Tao of Mac

Jul 16th 2005 · 2 min read

Bullet Time

A cursory glance at the news:

  • The demo of Halo: Combat Evolved is out, with impeccable timing as far as my vacation is concerned. I feel like shooting things.
  • Django is starting to make waves, and the first tutorial is up. Touted as the -based Rails killer, it seems to have adequate documentation and a clean enough approach for me to try it out. The current showstopper for me is its reliance on mod_python (for umpteen reasons I won't go into right now, I really don't want to use Apache, and would prefer something that, like Rails, bundled its own tiny, portable web server for development). Maybe it can be bolted on to Snakelets somehow.
  • Lots of noise about the Optimus keyboard, which looks horribly expensive, impratical, and breakage-prone. I, for one, hardly ever look at the keyboard, no matter what I'm using (and having to constantly switch between at least three physical variations of PT laptop keyboards on which I am often forced to downgrade to a US layout only drives that point home).
  • I am all for phones becoming less of a social nuisance, but making them cute and fluffy is a bit well, strange, especially if they start mimicking social interactions. It's personal agents all over again (and that never got off the ground), even if the social awareness bits are genuinely interesting.
  • Atom has reached 1.0. Yay. So now what?
  • Via pfig (who, incidentally, is prone to taking the Planet by storm with his one-liners), Ten Essential Development Practices, nearly all of which can be applied to something other than Perl.
  • Cringely goes off in yet another conspiracy theory spin again, trying to coalesce bits of rumor into the (rather obvious) likelyhood of an Movie Store. Nothing that plenty of other people have (including myself) haven't hinted at already, but wound up in a Dan Brown-ish sort of way. The icing on the cake (and what makes it really read like a Dan Brown novel) is the "movie with retinal display" thing. And the funniest bit is that someone will surely believe this...
  • The broadband sharing thing, gone cellular. I for one wish the boxes were anything but that particular viscous shade of green. I find this to be a very interesting niche for access equipment and have already more than a few tests under my belt, but the best European gear is yet to come. Until then, if you really need this sort of mobility on our side of the Atlantic, your cheapest bet (equipment-wise) is a (which should be getting phased out on the cheap and has a battery that just keeps on giving) and a Bluetooth dongle - just plonk down the phone near a window, and with the AirPort software, your can do the sharing. Just make sure you're not breaking your 's TOS.