When I started this blog I pledged it would remain focused on technical topics, but that’s trumped by what’s going on in New Orleans right now. Hundreds of thousands of dislocated people are struggling down there. I don’t need to tell you how to donate to the Red Cross, but here are some less widely circulated links to information and ways to help.

• Habitat for Humanity – lots of houses to rebuild
• Second Harvest – and lots of food needed
• Wikipedia entry on Katrina – dauntingly comprehensive
• NOLA.com – Local news site with lots of up-to-the-minute coverage
• New Orleans Craigslist Katrina Aid Page – excellent list of ways to donate and help
• Paypal is waiving fees for donations made to the United Way. I would be interested in hearing about other places that take Paypal donations as I think many people have a little Paypal “kitty” that they would gladly tap. That’s what I did.

Perhaps Microsoft is gearing up for combat in the web search index size wars. From August stats for e-scribe.com:

 	12.77% 	msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
 	3.61% 	Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
 	3.34% 	Yahoo! Slurp

So 12.77% of the domain’s hits for August came from MSNbot. When I drill down into the detail, it looks like the bot has a particular affinity for RSS feeds.

After invoking Expose, most people use a mouse to choose windows. But it can be controlled by keyboard, too. After invoking Expose for all apps (F9) or the current app (F10), you can use these keys:

• arrow keys to move between windows
• spacebar or return to bring selected window to front and leave Expose
• tab to move to next visible application (and enter current-app mode if you weren’t in it)
• backtick or shift-tab to move to previous visible application
• esc to leave Expose, ignoring window selection but staying in current app even if it has changed since Expose was invoked

Once or twice I’ve definitely confused the window manager this way – ending up with a foreground window with a greyed out title bar, for instance.

I got my hands on one of the new OWC Mercury Elite cases last week – the big one that looks most like a mini-G5 tower. I think it would make a fantastic casemod project for the Mini-ITX crowd (with a nano-ITX board, I’d guess). Imagine a little card-reader slot right where the CD/DVD drive is on the real PowerMac. Dare I say it would be cute?

The irony is that, if somebody builds such a thing, it will likely be Windows/Linux only – unless they do it by stuffing the guts of a Mini inside.

Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple’s KEEPING ME DOWN again.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since “Anarchie” days) to David Kocher’s Cyberduck. There’s no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It’s a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks – notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as “Edit With” – this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.