December 2003 Archives

For people doing research on the power of weblogs, watch this: I have written a small review of the Belkin Media Reader 12 days ago and a search on Google for Belkin Media Reader returns it on the first page as the 4th or 5th result today.

The first result pointing to the Belkin web site is on the 11th page! And it's not even going to the product page, only to a press release which itself does not point to the product page. I've given looking after the 25th page on Google. On Belkin.com, the only way to find it in less than two clicks is to use their search engine, which will show a result that says "coming soon"!

And since my review is not positive, I guess it won't please the marketing folks at Belkin. But that's neither my fault, nor Google's, not even weblogs'. The fact that weblogs have such a high ranking in Google is more due to the spectacular gap between the craptacular job done by clueless marketing people and the astonishingly simple but fruitful job done by weblog software editors who helped people publish content using web standards.

To the marketing folks around: you don't need a weblog to achieve high ranking in Google (I know this doesn't sound trendy). All you need is to stop producing content-free sites with pages that sport less than 10% text for 90% bandwidth-wasting images, animations and other HTML tag soup. And the best support for achieving a good content/noise ratio is to use web standards. And if you can't switch to web standards right now, there are two little tags you may want to focus on: <title> and <h1>. And it shouldn't take you a marketing degree to figure out what to place between those tags.

Dave Pollard has published a list of time-savers for bloggers, after he described his blogging process five months ago.

He also offers us a list of what the blogosphere wants more of, which I'm going to quote extensively (periphrases for copy) here:

WHAT THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS MORE OF

Blog readers want to see more:

1. original research, surveys etc.
2. original, well-crafted fiction
3. great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
4. news not found anywhere else
5. category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
6. clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
7. benchmarks, quantitative analysis
8. personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
9. first-hand accounts
10. live reports from events
11. insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
12. short educational pieces
13. relevant "aha" graphics
14. great photos
15. useful tools and checklists
16. précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
17. fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

1. constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
2. 'thank you' comments, andwhy readers liked their post
3. requests for future posts on specific subjects
4. foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
5. reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
6. wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
7. comments that engender lively discussion
8. guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

I'm patently breaking more of those rules than I'm following, but I might consider adding many if not all of them on my wish list for my new blogging year :-).

The blogosphere is cooling down, so is this weblog. I'm on holidays and very slowly recovering from sickness, a tabs dump seems an appropriate diet for now.

• Attack of the Flying Weasels by Maciej Ceglowski. "That the French authorities complied so completely with the American request demonstrates the considerable amount of goodwill remaining in France towards the United States, even after the acrimony over Iraq. [...] People in [the USA] sometimes forget (or are not often reminded) that France is second only to Israel in its extensive experience fighting against islamist terrorism. [...] Given this context, it has been particularly galling to watch the United States go out of its way to alienate France in punishment for its opposition to the Iraq war."
• Jeffrey Zeldman completes his third redesign in a year. "There’s something New Coke about toying so wantonly with an old brand, but this site is not only our podium, it’s also our workshop — a place to test new methods while no meter is running and mistakes are penalty-free."
• The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft. "In light of the won't do and can't do, Microsoft sits there, and watches its market share begin to erode. That's happening slowly at first, but the snowball is rolling. A few people are starting to look up the hill and notice this big thing barreling down at them, and some are bright enough to step out of the way." [Source: Slashdot]
• The Silent Penguin at Eurosource announces a new EU site on Free/Open Source.
• How users can help open standards evolve. As Seb notes, "you don't have to be a self-sacrificing zealot to pick the light side, as the open alternatives are cheaper and work better."
• This Car Can Talk. What It Says May Cause Concern. At one point in time, not so far from now, one may grow tired of being traced down everywhere, anytime. [source: ATAC]
• Resources from MT Plugin Directory. For the hardcore Movable Type users.
• Speaking of hardcore, Mark Pilgrim has decided that RSS is deprecated by Atom. Here is how his feed greets me now: "Note: The "dive into mark" feed you are currently subscribed to is deprecated. If your aggregator supports it, you should upgrade to my Atom feed, which includes both summaries and full content." I'll add my voice to Steve Kirks' remarks: "This is the first experience I've seen of what I'll call "feed discrimination". This is similar to the browser wars of the late 90s. During that time, you could frequently see phrases at the bottom of a webpage "insulting" your choice of browser. Cute phrases like "Site best viewed using Internet Explorer" or worse would let you know that it's time to "upgrade"." AFAIK, mainstream RSS readers such as NNW do not support Atom, so much for diving into deprecation.
• Installing MovableType on Panther. [Source: Karl Dubost who seems to prefer Bloxsom]
• Still on MT, They called it ecto. Adriaan, creator of Kung-Log rebrands it and joins Joi Ito's swat team of Super Bloggers.
• Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS. Marc Fleury and Julien Viet explain why using the PHP solution PostNuke for driving JBoss' web site wasn't such a good idea and why they rewrote it in Java. They even replicated the ugly URLs!
• Limitations to Keyword Targeted Advertising: "One embarrassing example was the placement of ads by luggage stores on a Web page for a news article about a murderer who carried away his victims in a suitcase."
• Online crime up in 2003 in the U.S. "The [Internet Fraud Complaint Center] reports receiving over 120,000 online fraud complaints through its website this year -- an increase of 60% over the 75,000 complaints counted in 2002. I wonder how things went in France, notably after they've put in jail a pair of Santa's brothers from pere-noel.fr.
• Scientists Measure Pollution in Humans, and it's scary. As says the Slahsdotter: "They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."

