Wednesday January 30, 2002

Ok, now I can say that I've successfully googlewhacked, although not with an amazing score:
    trephination hellhounds  13,400 x 7,350 = 98,490,000



Free image enhancer for iPhoto (or others).  To follow up on an earlier post here's an interactive Unix tutorial for folks with Mac OS X. [macscripting.com]

O'Reilly has put up part 4 of their Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X articles, which ties in nicely with yesterday's Foxtrot cartoon.

Here's something both interesting and disturbing.  Remote scripting with IFRAME, which shows how to make a web page communicate with a server, without submitting the page.  sidetext.jpgIn other words as you fill in a webform and then, perhaps, change your mind about submitting such personal information, the server may already have the information you typed in.  A few weeks ago I decoded the javascript used by clickstream.com.  Essentially they've worked out a method with javascript and cookies to track what pages you see, how long you spend on each page, and where you go after viewing the pages...and it even works when you hit the forward/back button without going back to the server.

Y'all need to get used to the fact that web pages are no longer dumb text & picture windows. 



Alrighty then, let it snow!  The forecast is for half a foot or more during our Winter Storm Watch Thursday night through Friday.  It kind of looks like the smoke stack on top of Texas is putting out psychedelic fumes.

wxmap.jpg



OS X fun yesterday.  Installed a full version of the PHP Apache Module, the BASH shell, and XEMACS.  The only one I wasn't happy with in the end was XEMACS, which I used to use all of the time on a Solaris box.  The Mac version is completely different (or I hosed the install), barren of menu features, and it has this annoying default behavior which drove me crazy: it treats "~/" as the homedir of the XEMACS app and not of the current user.  huh?  Not quite up to needing or wanting to install xWindows yet, but there are good choices for those of you who just have to have the xeyes on your desktop.  BTW, if you are new to the whole OS X unix world and want some help, check out the tutorials over at Macosx.org.