Here’s a fantastic post by Alex Faaborg with UI mocks of identity branding Firefox’s UI based on shape. Great discussion and some good comment posts, especially about the problem of reload and stop being a single button (as it is in safari).

P.S. There’s some talk there of just using stock icons on linux, but I think that’s stupid. If the icons FF is using are clean and are different for a good reason (subtle identity, and better UE in this case) they should use their own icons, not stock.

Mordac is awesome.

“Once, he changed Dilbert’s password to the entire text of The Da Vinci Code, excluding the
parts he did not believe. He also configured Alice’s screensaver to log her
out after two seconds of inactivity”

VMWare Fusion lets you run Windows on your mac using hardware emulation virtualization (i.e., it’s fast) similar to Parallels. Parallels has been giving me grief lately, so I’ve been checking out the competition. I stumbled upon this video of VMware Fusion’s unity feature — it allows you to run windows apps as single windows on your mac. Parallels has a similar feature called Coherence mode, but it’s a terrible hack (it can’t even render non-square windows). Here’s a video of the Fusion feature –

I love making whimsical wishes — “I wish I could drive a camel to work.” David Renie and I have just completed a new facebook app called MyWish that helps you do just that. With it you can make wishes like “I wish I could live in New Zealand for a year” or “I wish I had a pet giraffe.” Your wishes are customizable with millions of gorgeous photos from Flickr, and you can then stick them on your profile. They’re beautiful. Friends can comment on your wishes too.

My first wish of the day? “I wish I was at the beach *right now*”, with my friends back home in MD.

You can see it in action on my profile, or you can install it here.

Give it a try, and don’t hesitate to invite all your friends. You should. In fact if you don’t I will de-friend you.

Alright, I won’t do that… but you might get a malevolent wish directed your way!

Couldn’t resist. This is a clever way to answer your phone — implement this strategy and telemarketers will rue the day they dialed your number.

It’s been a bittersweet experience moving from coast to coast, but one thing I don’t miss is the broadband I had in the country (satellite, with a max download of 120K/s). Here’s a screenshot of the download rate from my office:

Dang, that’s fast! Brings a tear to my eye.

Ninjawords gets some print press! It was mentioned in the article Top 100 Undiscovered sites.

Here’s a video from a talk at siggraph 07. It’s a technique for resizing an image in one dimension (horizontally or vertically) without scaling the image — it intelligently removes pixels from the image as it get smaller. It’s outstanding and looks dang cool; watch the whole thing, because at the end they demo removing an entire person from a picture with just a few clicks.

Thanks for the pointer Michael.

I’ve never had much luck with routers from any of the major brands (although I haven’t tried Apple). I mean, it’s a simple piece of hardware/software, so it shouldn’t be that hard to at least make it work. They either require random reboots or “power cycling,” or they have some silly deficiency like crashing when Azureus exists or the inability to do static DHCP (without it, your IPs will frequently change when using DHCP, making port-forwarding useless).

Then I installed Linux (OpenWRT) on a new Linksys router and hooked it up to its own power supply, so storms don’t knock it out. Since then, my router hasn’t turned off or stopped working in 2/3 of a year. Here’s its status:

Host Name: OpenWrt
Uptime: 265 days

Haven’t had to think about it in a long time. It just works, always. Not bad for consumer hardware.

Just discovered this great software called Zooom, for Mac (it’s $20).

If you don’t use software like this and you’re mouse-click crazy (I’m looking at you Neha), you really should. You can basically hold down a hotkey and click anywhere in a window to drag&move that window, so you don’t have to click on the titlebar at the top. Works with resizing, too. This feature really should be in all operating systems (it is in Gnome & KDE). Clicking those tiny areas to resize or move a window is terrible usability, and it gives me serious RSI — it makes me want to drive my car into the lake!

If you’ve ever used Gnome’s alt+click dragging function, this is a bit better, because you don’t actually have to click. There’s an option to just hold down the hotkey and move your mouse. Very elegant.

There are apps like this for mac (MondoMouse (non-free) and WindowDragon (free)), but neither work as well as Zooom does, and when you’re dragging windows around all the time, the smallest bugs will drive you insane. Zooom can resize Firefox smoothly, and it works with Textmate, neither of which is true for MondoMouse or WindowDragon.

Finally a key window management feature done properly in OSX.