Thursday, March 7, 2002

Signs of a new El Niño strengthen Weather effects seen in the sea and in Peru, agency says. ASSOCIATED PRESS A February sea surface temperature map shows the equatorial Pacific warming trend as an orange trail west of Peru in South America. The signs are strengthening that the world is heading into a return of the El Niño weather phenomenon. OCEAN SURFACE temperatures warmed 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) in the eastern equatorial Pacific near the South American coast in February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Further Information CNN.com [~] El Nino 2002: How big a punch? [747 Radio-Ate] It is too early to tell how big this event will be. The last El Niño in 1997-1998 was a strong event that produced 47.22 inches of rain in San Francisco, making it the second wettest year on record. Storms that spring produced flood watches in my neighborhood and a tornado in Sunnyvale. It will be interesting to see how this coming El Niño plays out. 2:15:37 PM     Comment []

Frontier Contextual Menu Plugin Beta. OS X users—you can attach Frontier scripts to the Finder’s contextual menus. (It will work for Radio too in a later beta.) [ranchero.com] Another cool tool for Frontier from Brent Simmons. Since resigning from UserLand last week, Brent is cranking out stuff at a furious rate. If your interested in cool tools in Frontier and Radio, I would suggest subscribing to Ranchero's news feed. 10:38:28 AM     Comment []

Virtual PC updated: Macslash has a story and discussion underway about Connectix Updating Virtual PC. Will this update make the Windows-on-Mac program speedier under OS X? [Mac Net Journal] I updated Virtual PC last night. On my machine, the performance is much better than before under OS X. IE 5 under Virtual PC seemed downright snappy in browsing external websites. I did experience a huge slow down when I tried to access a page served by OS X on the same machine (but what was I thinking?). Overall, I am impressed. The following caveats apply to this report. First I am running OS X on a 450 MHz G4 with 512 Mb RAM. Second, I am using Win95, I would image that more recent versions of Windows could be slower. Third my testing was limited to IE 5 and pcAnywhere. And finally, I don't have great expectations for working in an emulated environment. 10:17:48 AM     Comment []