Solipsism Gradient

Rafael Fischmann wrote:

Rainer, your weblog looks bad over here, through Safari, I don’t know what’s going on. Do you want a snap-shot of it so you can check it out?

Thanks Rafael; I use Safari myself. Something has changed since about a year ago which makes the weblog text centered vertically (instead of top-aligned), but I’ve been too busy to find out why. Hold on…

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:
Rainer, your weblog looks bad over here, through Safari, I don’t know what’s going on. Do you want a snap-shot of it so you can check it out?

ADHOC (formerly famous as MacHack) will happen July 27-31, 2005, in Dearborn MI (near Detroit).

Unfortunately, my plans to publish a paper were foiled by circumstances. My own work has taken me in a different direction – partly motivated by the June Mac-Intel announcement – and my coauthor, the amazing HyperJeff, is very much snowed under by other commitments. So we regret to inform you that we can’t make it this year, but will try again in 2006.

Meanwhile, Dori Smith has several good links to ADHOC information.

Busy busy busy, learning the intricacies of WebKit… but even so I spent some time browsing through Kenneth Snelson‘s work, which I hadn’t heard of before. The atom section is especially entrancing. Warning: time sink!

Update: More info here.

I just got word that Akwan has been acquired by Google. Akwan (a Tupí-Guaraní word meaning “fast”) is a company founded by several of my former colleagues at the CS department of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. An earlier effort by some of the same people, the Miner search engine, was bought out by UOL (a large Brazilian content provider) some years ago. Congratulations!

One of the great features of the early issued of Macmania Magazine used to be the “Macintoshico” center page – cartoons satirizing some feature of the Mac. Somehow they became sparser and sparser over the years, but the last issue featured this brilliant comeback, which I’ve translated for your appreciation:

Click on the thumbnail above to go to the full comic (warning: it’s about 800K!)

I hasten to add that I sat in the 10th row during Steve’s last keynote and I didn’t feel weird at all…

One of the joys of programming is that you continually learn new things. So I was prepared to have lots of joy with WebKit. Still, the learning curve seems steeper than I’d estimated, although my comparative cluelessness about DHTML and JavaScript is partially to blame.

Even so, it looks like I’ll be able to do what I wanted. So stay tuned for developments.