The Open Source Mac site is a great thing. I don’t even care if they’re just doing it for the Adsense clicks – though I’m pretty sure they’re not. They’ve built a simple site devoted to “the best, most important, and easiest to use” open source desktop applications for OS X. These are popular, and popularizable, apps like Camino, Adium, VLC, and Cyberduck.

They understand the subtle wisdom that, besides being useful and OSI-compliant, a successful open source desktop application needs two things: a cool icon and a big obvious download button. (And you know I like big obvious download buttons.)

Very cool feature from the WebKit team, coming soon to a Safari near you – the Web Inspector:

The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.

One of the unique features of the inspector is the ability to root the DOM hierarchy by double clicking a node to dig deeper. This lets you easily manage large nested pages and only focus on a particular sub-tree with minimal indentation.

…at least that’s what you’d think by looking at the User-Agent string sent out by the Blazer web browser:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; 
  PalmSource/Palm-D050; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448

Embarrassing, especially for a Mac/Palm/Unix guy. I mean, if I did use Windows, I’d run something cool like Windows 2000 Server.

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Gene commented on Mon May 21 20:42:23 2007:

Hello, silly……. That is talking about the compatibility of the Blazer browser, not the operating system It is used by web sites to tell the server how to serve up the web page to the browser for best handling and viewing.

I quietly launched my first production Django site today, a replacement for a mess of legacy third-party PHP code. Unfortunately, it’s a members-only service related to my job and so I don’t have a public URL to share.

A couple interesting points: the new site was developed alongside the still-live legacy PHP apps, using some of the same data – including a user table that’s used for authentication. django-admin.py inspectdb made model creation fairly easy. I also found Scott Hurring’s PHPSerialize module indispensible for working with the highly crufty legacy data.

I’ve rearranged a few things in the page template and added a couple features:

• Comments from me are now colored differently so they can be more easily identified (until recently I never had enough comments to need this!)
• A random set of seven of my Delicious bookmarks appear in the sidebar
• “Recent comments” links now go directly to the individual comment

In the queue: comment preview, delicious/reddit/digg bookmarking links. How many more tweaks will I do before migrating away from PHP5? I really should do it while I still have a chance of cleaning up and releasing the code.

Extending my Reverse game coding spree, I decided to make a version in Logo. Of course, in order to really effectively program in Logo, I had to make a TextMate bundle for it.

It’s nice when minor obsessions come together like that.

(By the way, if you’re ever in a position where you’re trying to look up information on Logo on the web, be warned that it can be damned hard thanks to the conscientiously inserted alt text on five bazillion company logos!)

Apple’s new MacBook Pro doesn’t have a PC Card slot. Instead, the specifications tell us, it has an ExpressCard/34 slot.

What?

If you’re a Windows notebook nerd you probably know all about ExpressCard, as many models already support it, but I suspect most Mac-o-philes have never heard of it before; I hadn’t, anyway. It’s a replacement for the venerable PC Card (formerly PCMCIA card), designed to be smaller, simpler, faster, and more power-efficient. The “/34” suffix refers to the smaller 34mm version. There’s also a /54 version, which is 54mm wide just like the PC Card, with an awkward notch on one side. That size seems to be aimed at transition devices that can’t yet be squeezed into the smaller package.