Reuters reports that a first case of BSE, or "mad cow" disease, has been found in Washington state, U.S.A.

You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I didn't cheat, so there must be something wrongly wired in this questionnaire.

I think I'm coming closer to a nasty bug in Safari. I realized some time ago, while digging around Macromedia's Breeze presentations, that Safari would refuse to load anything after a failed attempt at launching some of the Flash videos. Today, after viewing the More video (which ran fine), Safari turned itself into stubborn donkey mode again -- annoyingly, with about 15 tabs open which I have to save manually before quitting. In both cases, it involves a plug-in (Flash 7 and QuickTime 6.5), and that may be the source of the problem. My version of Safari is 1.1.1 (v100.1) but I suspect that this behavior was present in the previous version.

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

P.S. : I cannot reproduce the bug with the More video (I remember that I had a lot of disk activity just after it was completely downloaded, may be running low on memory/swapping), however this Breeze presentation will freeze Safari each time. Click on the "Start Presentation" button, the control below the first slide will read "Buffering..." forever and Safari will refuse to load anything else after that. Same with this one.

Jon Lech Johansen, AKA DVD-Jon, wins another legal battle after a lower court of appeal cleared him of all charges that his role in creating the so-called "DeCSS" program was a violation of copyright and an invitation to wide-scale piracy. He was cleared on the first instance, but prosecutors took the case on appeal. They may appeal the case again to Norway's supreme court.

Whoever thinks that the Ally McBeal show depicts a completely fictional lawyer practice, needs to check Power Phillips P.C., attorney at laws in Denver, Co. Their web site's navigation shows labels such as "sleazeball attorneys" and "agonized clients" and its home page sports the best mise en bouche I've ever seen on a lawyers' site:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn't be caught dead in a courtroom.

Probably the closest thing to the sanitized lawyer speech on this site is what they name themselves the Obnoxious Disclaimer which starts with:

Due to circumstances beyond our control some documents on this website have not one funny word in the whole document. Worse than that, we have had to rely on our individual lawyers to supply us with their resumes and other biographical information. There is just no telling what kind of lies they may have put in those documents. Our firm is a small firm. We do not have the resources to try to track down every possible lie one of our lawyers may be telling. Just take all that stuff with a grain of salt.

They edit a newsletter called Bitches from Hell Reporter, from which I recommend the Newsflashes and the portraits of their lawyers.

The ABA Journal runs an article describing the recruitment tactic behind this site:

At Denver’s Powers Phillips, the goal is to convince lateral partners to join a self-described “peculiar” band of “uppity women” and “token males.” [...]

Occasionally someone will accuse the firm of not displaying the proper decorum befitting the legal profession. As you might expect, such criticism rolls right off the Powers Phillips crew.

