Well here some more random bits that I couldn't otherwise classify.
I'm involved in an ongoing Holy War (tm) to swing people away from C and it's evil spawn C++. This campaign has many fronts and only one of them is currently on the web.
The document in question in Ian Joyner's "C++?: A Critique of C++", 3rd edition. The article is available only in PDF format.
Yet another one of my crusades is the anti-Microsoft one. I guess that's become passe these days but I don't really care much. Word 6 is, of course, one of the worst programs ever released for the Macintosh and anything you can do to keep it off your machine is good.
Unfortunately losers insist on sending you Word 6 documents. What's worse, the convertor that's readily available is broken broken broken. I guess if you've used Microsoft software you're used to that already, but it's still kinda inconvenient. There is a convertor that does a reasonable job, it's just a little harder to find.
The most amazing thing is how you distinguish between them. The broken one is call "Word 6.0 for Windows/Macintosh" and the working one is called "Word 6.0 for Windows&Macintosh". Yes folks, the "&" is significant. Thank you Microsoft.
So, to cut a long story short, I've made the good convertor one available here.
The key on the Macintosh keyboard that is labelled with a little cloverleaf symbol that also appears in the menus is called the "command key". Over the years I've heard an amazing number of wrong names for this. Here's my collection:
Thanks to all the people who have contributed to the list! If you have any more suggestions, please drop me a line.
I met up with Lucy Mohl on my Grand American Tour of 1995. I had spent the previous three weeks trekking around the states and finally arrived, dazed and confused, in Seattle. I landed on the doorstep of Adam and Tonya Engst, creators of TidBITS, who put me up for the night. No sooner had I settled down when they informed me that we'd be out for the evening, visiting Glenn Fleishman, who had some strange event happening that night. We arrived at Glenn's offices to find the place jam packed with people, including a full TV crew! Anyway, we spent a very enjoyable evening there, totally failing to watch the first live broadcast of a film over the Internet (via CU-SeeMe) and instead spent most of the time talking to Lucy about her pet project, film.com.
Some time later we got a note from Glenn saying that Lucy was being interviewed by Australia's premiere youth radio station, Triple J. Peter Lewis stayed home all night (which is very unusual I might note) on 14 Aug 1995 and recorded the entire night's radio programme. After that he grabbed the sound to his Mac and mailed it out. I've decided to archive a copy here.
The sound is a Macintosh System 7 sound file, compressed with MACE 6:1 and then compressed again in a StuffIt Lite archive. Despite all this, it's still 1.6MB.
If you don't have access to a Macintosh it's highly unlikely you'll be able to play the sound. Sorry. I could