Someone asks what if Apple released OSX for the PC? I can’t see it happening, mostly because random PC hardware tends to suck¹.

1. Drivers, MOBOs, flakiness, and other pain+suffering ↩

I realized something today: I’ve been tagging slick site layouts as user interface inspiration. My thinking has shifted from thinking about user interfaces as buttons and boxes, to thinking of it as how information is presented: the aesthetics, the flow, and the grokability. Interfaces aren’t just facades for tools, but a face for the flow of information between people via the machine.

Miscellaneous Thoughts for Programmers talks about avoiding the hard stuff. It quotes the classic Ruby versus Java myths page:

In what serious discipline is “It’s too hard” a legitimate excuse? I have never seen a bank that eschews multiplication: “We use repeated addition here–multiplication was too hard for our junior staffers.” And I would be uncomfortable if my surgeon said, “I refuse to perform procedures developed in the last 10 years–it is just too hard for me to learn new techniques.”

Eric Meyer’s recommended base CSS setup, a good default to start with when building new CSS-styled sites.

I was thinking the other day that web stats tools have gotten stuck in a corner. Most of the tools follow trends in a fairly sterile manner, making it difficult to really understand what you care about. They offer tables and time-ordered graphs, but they fail to answer a web-meister’s basic questions. Where’s the money? What are people interested in? The current tools seem to splat it all at the same amplitude, missing out on the really interesting trends. And where are the blinking red lights?

[stars: 5] Travels (Michael Crichton). A brilliant autobiography cast in short story form. I am motivated to think about life every time I read this, even though I find many of Crichton novels shallow and trite.  Each story is inspirational and provoking in a way that’s unexpected from this pop author.  Maybe his novels aren’t as trite as I thought.

A scriptaculous quick reference, with examples and all.

Threads, Tasks, Coroutines, Processes, and Events, and why threads are not the only sane path to concurrent processing. I’ve known this for years, but I find may developers have not thought enough about the other approaches. ACM Queue also has a piece on Threads Without the Pain.

Blog Interface Design 2.0. I’ve read a lot of this in various places, but Luke provides a good summary on the topic.

Some VMWare player images.