“Let’s just say it’s also a good anti-recruitment tool for the wrong kind of clients and staff,” says Lansky.

This article points to another lawyer recruitment site for Stroock, attorneys in NYC, which runs a really funny Flash cartoon, Interviewing 101. I rarely find Flash movies interesting when used by corporations, least by lawyers, but this one is certainly catchy. Besides it can apply to a lot of other firms.

I applaud Powers Phillips' approach on their web site. Trust me on this, I have met with lawyers who have some sense of humor but until I discovered www.ppbfh.com, it seemed to me that while lawyers could sometimes, as individuals, express glimpses of humor (even non-billable ones!), there was probably some secret reason why they would never do such thing as a practice. Would there be a little hope in litigation-happy America?

[Source: Tech Law Advisor
]

Six Apart announces Movable Type 3.0 and discloses a few of its upcoming features:

• Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we'll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users.
• Improved comment and TrackBack management features.
• New API hooks for plugin developers. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and removing objects, building application methods with integration into the UI, and hooking into the publishing process. This opens up possibilities for plugins to add even more advanced functionality than they're able to do now.
• User interface rebuilt using CSS. We've seen with TypePad that a CSS-based interface gives users very fast application response times, and gives us a flexible interface for making application-wide changes, and we want to give this same speed and flexibility to Movable Type users.
• Support for the Atom API. We've already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we'll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.

Jay Allen seems disappointed by the comment registration, which IMHO can be useful if offered as a flexible option.

Six Apart has also posted Movable Type 2.65, mostly a security update for the mt-send-entry.cgi vulnerability and a new XML-RPC security issue to lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm. If you have already fixed the former, you can fix the latter by simply replacing the old file by the new one. The only new feature is "an Atom syndication template in the default templates, along with an auto-discovery tag in the main index template." The padawan will simply patch XMLRPCServer.pm until Atom proves to be useful or MT 3.0 sneaks around.

Update: this is what Master Dean Allen has to say about Atom:

For those to whom this is all Greek, Atom is a new form of AI technology that visits all websites simultaneously, looking for anyone badmouthing you or those batting for your team; it responds by firing back custom-made insults and denunciations including but not limited to accusations of hypocrisy and pot-kettle-black.

[P.S. Silly and absolutely useless stat du jour: this is my 500th post on padawan.info]

Silly stats du jour. If you search LinkedIn for weblog, you'll get 46 individuals, while a search for blog will return 42. Amazingly enough, none of the Trott will show up with those keywords, Mena has weblogs (32 results) and blogging (40 results) in her profile. With 18 blogs, 21 blogger and 3 bloggers, that's a mere 202 profiles mentioning weblog-related activities on LinkedIn among my 26,100+ network (I have no idea how many individuals are on LinkedIn, and I believe I cannot search beyond my network). Now I'm done with trying to turnaround LinkedIn's search engine limitations.

And Ben Trott will not show up with any of those keywords. But that's not LinkedIn's fault.

Zeldman is doing it again, in public, always in public.

I ordered a Belkin Media Reader for iPod a few weeks ago on the French Apple Store. I didn't like it and returned it a few days later. I'm not going to write a full review, as I couldn't test it fully, but here are my first impressions.

Frankly, I was not sure from the start that I would keep it, so I did not unwrap the enclosed batteries to keep them in their shipping state. I gathered four AAA batteries from remote controls around. Those batteries were in good shape for the remote controls, but apparently not good enough for the BMR, which seems to require a significant amount of power to operate. The iPod kept telling me that there was no media card to read from. Since Belkin claims that this is basically a FireWire card reader, and that it plugs into the dock port of the iPod, I don't understand why it requires extra batteries, rather than use power from the iPod battery over the FW port. Other FW card readers don't need batteries.

The FW claim is written all over the box. Then again, why isn't there a FW port so I can connect this directly to the computer? I found similar FW and USB2 media card readers ranging between 20€ and 40€, much cheaper than the 100€ Belkin is asking for the BMR in Europe (120€ VAT in France, through the Apple Store). I appreciate that the BMR let me download images to the iPod, without a computer nearby, but for that price it's not good enough and the claim that it is a FW reader is false. Its FW capabilities are non existent without the iPod.

