You’ve maybe heard about this ‘open source’ thing? You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in.
— the enormous ego of Eric Raymond, responding to a job offer at Microsoft.
According to Gallery’s stats, the above photo is the most popular one I’ve posted. Not sure why.
I was pleased to see that Apple had included a comprehensive dictionary with OS X 10.4. The Oxford American is a decent enough reference tome, and the computer implementation isn’t bad at all.
The typography’s fairly clean, if rather heavy on the whitespace. Cross references are active; if one clicks on the small-caps word whitlow, you’ll go to its definition (if you have to; it’s kinda nasty). For some reason, the Dashboard version of the dictionary doesn’t have active xrefs.
Searching isn’t as good as it could be. As with most electronic products, it assumes you already know how to spell the word. The incremental search does allow that, as long as you have the first few letters right, the list of possible choices is quite small. Like all electronic dictionaries that I’ve seen, it’s not possible to browse the text in that spectacularly non-linear way that makes a real paper dictionary fun.
It does seem to have a good few Canadian terms, but a true Canadian dictionary should be shipped with Canadian Tiger. Correct spelling isn’t just optional. It also only labels British and Canadian spellings as ‘British’.
So, in summary, pretty good, but far from perfect.
I’m not quite sure why Ru55el’s My Private Tel Aviv would be linking to me, but welcome!
I think it might be something to do with renewables. It sure ain’t for my wit.
Looks like the 512MW version is on sale in Canada as the Centrios. Wish they had the 1GB version.
Bullfrog Power are all over the news today. Green power for consumers in Ontario.
I could have done with more wind in the mix (they’re 80% hydro, 20% wind) but it’s better than Pickering, Darlington, and all that nonsense.
This one almost made stuff come out my nose on the train: She cant possibly be enjoying this!
I just bought a pair of Minigear Labs AM-1s stereo mics. They were remarkably cheap, and initial tests are good.
in no particular order:
You want I should review them? Get thee to Pencil Revolution!
Seems that Apple have dropped the iPod Mini in favour of the even weentsier iPod Nano.
Caravel CMS seems to be used and developed by the Mennonite Church. It looks fairly well thought out, and worthy of further study.
I’m thinking of subscribing to zip.ca, the Canadian DVD-by-mail company. I’ve browsed their catalogue, and they have some good things. But they’re not very clueful with computer security — they just sent my trial password in plain text back to me over e-mail.
My late grandmother’s intense dislike of them notwithstanding, it looks like a shopping cart from Rolser Canada could be just the thing for the carfree-about-town. Lugging shopping bags about is teh suk.
The intensely tony Pepper Mill in Hazelton Lanes seems to be the stockist for Toronto.
It seems that the concept of a toast rack is alien to Canadian kitchen retailers. Y’see, the parents are visiting soon, and last time they were here, there was a minor scene over toast sogginess. I tried two large kitchen shops; neither had heard of the concept.
We found this praying mantis at the back of the office. Paul picked it up, but it flew off. It didn’t seem to mind having its picture taken.
This (my second) mantis sighting was much more interactive than my first.
Although school in late August for us I always derived the tiniest bit of pleasure from writing the date today, and seeing that it was the same as the year. This shows I was educated in the last century.
As it was the start of the schools year, I was writing with new pencils, and summer holidays were long enough for me to forget their wooden smell. So I remember writing the date, and simultaneously, the smell of new pencils.
