Friday, February 17, 2006
IE7 motto: "Almost as good as Firefox!"
IE7 will offer several exciting new features, including tabbed browsing, "web feeds" (RSS/Atom support), and some revolutionary keyboard shortcuts.
Seriously, kudos to Microsoft for copying Firefox's keybindings. It's nice to see that instead of what Microsoft usually does to standards. (Not that Firefox's keybindings are a "standard" by any means. It's just that Microsoft has a repuation of, er, shall we say, "embracing and extending" standards.)
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Obscure UNIX utility of the month: "units"
The author of The case of the 500-mile email uses a utility I hadn't seen before, "units".
~$ units
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: centimeters/minute
You want: furlongs/fortnight
* 1.0021455
/ 0.99785914
You have: 720 miles
You want: kilometers
* 1158.7277
/ 0.00086301554
It can be used non-interactively as well:
~$ units gallon liter
* 3.7854118
/ 0.26417205
~$
Granted, if have net access, you can just use the Google calculator for this, but it's still pretty neat.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
The miracle of IRC
IRC is great. You can converse in realtime with anybody on the planet, and have deep, meaningful interactions that help us see things from other points of view and remind us that, deep down, we're all just a bunch of selfish jerks. Ha ha! Little bit of blogger humor there.
But seriously, IRC is full of deep, incisive commentary. Like this gem:
<meriad_> Am I just a sappy bloak or is a Walk To Remember frekain sad
<meriad_> IM IN tears here
<meriad_> :
<meriad_> (
<meriad_> :(
* meriad_ sobbss
* meriad_ wANNNNNHHH
<PurpleSmurf> why?
<meriad_> its so sad
<meriad_> PurpleSmurf he falls in love with this chick who has a terminal
and he didnt knoow and shit
<meriad_> PurpleSmurf u gotta see it to understand
-- Seen on ##linux (freenode)
Just warms the heart, doesn't it?
