Ads which take their cues from the page content (such as Google's AdWords) can always be amusing when you're searching or browsing for something and the ads match the letter but not the spirit of what you're looking for. Here's a prime example:
I wonder if herbalremedies.com will wonder why there's such a correlation between Mac OS X users and potential buyers of their N,N-dimethyl glycine.
After an email from someone who was trying to convert outlines back and forth to OmniOutliner, I've updated my shortest and perhaps least popular piece of public software, LispMe Importer, to 1.0.1. It's just a quick AppleScript which will take text files and import them as memos in Palm Desktop.
Steve Gehrman, author of the great Mac OS X Finder replacement Path Finder, has a weblog. Steve has from the beginning been incredibly receptive to my comments, honest and generous. Path Finder is no small feat for a single developer, and it's obvious he pours his heart and soul into the application.
After my stability problems with Radio earlier this week, it's stopped crashing! Go figure. I like problems which solve themselves. 
Illness update: I thought I'd be better by yesterday, but I spent all last night, 7 hours or more, in bed and coughing continuously, despite medicine ostensibly indicated to stop it. Somehow I finally got to sleep, but I'm now incredibly hoarse and my sleep schedule is almost completely inverted—I woke up at 5 PM. My brain still seems a bit fried but I am able to concentrate enough to begin catching up with everything I've missed.
I've been sick this week: my first multi-day illness since fall 2001. It started Monday evening during Kuk Sool when I had trouble concentrating. After I returned home, I began to have sporadic headaches and couldn't sleep well. Tuesday was barely average productivity-wise. Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore throat, worse headache and considerable disorientation.
Also on Wednesday, my mother called me in a panic to say that she had spilled Coke on the keyboard of her TiBook. I wasn't in much of a state to speak, much less give advice; I don't remember what I told her at the time. I discovered yesterday she left it plugged in and asleep for several hours afterward, but my father cleaned up the stickiness and the machine doesn't require repair.
More fun symptoms emerged over the remainder of the week: fever and coughing kept me up all Thursday night. I saw a doctor yesterday, where the one bright spot was that I had lost 12 pounds so far this year. As she predicted, my cough appears to be finally subsiding today.
Last week, of course, was the worst possible week of the semester for me to get sick. My illness encompassed the two days in which I planned to study for my exams, and the exams themselves. Instead of making a heroic effort to catch up, I think I may just drop immunology, take it again next year, and spend the rest of the semester exclusively on research.
Since I'm still having trouble concentrating on weightier matters, I did some computer maintenance today. Subversion has been upgraded everywhere, as has its SWIG-generated Python bindings and ViewCVS. The latter is now working perfectly, and seems faster. See for yourself: browse my public repository.
Zoe is finally working stably and reasonably quickly for me: the key appears to be giving it a couple hundred megabytes of memory to work with. (Need to upgrade my desktop G4 from 896 MB to 1.5 GB RAM, too…) I need to get it indexing my RSS feeds too, as part of the eventual goal of creating an index of everything I read.
Much more information on the hiptop SDK has been posted over the last week, including a preliminary schedule for releases of various components: preliminary docs this week, a simulator the following week, and on-device tools the week after that. Using a development OS means you can't use the T-Mobile servers, which is a real annoyance because you don't get to keep your PIM or email. Unless there's some way to migrate information between servers, that's a potential showstopper for me doing development on my Sidekick.
Finally, a question for which I was unable to find any useful answers on Google, perhaps because of the strange search terms I was having to use. Has anyone compiled GNU Emacs on OS X, and seen the delete key produce a forward delete/Control-D instead of the expected backward deletion? This happens at a pretty low level, as if I type control-q delete, the OS X-bundled version of Emacs prints “^?“, whereas my version prints “^D“. I could bind C-d to backward-delete-character, but I use C-d quite a lot myself, especially on my PowerBook where I haven't trained myself to use Fn-delete instead.
The version of GNU Emacs I'm using reports itself as 21.3.50.3, compiled January 28.
XMeeting: “The goal of the project is to develop a set of Internet video conferencing and telephony applications in native Mac OS X GUI (as in Cocoa or Carbon, not X11). Currently, H.323 is the only supported protocol, support of SIP may be added in a later date.” Now with native CoreAudio support. OS X really suffers from a lack of good, inexpensive or free native (non-X11) conferencing applications: this is a start.
12:51 PM