Tao of Mac

Dec 8th 2005 · 2 min read

Catching Up

If you needed any proof that needs to get its priorities straight, a good place to start would have been any of the main thoroughfares in Lisbon yesterday, for due to the Benfica/Manchester U. game (and the ensuing rush from folk to get home early in order to watch it on ), traffic had the fluidity of cooling treacle.

Not having watched the game at all (I only read about the outcome this morning), I'm somewhat relieved that due to today's holiday I won't have to deal with the follow-up arguments amongst armchair commentators at the office (an interesting remnant of old tribal customs, for sure, but also a major nuisance in an open-space office).

Anyway, it seems that I lost out on a lot more than a football match:

  • pfig dropped me some notes regarding Aaron Swartz's post plugging his (as yet unavailable) web.py framework (, frameworks and assorted LISP snarkiness make for a provocative mix indeed).
  • He also sent me an interesting CSS technique for bar graphs (mine already have text and legends, and I need them to be bit-mapped anyway for handheld/mobile browsers). If you're interested in graphs, this evolving thread over at Tufte's site has plenty of links to graphing resources (like Gri, which is very interesting indeed).
  • An interesting thing I came by while reading up on the framework controversy is Commentary, a brilliant way of using Ajax for HTML page annotation (remember Third Voice?). Adding this sort of thing to a documentation Wiki makes a lot of sense, and I will make a note of it for the future (more here).
  • Melo called me to comment upon the apparent inability of the Xbox360 to sell out in , with piles of boxes on display at malls and supermarkets. Meanwhile, slim s and s are selling out (more on that in a few days).
  • Oh boy, 802.16e was approved, which is sure to breathe new life into the mobile WiMax hype. I still think it will be mostly a US-centric technology until EU regulators can get their act together, and even then there's still the odd little detail of actually getting the hardware price points right...
  • Via Brent, Life with SQLite is a very interesting article detailing the SQLite support in  that I somehow missed as well (although I have a vague recollection of having come across QuickLite in the past).
  • VoodooPad was updated to 2.5. Gus still has the best notepad application out there, period.
  • Haven't I seen something similar before? Or could it be that after the MuVo, Creative has lost all ability to churn out innovative devices?
  • The Gnome environment is getting a lot more interesting of late - besides tagging, developers are working on adding search folders (and work is getting done in resource optimization as well).
  • Remember my in PDFs? Doeke Zanstra pointed me to PrinceXML, which is pricey but seems to do the job. More alternatives are still welcome, since there were a few other folk interested in a solution at the time...