What do you get when
What do you get when you marry a dump truck with a sports car? MacOS X. And you can drive it anwhere! [links glommed from Camworld and Slashdot, respectively.]
Wouldn’t it be cool if the sweet combination of a FreeBSD-based core & a Macintosh interface could take the world by storm? Apparently, if those articles are right, MacOS X can (theoretically) do anything Unix can do and (theoretically) run anything Unix can on PowerPC or (theoretically) Intel chips with an established GUI interface that makes Gnome and KDE look like kindergarden coloring books.
I’d like to think Apple finally got it right, but I’m not confident they won’t screw it up like they have in the past.
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Ugh. Been sick for a
Ugh. Been sick for a couple of days. That’s why no posts.
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What if Stephen Hawking was
What if Stephen Hawking was a gangsta rapper? Download a zip archive [7.19MB] with his def tracks. [Update 09/18/00: Oops. Forgot how little space mindspring.com allows me. Not great for MP3 distribution. Search for MC Hawking on Napster if you want the tracks.]
(Note: I didn’t create these tunes; I’m probably just violating someone’s copyright. (Go Napster!) if I stole ‘em from you so I can thank you.)
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Information doesn’t want to be
Information doesn’t want to be free — people want it to be [glommed from Slashdot].
Amen to that, brother.
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This article, Structured Data and
This article, Structured Data and the death of WYSIWYG [glommed from CamWorld], hits on some important distinctions, such as the difference between how “classes” of computer users interact with document creation software and the difficulty and bloat of contemporary word processors that have buried all logical structures beneath the WYSIWYG environment. For example:
“The two camps remain, the technical writers with their structured formats, and Emacs or, if their employer is rich, Framemaker/SGML, and the office workers with their MS word, userfriendly, as long as the macrovirus doesn’t get you, and your hardware is fast enough.
But does it have to be that way? It seems that structured formats clearly solve a lot of the problems people have with WYSIWYG: It lets you concentrate on what you write, not how it looks, it’s easy to get all your documents to follow a standard, and the semantics generally allow for smarter searching and archiving. But the tools are in the way.”
However, I think some of the conclusions of the author, Joakim Ziegler, are mistaken. For example:
“There’s no accepted norm for displaying XML data while editing. The only approaches we’ve seen are ones like LyX, which comes close to a WYSIWYG approach, and thus is in danger of falling into the same hole as normal WYSIWYG word processors. Also, it’s tricky to edit things like metainformation and the like in a WYSIWYG environment (if you can’t see it, you can’t get it). We went in the opposite direction, providing a visualization of structure.”
I thinkmajor conceptual mistake here is that What You See Is What You Get is inherently What You Can’t See You Can’t Get. The problem with contemporary word processors isn’t that they don’t do structured data, but that they suck at doing structured data. I’m not a programmer, but I’d wager that most “template” features in contemporary word processors are retrofitted structures onto unstructured data.
I think Conglomerate, Ziegler’s product, looks like it is probably on the right track — an XML-based document creation tool that will allow authors to write once, publish anywhere just by varying the DTD.
But I think he’s kidding himself if he thinks this is going to replace Word for the “normal computer user,” anymore than LaTeX or Framemaker would. When it gets right down to it, how it looks is more important to the normal computer user than using structured data to build the document.
What is needed is a system that does XML-editing and allows the users to toggle between editable WYSIWYG views of the various DTDs. That would be a powerful document editing tool!
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I bought a car
I bought a car yesterday. It looks just like this
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{fray} Someone shoot me for
{fray}
Someone shoot me for not stumbling upon this sooner.
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Damn. I just realized Captain
Damn. I just realized Captain Cursor’s cursor is pointing to the left, but it should be pointing to the right. Oh well. It’s the Behind-the-Looking-Glass Captain Cursor Sim.
I’ll fix it sometime later. It needs some touching up anyway.
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I love The Sims. It’s
I love The Sims. It’s bizarrely addictive. For those not in the know, The Sims is a game from Maxis, the makers of the classic game, SimCity. In The Sims, you basically create characters and run their lives. Decide when they wake up, when they eat, who they talk to, their job, who they marry and fall in love with, etc etc etc. It’s like a doll house for adults.
Beyond that, you can also customize The Sims by creating your own skins for the characters, such as the Captain Cursor sim I created this afternoon (just to see if I could and to endear Taylor to me).
If you want to hang out with Captain Cursor, Taylor gave me the green light to go ahead and distribute the skins.
Anyway.
Sometimes if you play The Sims too much in one day, when you get up from the computer to use the bathroom, you visualize your own Bladder bar getting
greener and greener . . .
Whew. My energy bar is kinda low.
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