Though it was a good read, the article had perhaps the funniest quote I’ve read about icons in a long while:

Ok, before we get into the real features, I feel like this needs attention. Watching the icons in the Adobe CS suite progressively change is like seeing someone in your office getting more and more into the drink. “Mike, I know you’re not explicitly peeing on my keyboard but dude, your belly dancing and constant humming of ‘Life is life’ is distracting.” It’s time the icon people at Adobe got an intervention.

Sure, I’m sure it feels good shedding the old icon constraints but this isn’t Yanni’s postmodern universe. A SEA SHELL AND A FEATHER MEAN NOTHING TO ME.

Ok, an eye fading was a bit clichéd but at least it made sense. I can only imagine the very real confusion that would arise if this became the norm: iTunes would be the feel of wind against your cheek on a June morning, Excel would be a plum listening to Jethro Tull, and the Quake symbol would be replaced by a Beluga whale in Matrix shades. Anyway, my point is that consistency makes sense when you’re chasing a deadline at 4 am and the only thing keeping you going is caffeinated beer and being able to recognize that hazy blob in your app switcher. If not for me, do it for the branding — the branding of the children.

– Adobe Photoshop CS 2 and Adobe Bridge review at Arstechnica

I’m blogging this for posterity.

If you have problems with XTerm not working with the alt key as expected (like in ETerm or others), ctrl-left click and hold, and select Meta sends Escape from the menu.

Problem solved.

snook.ca redesigned recently, and for the first time I saw an implementation of the so-called dockable comments that I liked. Usually they’re flashy ‘look at my superior CSS-fu’ type things, but here they’re actually useful — as you type the comment, you can scroll up/down for reference without losing sight of the comment or the ability to type.

Very handy.

Pathetic.

This is a beauty:

In 1918, this was found scribbled on a wall:

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a Communist, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike, and reside in the Castle of aaaaaagggh…

Unencyclopedia

As part of our course-work, our lecturer is making us do some presentations, whereby the students are cheap slave-labour. Each of us gets a portion of the book to lecture on.

Today, I had the pleasure of lecturing my Java Application Programming class on Chapter 3: Objects, Arrays and Strings. Apart from that being an oddly selected group of topics for once chapter, it seemed like a walk in the park.

Yeah, right.

I prepared a few slides — PowerPoint — and went to class. We have a rather casual setting, with one of the smaller labs, and about 10 students in the class (of which only 9 showed up today). About 9 o’clock I walk in and start my presentation. I finish up on Objects, and ask if there are any questions. The silence was scary. I started to get a sinking feeling as I typed out a couple of simple object questions for them. Fourty minutes later, we finished simple objects in Java. How simple? Here’s a rought estimate of what I asked of them:

Create a simple class to represent a person. Include name and age at least.

Next, write a running programme, and create a new object using the class declared earlier. Assign values to the data fields within it and print them to screen.

Out of the 10, 3 were able to complete this competently. Had the tenth student been there, 4 would’ve completed the excercise.

Next we went on to arrays. Same story. Single dimensional arrays were difficult enough that the remaining hour was spent demonstrating how they were declared and used.

*Sigh* I admit that not everyone out there has programming talent, ability, or whatever, I’d expect people who supposedly passed C programming to be able to create an array and populate it. At the very least, a single dimensional array. Nothing fancy, an int array perhaps.

Tomorrow, I have to present on Strings. I can feel it now. They’re going to confuse character arrays from C with strings in Java.

With regard to the rumour-mongering going on about how Apple is switching to Intel processors, this is the funniest take on it I’ve seen:

This is hilarious, it’s like Apple has a performance persecution complex. The one time they decide to switch processors, instead of going with the performance king (AMD), they go with intel. Priceless.

– OSNews comments

Nasal spray makes people trusting, even gullible…. Interesting read. By the way, you really, really want to buy me this t-shirt