Isn’t there possibly something wrong when a world class nation like the United States of America creates a massive out-flux of nationals who claim to be refugees? Is there something else seriously wrong when the receiving nation accepts them, citing that they are in danger if they were to stay?
Seriously, what’s going on down there?
This has actually been in the works for some time, the law firm involved has been dealing with disaffected Americans since shortly after the last federal election.
Here’s a collection of useful books to get started in the Mac environment.
“Mac OS X for Unix Geeks”, Brian Jepson & Ernest
E. Rothman, © 2003, O’Reilly and Associates, Inc., ISBN: 0-596-00356-0.
“Learning Cocoa with Objective-C”, James Duncan Davidson with Apple
Computer Inc., © 2002 O’Reilly and Associates, Inc., ISBN:
0-596-00301-3.
“Building Cocoa Applications, A Step-by-Step Guide”, Simson Garfinkel & Michael K. Mahoney, © O’Reilly and Associates Inc., ISBN: 0-596-00235-1.
Quite a few years ago, I read a wonderful book about unintended consequences. It was an excellent narrative and collection of case studies surrounding good ideas, gone very bad. Items like Prairie Grass overcrowding, the Tacoma Narrows bridge, bio-engineering that ‘slipped’, etc. The recurring theme in the book was that complex systems — which is to say most natural systems and quite a few technological ones — interact in unforseen ways when a new stimulus is introduced. Sometimes, it isn’t a new stimulus at fault, but one that was omited from the model, or perhaps the magnitude of the stimulus was not properly anticipated.
The book is Why Things Bite Back : Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner, (Not Teller!), ISBN 0679747567 and I reccommend it to anyone who wants to dive into this sort of thing. Along these lines, I found a fascinating reading list for Crisis and Disaster Management.
Ranchero Software (who make some of the best Mac applications for Web use out there) has really caught my attention this week. I’m particularly impressed with their very famous NetNewsWire product. I have no idea what Jobs & co have up their sleeve with Tiger, but I’m digging NNW!
In particular, something I just stumbled upon, which I’m sure you all know already, is their blog editor application, MarsEdit. I always thought that blog editors would generate static pages for you to publish, .Mac style. I had no idea that blogging software generally implements XML based RPCs (remote procedure calls) that let you control your blog from another software element. (Like the editor).
Found during a scan of Boing Boing this morning.
Boing Boing: Kentucky creationist museum online
As the kids would say, OMFG.
Xeni has a great post over on Boing Boing regarding censorship and automatic blacklists. Or at least a nice exposé of what’s permitted and some surprising no-gos. The part about a legal history of profanity being out of bounds hits a funny bone around here.
Originally found at link.
The much anticipated iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is now open for business in Canada, eh?
Apple announced in October that it would launch an iTMS in Canada before the end of November.
December 1 is close.
Bring it on, at only 0.99$ CDN, that’s about, oh, 0.85$ USD. 
Happy joy. Now I too can experience the wonders of DRM and one-click patent wallet violations.
UPDATE: Now the trouble begins ( or should I say — the sucking noise near my Visa card ):
I just found something I completely forgot I was looking for. A method to edit files remotely using emacs (just like the good old days) with ange-ftp, but using SSH (scp) connections. Rather than blab on about it for an hour, I’ll let someone else explain it to you.
A useful tip for Cocoa applications: In most widgets (text entry) you can complete the current word by typing Option-Esc. Much like emacs or xemacs. The goodness continues.
I found another blog entry dealing with this over at Salad With Steve.
