Monthly Archive for May, 2005

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Burger news

Amanda was telling me that the mayor of Detroit (who’s apparently assisted in creating a 300 million dollar deficit) has proposed an additional tax on fast-food to help fill the city’s coffers. Guess this is a strategic move since Detroit’s ranked third on the list of “fattest cities” (following Houston and Chicago)…

On a related note, I saw this other article at CNN about a restaurant that’s started selling a 15-pound burger! 10 pounds of beef covered in a 17-inch bun, 25 slices of cheese, an entire head of lettuce, 3 tomatoes, 2 onions, not to mention the usual condiments. Pretty disturbing. At least apparently they don’t expect one person to finish it alone… if two people manage to eat it within a 3 hour sitting, they get the $30 burger for free!

Whoops! Dashboard is now officially creepy!

Looks like Tiger’s new Dashboard could use some refinement when it comes to security. Looks like it’s pretty trivial to make a user auto-download a widget when they visit a webpage in Safari, it’ll then auto-install if they’re using the default Safari settings, and then they’ll be running a potentially very obnoxious (and possibly even malicious) widget that’s impossible for average Joe user to remove. With any luck they’ll refine this a bit in 10.4.1 (or possibly 10.4.2 since 10.4.1 has already been seeded to developers).

Why am I not surprised…

Saw Power Tool Drag Racing recently on the Discovery Channel late at night.

Java 1.5 on Tiger

Looks like Apples’s released Java 1.5 for Tiger. Not quite sure why people aren’t talking about this (was released same day as Tiger’s “official” release date) since a lot of people had mentioned it being present in the Tiger developer test releases and that it was absent from the final version released to the public. Looks like I can finally see about getting Liberty’s LSE up and running on OS X. Now I’m wondering if Apple bothers to provide separate packages containing the stand-alone Java runtime and the SDK…

Edit: Just did a little googling and discovered that not only is OS X 10.4 codenamed “Tiger”, but Java 1.5 is also codenamed “Tiger”. Weird.

Adium X 0.80

Looks like there’s a new version of Adium X out. Looks like there’s all sorts of new stuff in this release:

Adium 0.80 brings a completely new status system with available messages and invisibility on supported protocols, built-in secure encrypted messaging via Off-the-Record Messaging, the long-awaited file transfer progress interface, customizable built-in Growl notification system support, blocking, customizable service and status icons, full OS X 10.4 compatibility, and much, much more.

In addition to full Tiger compatibility (I fired the old version up in my test install and the basics appeared to work just fine), the big thing of interest to me is the OTR crypto stuff. Apparently it’s available for Gaim as well, so I’m going to have to check that out. Been wanting a better crypto setup for IM (not that anyone I know actually uses it too), and it certainly sounds interesting. You’ll have to check their site for further details, but it provides some nice features (deniability and perfect forward security). The tinfoil hat crowd should definitely check this out.