Solipsism Gradient

In line with his tips for shareware authors that I mentioned recently, Brent Simmons points at Rogue Amoeba?s Good Ideas. A must read.

The GIGA USA quotes site contains over 50,000 quotes indexed by date, author, and whatnot. And it’s searchable! And it links to a hundred other quote sites!

Following some links I chanced upon one of my favorite Steven Wright quotes:

I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas. I took it to the Gift Wrap department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.

😆

This is very apropos of a bug I’m fixing in XRay. I’m using aliases to track open files, in case they’re moved; if the open file is a symbolic link, it’s very hard to keep the system from following the link – I keep getting the file the link points at instead of the link itself. I need to find some system call that stops unwrapping the aliases/links at the appropriate place…

Der Schockwellenreiter graciously links to XRay… danke, Jörg!

While debugging buggy bugs (as my iChat status line says most of the time), I can’t resist reading my RSS feeds at least once a day. Lately several interesting interactive webpages have come to the notice of the people who are doing my web browsing for me, and the thing has reached a critical mass where I absolutely have to post this.

The Economists.

The Eyes Have It, Flower, Swarm, Swarm Plant, ah well, just look at the index of everything.

Programmable Smileys.

The Scribbler.

There were a few others, but I couldn’t find the URLs on short notice. I think all of these were found by the folks at Boing Boing and/or the peripatetic John Walkenbach.

Now, back to them bugs…

Either Panther has an unusual number of hidden gotchas, or Murphy is singling me out for special treatment this time… perhaps both. XRay 1.0.7 is getting good reviews but users are also stumbling over several bugs – due, I’m sorry to say, to somewhat hurried testing. Details at the 1.0.7 discussion forum.

I was figuring on spending this week and the next on reviewing the not-too-good plugin architecture; writing a few plugins which do new things is usually the best way to find out architectural limitations. Hopefully I’ll be able to close the last bug over the weekend and then start on that, but I’ll try to publish 1.0.8 as soon as I get at least two new plugins working.

In other words, expect light blogging for the next weeks, as they say. In the meantime, if you’re an aspiring Mac OS Xshareware programmer, here’s excellent advice from Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire fame) about making money with shareware. I seem to have lucked out, doing instinctively most of what he recommended…

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Apple bites, frank views and a flower for my favourite feline

A “long and winding road of litigation”.

It’s been some time since I wrote about the World of Ends meme. Now Dave Pollard writes about how it might (or rather, will) apply to large corporations:

You know business is in trouble when it starts suing its customers. Bad sign. What has led to this terrible state, and what does it mean for the future of business?

…

What remains is the business ‘world of ends’ in Figure 3, no different from Figure 2 except that it has ‘imploded’, with the removal of the no-longer-necessary large corporation getting in the way of true, open, networked commerce. This is a world of entrepreneurs, perhaps even New Collaborative Enterprises, agile and responsive to customers, specialized but working as a network, no middle-man required.

Well worth reading. I’ve been remiss in not linking more to Dave’s articles, they’re always intriguing…

Wired is moving into hosting weblogs. The first one is, appropriately, Bruce Sterling’s “Beyond the Beyond”. There are some nice links there already, among them this interview. Bruce responds very tersely, but I liked this:

Q: Do you view our inability to see the higher reality as a problem related only to human perceptions or does it involve our spiritual aspect?

A:There is no “higher reality” in the sense that you mean here. If one sees a spiritual higher reality, that in itself is a major problem.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Take that, Paulo Coelho! 😉

That said, there’s no RSS feed. Tsk, tsk… how un-beyondly…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link!