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.)

This software can post to del.icio.us as well as other similar sites. It will probably be supported by NNW, so I’d like to make sure that it can support posting to Rubric!

I’m not sure if this is really round two, three, or what. It’s not the first time that I’ve made an attempt to quit OmniWeb for another browser.

I had trouble with this at first. I think -0 is required when rebuilding the jar.

For a very long time, I had a small number of images that I used as my desktop. Most of them were symmetrical, easy to ignore, and blue. They were easy on the eye, provided enough contrast for my desktop icons, and didn’t distract or irritate me. Too often, I see people running with elaborate landscapes as their background, or family photos, or women wearing bikinis, or other busy, distracting images. The even crazier thing is people who do that and use transparent terminals.

Sometimes, I get caught up in the metaphor, and I start to imagine my software in terms of its convenient abstraction. I picture my Template Toolkit sitting on my workbench and I wonder where I the stencil for drawing an undef. I create a Socket and get visions of other programs plugging into a small opening in mine. I wonder whether Perl::Squish will someday collect the juices squeezed out of my code.