net) for pointing it out.

If you open a file saved in TextEdit.app in a command-line text editor like vi, the line feed characters are all wrong. The file ends up as one huge line with a bunch of blue “^M” characters. The link above gives several command-line options for switching the offending characters out for Unix-style line feeds (and back again, if you were silly enough to want that).