I was talking to Josh Portway about Koders, and he pointed out O’Reilly CodeZoo to me.

It’s similar, but a bit higher level - more of a catalogue of components and libraries. Nice because people can rate things, and leave hints and tips, so you get some sense of why it might be a good idea to use one jpeg rendering library as opposed to any other.

I am currently watching an F1 race with only six cars, which is a total farce.

On a simplistic level, it’s obviously the fault of Michelin, who had a problem with their tires and advised the 14 drivers using them that it wasn’t safe to enter the race unless the track was modified.

I have to wonder, however, about the six drivers who are currently circling the track, who happen to be using Bridgestone tires and therefore don’t have a problem.

Fourteen of their colleagues have been given an unambigous instruction that they must not drive the race, because it’s not safe. Those drivers wanted to race, but it would have been suicide to go out without a modified track.

An optimist might think that there was still some vestige of honour in the sport of motor racing, and some solidarity amongst drivers, regardless of their team affiliations.

A romantic might assume that, seeing that this was an issue of safety, and not of team rivalry, the unaffected drivers might have shown solidarity with the Michelin runners, and told their own teams that they also would not drive the race unless the track was modified. In the face of a united front from the drivers, there is no doubt that the track would have been altered, and a proper race would have resulted.

The realists only have to point to the race unfolding before me to show the true state of affairs. The fans don’t matter. The safety of other drivers doesn’t matter. A phyrric victory in a field of six doesn’t matter. If we can win, we’ll win, fuck the cost.

Very very sad.

Daring Fireball have a nice piece of comment on the whole Apple-Intel saga, entitled Together We Can Rule the Galaxy

Worth a read.

Recently I’ve been working on some odds and ends that I wanted to Open Source, so I had to ponder which license to release them under.

This is a surprisingly gnarly question, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the final answer but right now I’ve gone for the GPL, although I did have some concerns about it.

I take Jack’s point in Stolen Sheep about people getting all misty eyed about the consistency of the user interface on previous versions of MacOS.

I think he missed the mark slightly though, particularly by mentioning OS 9. I don’t know anything about Jack, so maybe he had an original Mac 128k, but I would never hold up OS 9 as a paragon of consistency, and people who do have obviously not been around that long!

The rot set in a lot earlier than that - for me it was around the time of Powertalk and Apple Guide. I would say that system 7 was pretty consistent though, and system 6 even more so.

Sheer complexity of the system is part of the problem I’m sure, but as I mentioned in Bring Back The User Interface Police I do think that Apple should keep a tighter overview, and at least conform to its own standards.