This neat little application keeps track of your power status on your Mac. If you disconnect or reconnect your power, it tells you about it with Growl. Since my laptop AC adaptor doesn’t have a little ring of light on it, sometimes I lose power without noticing. This makes sure I notice.

Adam has a module called Params::Util. It provides a bunch of routines that let you say something like “is this value an X value?” X might be “array” or “valid identifier” or so on. In general, I don’t put that module to a lot of use. Maybe I should, but I don’t.

Why is AppleScript so slow? Whenever I try to do a bunch of things repeated tasks with it, it feels like it takes forever. I assume it isn’t really AppleScript per se, but the underlying Apple Events layer. When I’ve used Mac::Glue, it’s been about as slow.

An unedited transcript from #vim:

This morning, Adam wrote his faux pitch to become TPF President. There were a decent number of replies, many of which were on the order of, “We actually don’t need to raise more money” or “people don’t actually want Perl certification.” The problem is that his “platform” outshone what I think is a real issue: TPF still seems like a black box.

I just love this blog entry from Guido. It’s just about a year old now – it was resent verbatim (replacing Python with Scheme) to some Scheme lists as an April Fool’s joke. Guido is talking about how he’d like to drop filter, reduce, and map. He says:

This is part two in my “All Hail” series. John C. is my friend and coworker, and he knows a lot more about Firefox than I probably ever will. He wrote Wikalong and a few other neat XUL-based geegaws. He’s the one who helped me figure out what extensions to start with when trying to emigrate from OmniWeb. (I think I’ve since repaid him just a little by getting him to use Tab Mix Plus.) Even though John is, incomprehensibly, considering moving away from Bethlehem: All hail John!

I was looking into some zsh functionality today and decided it was time to update my prompt. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, with the help of jcap:

Sometimes, I plug my laptop into the little amplifier we use for the TV. It’s nothing special, although I’ve got a nice pair of Bose bookshelf speakers connected to it. The sound quality is really great compared to my laptop’s built in speakers, or even to the little panel speakers I have in my office. This should not be surprising to anyone. What is a little disappointing, if not quite surprising, is that I get nowhere near that quality out of my iPod headphones. The problem isn’t the headphones’ drivers, as far as I can tell, but their fit. When I accidentally (or intentionally) press the little earbuds into my ears, tighter and at a weirder angle, I get a really superior sound. It’s like several accompanists just joined in.

Really, I think Firefox deserves mostly cheers. I reserve most of my jeers for lousy extensions or extension incompatibilities. (That, despite the fact that I know how hard it is to write code that will Just Work when plugged into an existing larger system with other plugins.)