Thursday, May 15, 2003

Quote of the day: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 9:53:23 PM    comment () I'm reading the "Tinderbox" user's manual (strange, I know), and I've found that it has "aliases." An alias is a way to have the same note appear in multiple places in a document, and any change made in one place applies in all the others as well. This feature is also present in "MORE", where an alias is called a "clone." It's incredibly useful, and I'm very happy to see another application finally using it. The feature works a bit differently in the two apps. In Tinderbox, there's an original note and aliases of the original. If the original is deleted, the aliases are all deleted as well. This is similar to the way Mac file system aliases work, except that the file system doesn't clean up broken aliases. In MORE, the clones are all equal--if you delete the original heading, only that particular clone is removed and all the others stay where they are. That approach is more like Unix hard links. As a long-time MORE user, I think both approaches would work equally well. Even more impressive is Tinderbox's "agents" feature. It lets you create containers which will automatically hold aliases to all the notes which meet whatever criteria you specify. I think that will be quite useful! 8:01:26 PM    comment () Row over passive smoking effect. Research suggesting the damaging effect of passive smoking on health may have been overstated has sparked a furious row. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition] I'm not surprised. This quote from a safety Nazi pretty well sums up why people are so upset about the research: This could be very damaging as it will be used by industry lobbyists to argue against laws to ban smoking in public places and workplaces. Note that the Nazi isn't concerned at all with whether the results are correct or not, only with the potential impact on her efforts to impose her beliefs on others against their will. 6:33:57 PM    comment () I've just discovered an interesting application called Tinderbox. It's available for Mac and OS X, and at first glance it seems to combine certain aspects of "MORE", Infodex, and Radio UserLand. I've downloaded the demo version to experiment with. 9:43:11 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 1:54:17 PM.