Gamasutra – Features – “Procedural Rendering on Playstation 2” [09.26.01] – This article is interesting, the best I've found about discussing what really programming for the Playstation 2 is like, especially in terms of tools deficiencies (some of which I plan to remedy…)
This has to be the weirdest Mozilla bug I've ever seen.
Many people seem to have not understood how text is rendered in Mac OS X, judging by the number of emails I received since I posted the font rendering story yesterday. I've made some changes to it. It's not exactly my best work stylistically, but I'm strapped for time and prefer technical accuracy to making it sound good.
I still haven't started on the presentation I need to give at the research group meeting in the morning. I have a feeling I'm not going to be getting much sleep tonight.
Trying to fix my template, add proper CSS support, etc. I opened up the 'www' folder in BBEdit's file browser. Nothing shows up. What's up with this? It seems to be the default way Radio outputs text files. So, some investigation with my launch tool (shameless plug) reveals:
6:07 AM
[p1:5] ~%launch -f '/Volumes/GrayExtra/Extra/Radio UserLand/www/2002/01/30.txt'
/Volumes/GrayExtra/Extra/Radio UserLand/www/2002/01/30.txt: document
type: ' ' creator: 'text'
kind: Plain text document
What is a creator of 'text'? It's not claimed by any application on my system (launch -nc 'text'). And a type of ' ' (four spaces) is not the same as an empty type; however a type of '????' is. (See Apple's docs.) Jake seems to think it's TextEdit's creator, but it's not:
[p2:3] ~%launch -f `launch -ni com.apple.textedit` 12:22AM
/Applications/TextEdit.app: Mac OS X application package
type: 'APPL' creator: 'ttxt'
bundle ID: com.apple.TextEdit
kind: Application
TextEdit's creator is actually the same as SimpleText's creator. The code in question is in file.writeTextFile.
Here's a fun experiment:
[p1:26] ~%touch blah 12:33AM
[p1:27] ~%SetFile -t ' ' blah 12:33AM
[p1:28] ~%launch -f blah 12:33AM
blah: document
type: ' ' creator: ''
kind: Radio UserLand Document
Radio actually registers four spaces as a file type! Definite bug. According to the File Extension Guidelines (which I don't 100% agree with, but…) Radio is best off setting the file type to 'TEXT', but setting no creator, instead of its own. “Applications that are not a primary editor for documents of a given type should not set a creator code for those documents.”
Dan Bricklin writes (get a better permanent URL strategy going! Anchors are your friends…) about the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. Hey, that's what I want to do. 
Also in the “not quite a weblog” category is Dan Gillmor's “new” site. If you have to click to get new content, and scroll through recent content, it ain't a Weblog. Just a collection of articles.
The font size is tiny as you can guess the Web “developers” didn't bother to test on a Mac, or read any of the many books and articles on the subject. Oh, and look in the source:
if (b=="Netscape") this.b="ns";
else if ((b=="Opera") || (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera")>0)) this.b = "opera";
else if (b=="Microsoft Internet Explorer") this.b="ie";
\// I have disabled the following line, but something similar might be useful later,
\// but launching a popup window is more polite than this alert.
\//if (!b) alert('Unidentified browser./nThis browser is not supported,');
Damn right saying “unidentified browser” is wrong. Heard of web standards? Make it work everywhere, make it look pretty with CSS, SVG, Flash, whatever, where you can.
And of course, the page content is the usual spacer GIF/table background color garbage. That's a redesign, folks.