Another thing I disliked a lot is the quality of manufacture. The BMR looks cheap, way too cheap for its price tag, and ugly, way to ugly when plugged to the iPod -- the photo above goes a long way in reducing the contrast in design and quality between the BMR and the iPod. When I opened the plug part, some piece of plastic fell down and I wasn't able to find where it came from. The cards compartment is judiciously protected by a sliding door but I have serious doubt about how long this can work without breaking or blocking. Same for the cord and plug, which requires some level of manipulation (torsion, traction, compression) and cast fear of breaking things too easily. It reminded me of a lot of those electronics gadgets that one can find anywhere in the US, and thoughts of Radio Shack popped into my mind, only to remember why their stores disappeared from France a long time ago. Damn the French, those sophisticated bastards, who think that cheap plastic cannot sell with a 3 digits price tag.

And finally, once I had the thing in my hands, I wondered why the hell I had to have this big, overpriced, plastic gadget when both my camera and iPod have enough software power to talk to each other through a simple cable, like the camera does with any computer (and even some printers!). Thank you Belkin, but I'll wait for that instead of abandoning myself yet another time to the geek buying impulse.

I've been playing with the iSight and, from Check Derrick Story's iSight Video Tricks, found a few applications to use it as a digital camcorder to record videos on disk:

• Apple QuickTime Broadcaster (free)
• Boinx iRecordNow ($15 shareware)
• BTV ($20) and BTV Pro ($40)
• SecuritySpy ($50)

I hesitate between iRecordNow and BTV. QuickTime Broadcaster does a reasonably good job but is tricky to configure if your goal is simply to record on disk (its primary use is to broadcast a live feed). As one can suspect when digging deeper into the advanced settings of those programs, they are all based on the QuickTime layer, which makes me think that as time passes, we will see a freeware for simple recording.

During those tests, I've had several, repeated problems such as conflict with iChat AV (fix: quit it or uncheck the preference that launches it each time the iSight is turned on or plugged in), frozen video, spinning wheel, weird images (loss of color, synch, zebras), and twice the iSight would stop working after a while. One strange symptom was that after some time, the images started to slow down or freeze and the green light on top of the camera would flick on a regular basis. I first thought of a software problem, related to the use of QuickTime compression, but after Googling for iSight problems, I think I have found the culprit in the FireWire cable that Apple ships with the iSight. It's a light and thin cable (with handles that are extremely hard to unplug from both ends because they are too small and flat) which seems to be very sensitive to interferences. That would explain why so many people are relating their iSight problems with wireless networks (I have an AirPort network). Once I replaced the cable by a "regular", properly isolated cable, all those problems disappeared.

Interestingly, the iSight is recognized by Macromedia's Flash plugin, and I was able to broadcast video and sound through a Flash Communication server (precisely with Breeze Live) to a Windows-based colleague.

My first impression is that the camera is quite good, it requires good lighting (or you'll get lots of noise), its auto focus is fast and works well, the automatic white balance is easily fooled by artificial light and/or poor lightning condition, the microphone is decent. The cable is problematic, and you won't be able to use the provided mounts with a FW cable that has bigger handles that the one that ships with it (but you can check for alternative mounts or build your own).

If you have similar, or diverging, experience with the iSight, I'd love to know. I'm also curious about how to use it to IM with people on Windows -- and not necessarily with AOL's AIM (which is reported by a co-worker as causing lots of issues suspiciously close to spyware behavior) -- and drivers to use it on other platforms.

Invest £15m in a brand new IT system to replace an old one that, apart from being old, "worked just fine". Do a careless execution during which you manage to loose important business data such as the profit margin. Loose £60 on each sale when you think you're making £40-50. Run that system during a whole year without caring. Post a £911m loss. Blame bad IT execution.

I wouldn't want to be in MyTravel's CIO's shoes right now. Or the CEO's neither, because taking a year to notice that the money is flushed down the toilets might be difficult to blame entirely on the IT side.

Anyone at MyTravel booking a ticket for Mumbai?

