A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

[Crossposted from Appleseed Blog]

My friend Noah, a sysadmin at MIT, reports that on October 1 he switched off the info-mac hyperarchive (hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu), one of the oldest websites on the internet. It was a web-accessible version of the info-mac archive, an online repository of Mac freeware and shareware, which before then was mainly browsable via FTP. I have fond memories of spending evenings trolling through the hyperarchive's directory structure, looking for neat stuff to fill my Mac LC's 40 GB hard drive, circa 1994.

Several years ago, when I was writing the Nutshell book, I discussed the possibility of being the hyperarchive's volunteer maintainer. Nothing came of it, though, and the server was allowed to coast into electronic senescence. I see from that Wikipedia article that there exists an info-mac website that claims lineage from the original archive and mailing list, but it's now just one more computer-news website in a vast sea. It does sport a mirror of the info-mac archive, where it's quickly apparent how little traffic it got since the turn of the decade; viewing some categories by date shows you software from the 1990s on the first page.

Though the hyperarchive's role was supplanted by better-organized websites years ago (hello, versiontracker), I won't forget its important role in the early history of Macintosh software, the web, and myself as a computer dood. Goodbye, old friend!

Oh boy! Rivet works much better in the new apartment, since now my sessile Mac is hooked directly to the router via Ethernet (thanks to dictator555's wire-running machinations, from back when she lived here). It didn't work at all when I was trying to play movies more than a few megs in size over my old 802.11b connection.

But now I can torrent down entire TV series upstairs, and then immediately play them on the downstairs TV via the XBox, without having to move or change anything. I just tested it on an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I grabbed some months ago, but haven't watched because it was too much of a pain. No longer!

Also can access my whole music collection from the TV. Yeah, totally gonna buy this.

I'm kinda giving up on jmac.org/blog. I've already stated why I failed to leave LiveJournal, and there's no good crossposting tools that I can find. Meanwhile, the jmac.org blog has 0 subscribers. So LJ kind of wins.

You know what doesn't win? xJournal. It used to be a pretty good LJ client for Mac, but it's been getting crappier. Since I "upgraded" a month or three ago (probably because the old one didn't work on Leopard) my tags have only shown up about half the time, and I have no idea why. In case you were wondering about that, too.

(In fact, the reason I haven't found any good crossposting tools yet is because they do exist but none of them support LJ tags properly. I don't know if this is because LJ's tags are nonstandard and hard to cope with, or if the toolmakers are just lazy.)

Anyway, meh. I think the jmac blog might morph into my company's blog, once my company has a website.

I set up a Boot Camp partition on the lappie last night, and then put Windows XP on it. I named the partition Limburger, to go with the lappie's existing name of Brie and the desktop's Stilton. So now when I start up my laptop I'm asked, without any other context, to choose between Brie and Limburger, and that cracks my shit up.

I then grabbed the public beta of VMWare Fusion and had it bless the partition. So now I can either boot into it and literally have a Windows machine, or emulate it inside a little window while Mac OS X is running. It's really nifty; the two Windows morphologies are effectively two different machines with different hardware setups that happen to share the same hard drive. Apple installs a passel of drivers on the real one, and VMWare dumps stuff all over the emulated one, and it all just works. I am impressed.

The reason I did this - besides wanting to start feeling like I'm getting my money's worth out of this new Mac - was to get access to Internet Explorer running on Windows (what the technowonks call MSIE). Like a lot of modern web developers, my hacking environment is Firefox with the Firebug plug-in, so that's the initial target of everything I build. Then I see how well it works in Safari, the browser I use for ordinary web surfing. Sadly, even if the software works flawlessly on both browsers, you still haven't really tested it until you sigh, empty your mind, ponder the beauty of a tree, and then turn to ask MSIE what it thinks. Which is usually met with a roar and the flinging of your application against the nursery wall.

But what is there to do? Behind its idiot grin, MSIE still has the most market share. We have to do what MSIE wants, never mind that it remains the most utterly insane and noncompliant of all browsers, forcing you to add all these special MSIE-only exceptions and privileges in your code in order to mollify his royal highness.

So it was with dismay but not surprise that even before I was able to replicate an error someone else found with the new Testbench port, I saw that the entire volity.net website was broken under MSIE, and lord knows how long it's been like that. No doubt since one of the minor structural tweaks we made to the site this year, which nobody ever thought to test in MSIE. Who knows how many Windows users have visited the site in the last month or three and never known about our user accounts or blogs or forums? Bah.

Well, I have a Windows machine now, so I was able to fix it and put up a sheepish blog entry. It won't happen any more.

Any a' y'all have a favorite Mac time tracker/invoicer app for consulting work?