I've shut off the referrers and aggregators display that was in the right side of the blog. I don't really look at them, and the way that it's implemented is kind of a hack that doesn't scale to well. If you miss them, comment on this post and I'll see what we can do.

I started using zsh when I was a graduate student, and at the time, there was no shell to compare with it for interactive use. The great command completion support was one of those reasons. The bash completion project come up (again) in the freshmeat.net RSS feed. These folks seem to be revving their completions pretty quickly. In the meantime the zsh folks have come up with a new super spiffy completion system in zsh 4, and while there are lots of (very complete) completions, they don't seem to be revving them as fast. That and the zsh 4 system is more complicated (and capable) than the previous one (in fact I've dumped all of my old completions and am just using the new defaults). And truthfully, I'm not sure I have the time to read the manual to figure out all the completion system settings or the syntax for defining new ones. But there are all these new Mac OS X command line commands....

While reading the December issue of Wired, I came across this quote in the article The Great Library of Amazonia:

In this enhanced physical world, the logic of the book business is transformed. Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.

This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to information about where this material can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power. Manber is correct when he says that Amazon's Search Inside the Book is not an ebook project. It is merely a catalog. But a decade of Internet history proves that the catalog is exactly what you want to own.

I think that the same thing is going to be true about microcontent. There will be value provided by those who are sourcing that microcontent. But I believe that there is going to be so much microcontent that there'll be a traffic in that as well, as microcontent, of course. In the blog variant of microcontent, this is already happening. You have blog posts, which are content, but some are also meta content in the form of commentary, reply, or actual "this blog rocks".

Today I finally got around to hooking up my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. Now I have to relearn how to type. The Powerbook is sitting on my desk right in front of the 21" CRT. So I have an unusual multiple monitor setup where the secondary display is below the primary display. I've been typing on the Powerbook keyboard, and it's been making me slightly batty - it's not a Thinkpad keyboard, for one, and it's at the wrong typing height for me. To make matters worse (for my hands an back), the Natural Keyboard Pro is sitting on a nice keyboard arm that is slung under the desktop, which puts the keyboard in a perfect typing position for me (and almost no one else because I'm small). I've been feeling it in my arms and back. So today while waiting for one of my stress test cases to run, I dug out an old Microsoft Natural Keyboard and a really old PS/2 Intellimouse, plugged them into the television, er, Windows box, and plugged the Natural Keyboard Pro into the PowerBook. Quick test to make sure the Windows box is happy (it is), and on to the Powerbook. I put the Intellimouse Explorer back onto the keyboard arm platform and plug it into the Natural Keyboard Pro, and download MS IntelliType 5.0 for OS X. Everything works great. The OS X drivers have sensible binding for all the media function keys that I never used, (and can't reliably find from the home row).

I'm really in power work mode now, and I've got lots of windows open -- 20 across 4 virtual desktops, and I don't have the window happy WingIDE running at the moment -- add 4 or 5 for that. I've got tons of XChatAqua windows, everything. I really need Expose, and I've started to use it -- by using the activation corners, but it seems a long reach to get there. I don't want to take my hands off the home row, but I have to take my right hand off to use the mouse to get the right window out of the pile. This makes the default F8 - F10 binding useless, because the hand that pushes those keys should be on the mouse to fish out the window. What I really want is to use a shifted mouse key (like the side forward/back buttons plus command or option) to invoke Expose. But I couldn't figure out how to do it with my setup. Is there anybody out there that's made this work? Maybe using USB Overdrive?