Zzot!

I don’t know what it is. Child-like faith? Some twisted form of optimism rooted in minor failure? Whatever it is, I always get this feeling that there’s still hope for the world when someone makes an announcement and vastly underestimates the amount of bandwidth it will consume. movabletype.org, sixapart.com, typekey.com, and presumably the rest of their sites were bordering on unreachable for much of the day yesterday.

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I’d been looking for one of these for a while, and I found one. Or, more accurately, I asked PowerBook Guy to find one for me, and he was only too happy to oblige. Now all I need is some spare batteries. And possibly another spare power supply. And my SuperDrive to stop dry-ejecting. Oh, and one more thing — someone to make a PowerBook G5 Dual-Slot Battery Charger, preferably in advance of my TiBook flying apart at the seams from nearly continuous use since I got it.

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Okay, so for ages, I thought the whole idea of RSS aggregators was silly. Not that other people shouldn’t be using them, but that I would never have the slightest interest in them. But then, I downloaded NetNewsWire — and liked it. So I was wrong; long live RSS.

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I’ve made the mistake of getting drawn into pointless arguments before. Somehow, once, I was even drawn into an argument against my own position on the question being argued.

The internet is full of people who waste other people’s valuable time in pointless arguments like they’re getting paid for it. While it had never occured that this matter deserves its own rules of engagement, at least _someone_ has.

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While watching some ADC TV, I became somewhat enchanted with a Panther feature I previously was largely unaware of — most of the Quartz compositing engine is now available from Python. The problem I had with it, however, was that there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of info available beyond what I said above; its in there somewhere. I only found out about it half a year after the presentation when I watched it on ADC TV, and months after Panther’s release.

So, tonight I idly decide to skim O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter — host of many interesting articles, in spite of the fact that I get over there slightly less often than most people see their Dentist. One of the items that jumped out at me was Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics, complete with an example featuring the requisite PDF-powered drop-shadow effect. What’s more, they point out where Apple’s cool sample code is — /Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/ — and that some of Panther’s fax features, including generation of cover sheets for outgoing faxes, are implemented in CoreGraphics-using Python scripts (see /usr/libexec/fax/).

I should start buying my non-programmer friends (i.e., “I’ve been too busy using [Mac OS X] to have time to learn how to use it”) Python books whenever a gift occasion pops up. “You already gave me a python book, you know.” “Clearly you need another one!”

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