Articles posted in December, 2003

EPL: Day 19 (Southampton 0 – Arsenal 1)

Monday, December 29th, 2003 • 8:11 am

Ah, Arsenal… The EPL team with enough technical skill in a single game to fill ten instructional videos! They were just magnificent today, especially Vieira, who appears to be back to his best form. Thierry Henry was excellent as usual, and Kolo Touré impressive again both as a defensive player and as a player going […]

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Mac OS X 10.3.2 fixes CD mounting performance issues

Monday, December 29th, 2003 • 4:46 am

The Mac OS X 10.3.2 update appears to have fixed the problem that I had with the whole system temporarily freezing every time a CD or DVD volume was being mounted. On the other hand, I’ve just accidentally pressed the Eject key to close my CD tray while I had a CD in it that […]

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Mac OS X 10.3.2 causes problems with resolution switching

Monday, December 29th, 2003 • 4:34 am

It appears that I am not the only one suffering from resolution switching problems in Mac OS X following the 10.3.2 update. MacFixIt now has an item on the problem. Since this is a problem likely to affect gamers a lot, it was nice of Apple to introduce it just in time for the holiday […]

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USB back from the dead… and then dead again

Sunday, December 28th, 2003 • 6:47 am

Eight days ago, I mentioned some weird problem I had been having with the USB ports on my secondary monitor. At the time, I predicted that the problem would clear up on its own accord, at some point in the near future. I have a USB Dymo LabelWriter that I only use very occasionally, mostly […]

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Panther’s Mail: Can’t change both text color and background color in message rules

Saturday, December 27th, 2003 • 12:12 pm

This is a limitation in Mail that I find is unwarranted. When you create a new rule in Mail, in the set of actions that you can trigger whenever certain criteria are matched, you can ask Mail to color matching messages in a certain way. You have a choice of changing the color of the […]

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Quoting excerpts using HTML and CSS

Saturday, December 27th, 2003 • 5:48 am

I have been looking at ways to improve the visual appearance of quoted passages in my blog for a while now. After a certain amount of head-scratching, I have come to the conclusion that I might as well establish my own rules and not worry too much about “standards compliance”. The core problem is that, […]

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Fast Company article on Apple and Steve Jobs

Saturday, December 27th, 2003 • 2:18 am

The 2004 issue of Fast Company has an interesting article on Apple, Steve Jobs and the “limits of innovation.” In spite of the annoying hyphenation left-over from the printed version and the badly encoded accented characters, it’s a good read that highlights how Apple has failed to transform their on-going innovative prowess into market dominance. […]

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EPL: Day 18

Saturday, December 27th, 2003 • 2:05 am

The big Boxing Day upset was obviously the 4-2 defeat of Chelsea against Charlton. Based on prior evidence, we knew that an upset was possible — but Chelsea had been getting with many subpar performances since the beginning of the season, still bagging three points almost every time. Well, they certainly didn’t get away with […]

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Jeffrey Zeldman’s redesign

Monday, December 22nd, 2003 • 7:20 am

I must admit that I am puzzled by Jeffrey Zeldman’s redesign of his Daily Report page. The most strikingly unpleasant aspect of it is the huge blob of empty orange space at the top. I simply do not understand how a professional designer can come up with such a design. It’s an enormous waste of […]

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Alexander Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002)

Monday, December 22nd, 2003 • 2:16 am

A strangely intoxicating movie. It’s experimental, yet accessible. It’s a technical tour de force (the whole 96-minute movie consists of one single take, shot in real-time, with thousands of actors, live orchestras, etc.), yet it feels perfectly natural. It has no plot to speak of, but has a dream-like quality that enthrals the viewer. The […]

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Panther’s Mail: Auto-complete doesn’t work for company names

Sunday, December 21st, 2003 • 11:38 pm

I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this before, but today I tried to insert the e-mail address of a software company that I have listed in my Address Book in the “To:” field by typing the first few letters of the name of the company and… it simply wouldn’t work. It looks as if […]

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Panther’s Mail: Behaviour of contextual e-mail address menu improved

Sunday, December 21st, 2003 • 11:23 pm

It is a very small change, yet important for me — and probably for enough people to prompt Apple to make it in the first place. As of Mac OS X 10.3.2, when you click on the small white triangle pointing down next to an e-mail address in the “To:” or “Cc:” or “Bcc:” field […]

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Mac OS X 10.3.2: What does it fix?

Sunday, December 21st, 2003 • 7:57 am

As usual, Apple’s own documentation regarding the changes made in Panther with the 10.3.2 is rather laconic: Key enhancements include: improved file sharing and directory services for mixed Mac and PC networks more robust printing to PostScript printers improved font management updated Mail and Address Book applications new ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers FileVault, FireWire […]

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USB, SCHMUSB

Saturday, December 20th, 2003 • 6:21 am

There are days when I get really tired of all the glitches with USB devices in Mac OS X. Today, I came back to my machine to wake it up from sleep, only to find that my cursor had disappeared yet again, in spite of my precautions. After using my computer in the dark with […]

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EPL: Day 17, Part 1

Saturday, December 20th, 2003 • 6:15 am

Pretty miserable day in the English Premier League today, especially for Arsenal fans. The appalling weather conditions probably didn’t help, but both the Chelsea game at Fulham and the Arsenal game at Bolton were boring as hell. The difference is that Chelsea benefited from one flash of genius by Bridge and Crespo to take a […]

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