Noel Jackson accidentally (we think) makes a double post to his web log while ranting about web design incompetence. (Archived screen shot here).

We stopped by CompUSA, and picked up Final Cut Express. It’s not hard to see why it’s such a popular program. The most used work paths have been carefully smoothed to be hyper-efficient. It’s not as intuitive as iMovie is, but I picked it up very quickly. The included DVD showing how to use it was very useful.

Here’s my first test video clip made with Final Cut Express using video from our first trip to Europe: Monte-Tobogganing in Funchal, Portugal (5megs).

It seems D. J. Bernstein, is sending in a letter everyday to the university patent head. Pretty funny.

Time for me to clarify a little bit on my last post about tabs. Shawn Medero asks, “I suppose this idea as a plug-in is fine, if that is your thing… but not at the OS level, how does that please both sides?”.

Watching the frequent Tab Wars on the BBEdit mailing list, one of the often repeated reasons for no tabs was that it was not an application’s right to break the operations system’s overriding metaphors. On Mac OS the metaphor in question is that of “One window = one document”. The concern, and quite justly, is to keep all applications acting the same under the same circumstances, which is one of the Mac’s greatest strengths. If good way of handling tabs is provided at an OS level, then all apps behave the same - and power users can enable tabs.

Having tabs does not necessarily imply an MDI, or some such evil… Hehe, and by “Tabs”, I don’t even really mean tabs, just a one click way of swiching between documents that is in some way attached to the document’s window.

Of course, I may be the only ultra-tab fanatic in the world. While doing my website work I often have about five php files open in BBEdit, and I constantly am switching between them, as I add a feature to the back-end php files, then the page file, then the page’s template. My web browser often has a test page open, one or two pages in the web site I am building, one or two phpMyAdmin pages open, and often several different documentation pages for PHP, MySQL, and third party libraries I’m using. I often have a conversion going with a customer, over AIM, and perhaps a few conversations with a few friends (I’m a freelancer, so I’m not cheating “the boss”). I often have three to four terminal windows open, SSHed to the various web hosts I work on. On average during a productive morning’s work, I switch documents about once every twenty seconds or so. To cut off one second from each document switch ends up being worth $12 of my time - every morning.

There were new puppies at our dog’s breeder’s house, so we dashed down get pictures, and get our “puppy fix”. They were six days old and tiny. One could curl up in one of your out stretched hands. They were less than one hundredth the size of a full grown Swissy.

And you think computer people are the only ones to speak gibberish?

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the “Raven.” The former is trochaic — the latter is octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic….

Edger Allen Poe

I’ve think I’ve solved my problem with getting to bored while doing repetitive manual labor out in the shop. Not surprising it’s a slightly geeky solution. I download the text of a book from Project Gutenberg, have my computer speak it into a MP3 using iSpeak It, then I put the 10 or so hour MP3 onto my iPod, and then off I go.

The quality level is hilarious - lisiten to a short sample from the Verne book I’m reading right now - but at least I understand the text of the book, and let my imagination do the rest.

I was quoted on the web today for the first time ever, as two squad leaders discuss building a squad. Now I just have to get back to being humble again.

Luminaire 5: “During the second world war, Gen. Bradley said, “Leadership is ninety percent character.” A squad leader for a great team must have two attributes - you must take responsibility and have integrity. To put it bluntly, responsibility means you don’t blame anyone, ever. If someone your squad messes up, it is your fault for not training them properly, or not taking them out of the squad. If your squad loses a match, it’s not the enemy’s fault for doing something lame - it’s just your squad is not to their level yet, and there are things you can learn from it. If you are blaming you aren’t learning or fixing. Integrity just means that you say what you do, and do what you say.” Joey Sondgeroth: Exactly Luminaire 5: This is all Brains, by the way

I’ve been reading the roman side (as told by Livy) of the Second Punic War - You know the war with Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants, and annihilating the Roman army at Cannae. There are quite a few parallels between it and World War II.

World war II

1. War is begun by the loser of the first world war
2. Lighting attack by the Germans through the "impassible" Ardennes forest, bypassing the main enemy forces waiting to block them.
3. Brilliant leaders on the German side.
4. Annihilation of the French and for all practical purposes, the British army.
5. Britain would not surrender, though without a army.
6. Germany could not take out England when they had a chance.
7. War was fought all over the place in multiple independent theaters
8. Brilliant leaders began emerging on the allied side.
9. The Allies after a long war push Germany up to the wall.
10. Germany would not surrender till beyond all hope was lost.

Second Punic War

1. War is begun by the loser of the first world war
2. Lighting attack by Carthage through the "impassible" Alps, bypassing the main enemy forces waiting to block them.
3. Brilliant leaders on the Carthagean side.
4. Aninnilation of the entire Roman army and then the second Roman army.
5. Rome would not surrender, though without a army.
6. Carthage could not take out Rome when they had a chance.
7. War was fought all over the place in multiple independant theaters
8. Brilliant leaders began emerging on the Roman side.
9. The Roman after a long war push Carthage up to the wall.
10. Carthage would not surrender till beyond all hope was lost.

For starters, I’m a tab lover. Until I got Mozilla and then Chimera on OS X, I browsed with tabs in Opera on Windows. My favorite windows text editor uses tabs, and I missed the tabs when I moved to bbedit. Adium’s use of tabs was wonderful, and really saved desktop space.

Many people cry for tabs, but those in the “No tabs” camp say that tabs should not be implemented on a per application basis and the “Document” metaphor should be consistent across the OS.

Okay. While these two sides seem to be at odds with each other, there is a simple solution. Build tabs into the OS and make them work for every document based application. (or at least make a haxie for it.)

Just think, iChat with tabs, BBEdit with tabs, Safari with tabs - we are getting really close to perfect now.