I’ve been thinking of buying a new mac this week. I’m tired of the quagmire of costly Windows applications. They’re overloaded with useless features, thrown together in the most inelegant ways. The Linux world is tiring too, with a lack of completed, functional applications, and an almost non-existent commercial market. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the Windows and Linux worlds, but they both lack balance.

At work we have several Macs. I’m always impressed when I get to use them, and the Mac guys really dig them too. It seems that Mac-heads aren’t pathetic followers like Windows-fanboys, blissfully ignorant of computing history and zen. And they’re not in denial like the Gnu/Linux zealots, who ignore the time they have to spend to make their machines work. These Mac lovers are motivated to create things - beautiful things. There is just something about a Mac that inspires.

And of course Apple builds beautiful looking hardware too, with well-polished tools and interfaces. So there is that draw of technolust. PCs, on the other hand, are a repulsive pile of components, in complete absence of attractive abstraction. While it is possible to build a powerful PC for less than a Mac, they’re damned ugly in every way.

I bought my first PC under duress. I knew it could be better, and I could never understand those people who thought that their PCs were so cool. Hadn’t anyone seen the Macs, Amigas, and Ataris of the mid 80s? It was painful to get increased complexity for a reduced featue set and increased cost. An Atari 1040 STe, for example, with 1 meg of ram and a monitor was about $1000. A similar PC was over $3000, with crappy CGA graphics. Worse, programming the PC was a mess, compared with the Ataris, Macs, and Amigas. I knew it could be so much better.

I still know it can be better, which is why I’m tired of PCs, Windows and Linux. Or maybe it’s the lust for shiny, new hardware. Or maybe it’s a desire for inspiration. Or maybe I just think a change would be for the better. Whatever it is, anyone who develops for Windows or Linux should look to the Mac for an example of balance and completeness, proof that it can be done.

We received (and bought) a few Lego tubs this Christmas. The price was right ($23 CAD for 2000 pieces) and the stuff is fun, but Lego is starting to skimp on the plastic.

Old Lego	New Lego

You can see the reduced thickness of the walls and the centre shaft. The pieces feel lighter, and don’t quite fit as well - though no where near as badly as the knock-off brands. A good value overall, but they need to be careful how much they play around with the brick quality. Someone might notice.

I added a few features to my Wordpress link plugin. I had been calling it MagicLink, but am thinking of changing the name to SimpleLink. People fear magic, even though it can be a lot of fun.

Here’s what can be done with Simple Links:

Markup	Resulting text
[http://warpedvisions.org]	warpedvisions.org
[http://warpedvisions.org|test]	test
[test google search]	test google search
[google: more google]	more google
[foldoc: usb]	usb
[imdb: star wars IV]	star wars IV
[perldoc: cgi]	cgi
[here: Google be gone]	Google be gone
[wiki: tsunami]	tsunami
Image linking
[asin: 0898799279]
[image: trees.png]
Special text
[abbr: CSS - Cascading Style Sheets]	CSS
[note: You are here.]	You are here.
[comment: Test comment.]	Test comment.
[warning: Don't!]	Don’t
[tip: A tip.]	A tip.

The Doc wrote today about Technorati’s new watchlist tool. It’s a tool that slices you up a custom weblog based on a search, and serves it up as a news feed that you can slurp up with your favorite news feed reader. It’s a Google that remembers what you’re interested in and tells you about it daily, ordered by time, helping you to follow discussions without having to search for them repeatedly.

I hacked together a few WordPress plugins today to add support for the MediaWiki linking syntax. The first plugin, wikifier.php, adds support for double-square-bracket wiki links (to a default wiki, or the specified wiki. The second plugin, magiclink.php adds single-square-bracked external-wiki links and Google I’m-feeling-lucky, similar to my MagicMarkup plugins for Blosxom, which I plan to port in the next few weeks. For now, the plugins can be downloaded here … sometime in the future, I’ll setup a wiki page for my WordPress plugins and hacks.

WordPress has a decent plugin system. It’s a basic callback registration system with priorities, and has many exposed function points. It’s a better approach than Blosxom, mostly because the plugins can be ordered by priority (handy for text filters). It’s in PHP though, which reminds me of my days working in GWBasic and DBase. PHP seems so akward compared to Perl, Java, and C++ (but it’s workable).