Status-Q

Transmit is a fabulous FTP client for the Mac, which also does SFTP & WebDAV. I’ve always liked it, but the new version (3) has a couple of features which are really nice if you keep on your own machine copies of files which are on a remote machine:

• You can ‘Link Folder Navigation’ meaning that as you move through the tree of files on one machine, it automatically changes to the matching directory on the other.
• You can set up ‘DockSend’ for your favourites. If you drag a file from somewhere within your local filesystem onto the Transmit icon in the Dock, and it recognises the local origin as being within a directory that has a copy on the server, it will connect, upload the file to the appropriate place in the remote hierarchy, and disconnect again. Too cute.

It has loads of other features too, but these are the new ones that may not be known to existing Transmit users. Highly recommended.

Mac owners who use the Safari browser sometimes find that they start to get the ‘spinning beachball’ cursor fairly often, while Safari takes a short pause to contemplate life. I found a couple of hints that are supposed to fix this:

• Under Safari Preferences…select Autofill and then turn off “other forms.”
• Quit Safari and delete your ~/Library/Safari/Icons directory. This caches the ‘favicons’ which may be associated with each site and it can, apparently, get a bit clogged up.

I’ve just tried these, and things seem snappier, though it’s a bit early to say for certain…

Follow-up, a day later – yes, it certainly seems to have helped a lot.

The ‘Green Goddess’ has been an important part of fire and rescue services in the UK for half a century. They appear on the streets when the regular Fire Services go on strike. Now you too can own one…

Follow-up: Apparently The Times announced that the whole fleet was to be disbanded. That was in January 1978. But they’re still going. Which just goes to show that, arrr, they don’t make ’em like they used to…

A group of Greenpeace activists tried to storm the International Petroleum Exchange in London on Wednesday and got more than they bargained for. Times report here. Now, I’m very much in favour of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and I think Kyoto is a Very Good Thing.

Some of the loony left, however, believe that when they can’t win by force of rational argument, they have a moral right to disrupt & damage things and to do so with impunity. I think it’s high time that they got a taste of their own medicine, though I fear that they won’t view their bruises in that way.

Don’t believe anything you read in the papers…

It’s quite educational, too, to read the account from the BBC of the same event and see what a very different an impression it gives you. I don’t think this is primarily because of political bias in either case. The Times, which is in danger of becoming the tabloid for the polysyllabic, paints a fairly unpleasant picture of both the traders and the protestors, gives you more gory details and portrays it as more of a battlefield. The BBC gives the impression that there was some disruption but then everybody went home for tea.

Weblogs are almost always organised in reverse-chronological order; the most recent posts first. This gives a feeling of the most important news headlines being at the top of the page, with older stuff ‘below the fold’, and was important when most people read blogs using their web browser. It’s less vital now that so many are using RSS readers which highlight what’s new for you anyway.

Anyway, it means that there’s an increasing number of web pages that I read backwards, or at least scroll parts of them backwards in order to follow the development of an idea. Is this something we’ll all do naturally in a few years?

I’ve often thought that blogs should show the most recent days first, but should go forward chronologically within a day.

I’ve mentioned Bob Shaver’s rather nice Patent Pending site before. Sometimes you find things here which aren’t really about patents, like this…

A New Scientist article about printing food…

OK, OK, I’m a bit slow with this one…

In iTunes (unless you’ve turned them off in Preferences) there are little arrows beside the entries in the columns which take you to relevant pages in the iTunes Music Store.

Did you know that by holding down the option/alt key you could use them to jump to relevant places in your own iTunes library? Much more useful. And you can toggle this behaviour so that using your local library is the default and you need to hold down Option to go to the Music Store. Very nice.