Please check back in the future for a Macintosh version of Netscape!?! If only AOL could "move forward" to the past...

A craptacular marketing misuse of a once famous brand.

Dave Pollard's 'How to Save the World' Roadmap:

[...] this post draws together many of the ideas I've written about in these pages over the past year into a single 'roadmap' action plan for transforming the world from one of imminent ecological disaster, massive cruelty, violence, suffering, rampant disease, poverty, misery, overpopulation, inequity, excess, ruinous growth, tyranny and waste, to one of balance, peace, harmony, stability, diversity, happiness, equality and well-being.

And Dave, helped by his wife, is putting his acts together and has published a personal plan and scorecard along this roadmap. Even if I don't adhere to 100% of his roadmap, I have a lot of respect for someone who is not only capable of such political vision but is acting upon it.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the Pollards make positive progress along this road.

Saddam Hussein has been captured in Iraq. This is great news and I hope it will be a cornerstone in the liberation of Iraq, and an important sign would be if he's judged in Iraq, by an Iraqi court (but not before late 2004 since there are no legitimate authorities yet).

My article Web Standards for Business has been published by the Web Standards Project. A very special thanks to Steph for the new translation and the buzz!

Jeremy Zawodny has a hilarious post about TrackBack and Corporate Secrets:

Bob, from BigEvilCompany which has adopted MovableType internally--behind the firewall, has been using his internal blog to track various things: competitors, possible acquisitions, recent discoveries, etc. One day Bob has a great idea and jot some notes on his weblog. However, what Bob doesn't realize (or even understand, really) is that MovableType had TrackBack auto-discovery enabled. As part of that blog entry, he links to a post onScott's Feedster blog. MovableType happily sends Scott's blog a TrackBack ping with the title and an brief excerpt of the entry.

The title is: Feedster Acquisition and the excerpt starts out:

To better position ourselves against Google in the upcoming battle for RSS/weblog/news search, we should buy Feedster as soon...

Uh oh...

It smells so much like a real story...

I bet MT Pro will have TrackBack autodiscovery off by default and that Six Apart should think of a guide for firewall administrators ;-).

This weblog has one year today. Please pardon the following self-gratifying vacuities.

Padawan.info was launched on Dec. 7, 2002 and has since attracted 191,409 visits, 579,635 hits among which 217,084 pages and 110,508 downloads (mostly RSS feeds), representing 5.6 GB transmitted over the pipes. I am currently receiving, on a daily average, 1,265 visits, 1,267 pages views, 871 downloads representing 35 MB of data. I received a peak of 1,782 visits on 09/11/03, a very special date for me.

Over a year, I posted 487 entries on the English side which received 358 comments. That's 1.33 posts/day and 0.74 comment/post (come on, you can do better than that ;-). On the French side, started Aug. 7, I posted 105 entries and received 278 comments, which translates into 0.88 post/day and 2.6 comment/post). I reckon that my current pace is about one post per day on both weblogs, and the francophone audience is significantly more vocal (but my French weblog is also much more personal and political than the English one).

In terms of geographic distribution, 37% of the visits came from the US, 37% from France (some sort of balance, isn't it?), 3.2% from Canada, 2.5% from the UK, 2.2% from Switzerland, 1.6% from Australia, 1.5% from Germany, 1% from Belgium out of a total of 101 countries (the last one being Zimbabwe, with just one hit!). One anecdote: I have 46 IP ranges in my banned IP list for the English weblog, and zero for the French one. To date, I have received no comment spam on the French side of padawan.info (je croise les doigts !).

Known and likely robots accounted for 35% of the visits, 27% of hits and 34% of the data volume. 22.2% of the visits came from a Macintosh, 13.5% from Windows XP (22.5% from other flavors of Windows), about 3% from Linux (platforms figures are not normalized to take the robots out).

28,138 visits came from a Google search (trusting 84% of all search referrers). The twelve top search phrases overall were: padawan (easy guess!), google tricks (big raise on the past two days), applemusic, alpha male, constitution européenne (beware the é), slashdot rss, constitution europeenne, humour noir, flash text editor, constitution européenne, jean yanne, gandi. The top 12 from Google were: padawan, google tricks, slashdot rss, alpha male, applemusic, flash text editor, flash rich text editor, french paradox, frontpage 2003 (gasp!), microsoft connectix, linkedin, rich text editor.

