scot hacker's foobar blog

The common everyday EULA can become a prophylactic against prosecution for unscrupulous marketeers/virus vandals, who can take advantage of the fact that almost no one reads a word of any End User License Agreement — people just “accept the defaults” — click OK and move on. So now we’ve got commercial programs that have users agree to let them propagate, virus-style – to every user in their address books. The program / virus is not illegal, because every user agrees to its viral terms by clicking OK. We are punished for being busy and trustful.

Of course, this first incarnation affects only Windows users, and then only Outlook users. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t affect me – I don’t read the damn EULAs either.

In daringfireball, BareBones’ John Gruber posts detailed notes on how differently the W3C’s HTML validator works compared to the one built into BBEdit. In essence, both validators report different classes of errors, but that doesn’t mean that one is more broken than the other. The W3C’s will even let you set width=”fred flintsone” on a table cell without complaining. Neither validator reports false positives though – may as well use them both.

Validate? Sounds wonderful. I’m all about validation. Oh wait – I don’t have time to update 5-year-old designs, let alone validate new ones.

Count me among the growing throngs of Mac users heading for the greener pastures of Chimera. Faster and lighter than IE, better bookmarking, tabbed browsing, nice hotkeys for increasing / decreasing font size, not from Microsoft, and not subject to IE’s retarded stylesheet cacheing bug (which is murder for CSS developers) … what more could you want in a browser?

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Music: Marc Bolan and T.Rex :: Children Of The Revolution

If you put a blank CD in your Mac, you can drag files onto it, eject it, let it burn, and get a nice cross-platform ISO9660 CD out the other end. Do the same with a blank DVD and you get a Mac-only HFS+ DVD. There is apparently no way to make a cross-platform data DVD from the Finder. Of course, Apple doesn’t tell you this – doesn’t even mention it in their Knowledge Base. You just waste a bunch of money on $5 blank DVDs, thinking something else must have gone wrong, since you’ve never made a coaster with this technique before.

The solution turns out to be Toast. Hooey.

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Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu

Next person to say “boxen” when they really mean “computers” gets a wedgie.

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Music: Pink Fairies :: Portobello Shuffle