Articles posted in February, 2003

US vs. Iraq: Resignation

Friday, February 28th, 2003 • 11:25 pm

I invite you to read the full text of the letter of resignation that John Brady Kiesling sent to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, as posted by the NY Times: Letter of Resignation Until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding […]

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A ‘Pirce’ Worth Reading

Friday, February 28th, 2003 • 5:35 pm

Don’t quite now how this happened, but a piece by John Perry Barlow is now making the rounds… “Sympathy for the Devil” It certainly is an interesting piece – which doesn’t really provide any answers. The theory that Dick Cheney is actually working for world peace is, mm, challenging, to say the least. But what’s […]

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Mac OS X’s Page Setup and Print dialogs: too much confusion

Friday, February 28th, 2003 • 12:37 am

I recently mentioned an interesting web page containing a report by Raffi Krikorian on his experiments with sharing very large video files through peer-to-peer file sharing. Today I wanted to print this report to PDF from within Safari using Mac OS X’s built-in “Save as PDF” feature. I did just that using my default print […]

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Radio: No escaping the quotation mark issue

Thursday, February 27th, 2003 • 10:34 pm

After I published my blog item on outstanding issues with Radio UserLand the other day, I got feedback indicating that it was possible to use the quotation mark symbol (“) in item titles, as long as you “escaped” it by inserting a backslash () before each occurrence of it (which is supposed to tell the […]

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Mac OS X: ‘Search Results’ folder in ‘Search Results’ window

Thursday, February 27th, 2003 • 8:02 pm

When searching for a file using the Finder’s built-in search tool, I don’t think that the first “result” that appears in the search results window should be a folder called “Search Results for ‘xx’ in ‘yy’”, which was obviously just created somewhere in “yy” by the search tool in the process of searching for files […]

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Don’t try this at home

Thursday, February 27th, 2003 • 5:02 pm

Just did something very stupid and was very relieved that I had a recent backup of my “www” folder. I’m still in the process of learning about how Radio works and about the underlying logic of this blogging tool. So from time to time I CHECK out the various options provided by the software and […]

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P2P and the MPAA

Thursday, February 27th, 2003 • 6:13 am

(P2P = peer-to-peer / MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America) Apparently the MPAA is concerned that P2P file sharing (which was put on the map by Napster in the late 90s and takes a variety of forms these days) is going to do the same thing to movies that it allegedly did to music. […]

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Curly Quotes

Wednesday, February 26th, 2003 • 11:35 pm

Have to agree with John Gruber in his response to Cory Doctorow’s item against curly quotes: Proper typographic punctuation is 400-year-old news. That it’s considered exotic, or even non-standard, on today’s web is embarrassing. The solution isn’t for everyone to LIMIT themselves to the same character set used on 1970’s-era VT-100 terminals. The solution is […]

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Word X: Where are the live scrollbars?

Wednesday, February 26th, 2003 • 1:35 am

For many years now, windows in the classic Mac OS and later in Mac OS X have featured what is sometimes called a “live scrollbar”, i.e. a scrollbar widget whose size varies depending on the proportion of the entire window contents that is actually visible with the current window size. For example, in this window: […]

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Problems with Radio UserLand (so far)

Tuesday, February 25th, 2003 • 11:48 pm

*1* Can’t handle quotation marks in item titles. If you use a quotation mark, it truncates the rest of the title (the quotation mark and everything that comes after). *2* Can’t handle accented characters in item titles. If you use an accented character on the Mac in the item title field and publish, the character […]

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Slate and their “print-ready” format

Tuesday, February 25th, 2003 • 9:11 pm

Trying to read an article on Slate this morning… As usual, whenever it’s available, I click on the option to display the article in “print-ready” format, so that I can easily save it as a PDF file if needed (and also to reduce screen clutter). What do I get from Slate when I click on […]

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Truth Be Told

Tuesday, February 25th, 2003 • 8:39 pm

Paul Krugman’s “Threat, Promises and Lies” pretty much sums up my own sentiment as well as the sentiment of the vast majority of people with whom I have discussed the issue of the current US administration. We are all used to politicians lying. But, once again, in typical fashion, the US has managed to do […]

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America & Iraq: Anti-French Sentiment

Tuesday, February 25th, 2003 • 1:18 am

Apparently, some prominent people and media outlets in the US are busy dissing the French because of France’s reluctance to endorse a US-led war on Iraq. I wouldn’t know, since I never watch mainstream US TV networks or read US tabloids. But it sounds like it’s getting pretty bad in places. There is a bit […]

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America & Iraq: The Need for World Governance

Monday, February 24th, 2003 • 11:56 pm

For anyone wondering if there are still any strong and reasonable voices within the US political system, the following two “Senate Remarks” by US Senator Robert C. Byrd are required reading: “We Stand Passively Mute“ “The Administration’s Dangerous Wartime Rhetoric“ I have learned from fifty years in Congress that it is unwise to insult one’s […]

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Murat aérien

Monday, February 24th, 2003 • 6:27 pm

Jean-Louis Murat, “Au Mont Sans-Souci” Rien de tel pour bien commencer une journée où l’on se sent moitié sale, moitié perdu. Il a beau essayer de massacrer la chanson en live sur Muragostang (sur la fin), ça reste insurmontable de beauté simple et immédiate. Je suis sûr qu’on lui trouve plein de défauts, à Murat. […]

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