08/17/2004 - 08/23/2004

In case you were unfamiliar with the term...

A "clue-by-four" or more commonly known, the "cluestick" is defined on the jargon web site as:

clue-by-four

[Usenet: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick with which one whacks an aggressively clueless person. This term derives from a western American folk saying about training a mule “First, you got to hit him with a two-by-four. That's to get his attention.� The clue-by-four is a close relative of the LART. Syn. clue stick. This metaphor is commonly elaborated; your editor once heard a hacker say “I smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!�

Things that make you want to use your cluestick!

You're Athletes, Not Journalists

Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online -- or see snapshots or video they've taken.

The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites.

IceRocket - cool new search engine

Now that Google is public, it's time for everyone to improve upon it...

The first in the crowd, that I've seen, is IceRocket.

Although it has nowhere near the number of sites indexed yet, it does have some pretty cool features that are causing me to play it with more and more.

My two favorites are "web pictures" - a little thumbnail of the web page in question, and a "Related Searches" section.

Try it - you'll like it!

Leonard

What to do with that old Mac case?

Ever wonder what you can do with the case from an old Mac 128/512/Plus?

Well wonder no more. There is a whole site dedicated to keep track and offering pictures of many...

Leonard

A bear with taste...

from CNN - http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/08/18/bear.beer.reut/index.html....

SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday.

"We noticed a bear sleeping on the common lawn and wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around," said Lisa Broxson, a worker at the Baker Lake Resort, 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Seattle.

The hard-drinking bear, estimated to be about two years old, broke into campers' coolers and, using his claws and teeth to open the cans, swilled down the suds.

It turns out the bear was a bit of a beer sophisticate. He tried a mass-market Busch beer, but switched to Rainier Beer, a local ale, and stuck with it for his drinking binge.

Wildlife agents chased the bear away, but it returned the next day, said Broxson.

They set a trap using as bait some doughnuts, honey and two cans of Rainier Beer. It worked, and the bear was captured for relocation.

Postscript generation on Mac OS X

I keep meaning to write up some comments on this subject, and since it came up at work today - now is a good time!

First, let's look back at Mac OS 9 and how printing took place.

In Mac OS 9, applications printed using one of three methods..

• QuickDraw - the native drawing model of Mac OS 1->9
• QuickDraw + PSComments - native drawing plus some Postscript fragments when necessary
• "pass through" Postscript - send PS directly to the printer

When sending QuickDraw(QD) either by itself or with PSComments, the printer driver was responsible for converting the QD instructions into Postscript and then sending the PS unto the printer. This is how most applications worked. However, professional graphic tools (eg. Adobe apps, Quark, Macromedia apps) would take the last route and generate their own PS and send that or if dealing with a non-Postscript printer would send a big raster image.

Mac OS X no longer uses QuickDraw for imaging, instead moving to a PDF & PS-compatible drawing model called Quartz. Quartz's image model and it's ability to read & write PDF documents permeates the entire OS - including the printing system. I have a whole presentation about this - if you wish to read more. One feature of note, however, is that the OS includes the ability to create Postscript from PDF (and as of 10.3/Jaguar, the ability to create PDF from Postscript)

OK - back to printing...

Instead of the three modes of Mac OS 9, Mac OS X offers four modes...

• QuickDraw compatibility - a path for older/dumber apps to print
• Quartz - the native drawing model of Mac OS X
• "pass through" Postscript - send PS directly to the printer
• "pass through" PDF - send either PDF or PS directly to the printer (new in 10.3)

A handful of applications that haven't been fully Carbonized may still use Quickdraw to render on the screen and/or to the printer. In those cases, such applications don't get any of the benefits of Mac OS X including the integrated PDF support. They will be able to print, as the OS will convert QuickDraw to PDF on the fly during printing - BUT any attempt to use PSComments will fail.

The majority of applications - be they Carbon or Cocoa-based - will use Quartz to print. They already use it to render and now they send it to the printer. This will create a PDF file automatically into the printer's spooler, since PDF is the native spool format for Mac OS X. These PDFs are high quality, though sometimes larger than necessary - but take advantage of advanced PDF features such as ICC profile-based colors, subset fonts and Unicode support.

The one caveat to clean and simple PDF/PS generation with Mac OS X is an application, such as Microsoft Word, that supports the inclusion of EPS graphics. Versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.3/Jaguar did a pretty poor job of passing this information to the printer - 10.3 is just fine, however

Even so, professional printing apps can continue to send PS directly to the printer - but in the event that the user doesn't have a PS printer, the app no longer has to rasterize into a big image, the OS can now convert the PS to PDF and handle it itself! Newer applications, such as Acrobat 6.0.1 and later, running on 10.3/Jaguar can even send PDF documents directly to the printing system avoiding all the overhead.

So a Postscript printer will get Postscript created either by the application directly or by the OS-provided conversion of PDF to Postscript. Unfortunately, this isn't the world's best Postscript and has a number of issues, especially with proper handling of fonts and text that may later be reused for other purposes. (For printing it is just fine, but PS reuse is a known issue.)

Bottom Line - if you are working with Mac OS X and Postscript, make sure you are using Mac OS 10.3 or later with the latest versions of your authoring/production applications!

JSON - when XML is too hard for you

I came across an article on CodeProject today about JSON.

The introduction for JSON describes it as:.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. This feature can also be found in Python. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

I describe it as someone who had a bad experience with XML, decided it was too hard, and wrote their own alternative based on something that was easy for them to do. You can easily see this in their XML vs. JSON page. or their examples of JSON vs. XML

To each his own...

How did I survive without one?