My ten most read posts (in English) were:

1. A rich text editor in Flash
2. Safari auto-fill considered harmful
3. Alpha Male Lessons
4. AppleMusic
5. On cultural differences and bricolage
6. BitFlux, an open source Wysiwyg XML editor
7. Slashdot RSS ban
8. Paris WiFi
9. About this site’s author
10. SSL vs. IPSec VPN

Saying that this is not exactly my personal top 10 list is an understatement, but this is the tribute one has to pay to search engines, especially when one does not write with respect to search engines. However, two peculiarities of weblogs are the RSS feeds and the exposure each post gets on the home page, which do not allow to accurately track individual posts, so the figures above are, indeed, what matches popular searches on the Internet. It makes me think about ways to improve weblog stats.

The graphic below show the progression of pages/files/hits, visits/IPs, bandwidth on the past 12 months (you'll figure out the French):

The steep and (allow me to dream one more month) continuous rise starting in August corresponds to the opening of my French weblog (which I reckon accounts currently for 42% of the RSS downloads and 49% of home page visits). Who said that to reach francophones, you'd better write in French?

My Egorati, as of today, shows 66 inbound blogs and 109 inbound links. Funnily enough, the equivalent measure from weblogues.com (francosphere) shows 172 inbound links from francophone weblogs. My GoogleRank shows 772 links (but many are internal to this site).

To put some beef behind the numbers, this experience has proved to be positive and fulfilling to me. I'm glad I have been able to sustain the pace for a year, and I hope I will be able to sustain it even longer. Some introspection has started, though, as I'm having some dissatisfaction about the present form and content. But that's part of the experience, isn't it?

Thanks (and I mean it) for your attention :-).

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement [source: Jeffrey Veen]:

One simple theme runs through much of the commentary about website management over the past five years - all the complications should be automated away. The goal of this approach is a single platform that controls websites, their content and applications, and that works like Microsoft Excel. You open it when you want to do something, close it when you're finished, and never worry about it. [...]

And since the late 1990s, software entrepreneur after software entrepreneur has pursued this goal. For a long time, analytical firms such as Forrester, Jupiter and Gartner predicted the dream of painless site management was just around the corner. [...]

The great surprise of the past five years of content management is that, despite all the hundreds of systems, no clear winners have emerged. Instead, there's a growing dissatisfaction with the ongoing technical burden that such systems impose.

As if I needed more reality-checking, I managed to browse around those other articles today:

• Role Fragmentation, Divide and Conquer - Why IT Administrators Have Become All-Powerful Demi-Gods
• Bad Manager Personalities
• Processes and the Bad Manager
• IT Support Department to Hire Rottweilers as Technicians
• Stop the Press: Software Delivered on Schedule!
• Obsolete Documents (and what to do about them)

I learned that IT is not an exact science a long time ago. Let's say it helps to be reminded once in a while.

Apple has issued a security update (2003-12-05) which fixes the vulnerability of Safari to the Mozilla cookie exploit. Use Software Update to get it (if you download it, be sure to pick the right file depending on which version of Mac OS X you are running).

A small but nevertheless good tip from Eric Meyer on how to restore the keyboard shortcuts for "New Folder" and "New Finder Window" in Mac OS X. Hack the com.apple.finder.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder (I had to add this snippet to mine, after the first <dict> element):

<key>NSUserKeyEquivalents</key>
<dict>
	<key>New Finder Window</key>
	<string>@$N</string>
	<key>New Folder</key>
	<string>@N</string>
</dict>

This makes Command-N into New Folder and Command-Shift-N into New Finder Window. Logout then login to make it work.

A girl and ant conversation about opening comments on a weblog. Funny and to the point [via Sebastien Paquet].

This is a translation by Stephanie Troeth of my article Les standards web pour l’entreprise that was published on OpenWeb in November 2003.

If you read French, I have a personal story about AIDS. Otherwise, check the world AIDS day web site.