SGnTN (Some Geek In Tennessee) is the web site of Casey Fleser: software developer, hobby collector, and occasional writer of words. I'm from Michigan, but I've lived in Tennessee for the last 30 years or so. This I where my blog, genealogy, and other random niblets have lived since November 2002.
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Obligatory assortment of "social" links, some of which I actually use.
In case you haven’t heard, Flying Meat has released a brand new image editing application called Acorn. I got a sneak peek of Acorn at the recent C4 conference and it looks very slick. From the Acorn product page, Gus Mueller, Flying Meat’s perpetual employee of the month, explains:
Acorn is a new image editor built with one goal in mind – simplicity. Fast, easy, and fluid, Acorn provides the options you’ll need without any overhead. Acorn feels right, and won’t drain your bank account. Don’t let Acorn’s size fool you; it’s a powerful little guy. Fancy math to keep your pencil strokes from having sharp edges, squeezing all the performance out of your computer’s GPU as possible, and simple innovations to make your life easier.
I was going to mention this when in my last post, but thought better of associating a new software release with things bursting into flame. Though Acorn is unlikely to start fires, it is a lightweight, but powerful, image editor for the Mac that’s easy on the wallet. If you’ve been looking for something that fits that description, go check it out.
As I was getting ready for work this morning, it seemed that I could hear sirens off in the distance… the very near distance and so I wandered over to the window a looked outside to see if I could catch a glimpse. This is pretty much what I saw:
This is not a happy sight unless their happened to be an unscheduled parade in going through my neighborhood. I saw no Tootsie Rolls.
Actually there were more than just this one. This was one of about five La Vergne fire department vehicles. Later that number grew to include a couple of La Vergne police cars and someone from the water company maybe? Whatever, this was not good. I didn’t smell any fire, but I rapidly finished dressing to see what was going on (My apologies to the fireman that saw me wearing only a towel as I was looking out the upstairs window. This probably burned his eyes more than any smoke ever has).
There was no fire in my house and my vicious guard dog lay placidly in the dining room, probably dreaming of driving my car. From my front porch I saw:
I could also see my next door neighbor standing in her driveway looking distraught. All the windows in her house were open along with the front door. A fireman was using an industrial strength fan to drive the smoke from the house. Not good, but the fire was apparently out. After talking to her I discovered there was an accident, a small corner of their living room burned and everyone has frayed nerves, but everyone is also okay, which is the important thing.
Paul Kafasis is not the first to comment on the bizarre UI decisions behind the new Dock in Leopard and probably won’t be the last. He sums up my feelings nicely. Go read.
For the record after having tried to train myself to use the Dock on the bottom, I’ve gone back to the side despite the vertigo.
I love Wikipedia. Really. Not only as a legitimate research tool, but also as a form of edu-tainment. A simple perusal of the most mundane topic can lead to hours spent visiting page after page. Maybe I’m just peculiar that way… in addition to all the other ways I’m peculiar.
What I don’t like are some of the editors that seem to have this authority complex. On more than one occasion, I’ve run across these Barney Fife’s threatening to get their bullet out in response to the most trivial things.
My first encounter was in response to an edit I made to Griffin’s wikipedia entry. I had listed the number of employees at 100 assuming an approximate was sufficient. That was immediately reverted by a former employee as he knew there was no way Griffin could have that many employees. The actual number was 94 at the time, so I left it. Whatever. Oh, I see that Griffin’s logo has been deleted now also.
Anyway, yesterday I noticed that Proxi’s entry had been tagged with a deletion proposal. This on account that the article gives no indication of notability or verifiability. You see, I added Proxi after one of my wikipedia browsing sessions having noted that LaunchBar, Butler and of course Quicksilver all had entries so I figured why not. Though I’m the author I tried to leave out any bias and simply provide a short description and information on the current version, etc. I also included links to those applications that I mentioned above. I thought it might be handy for anyone poking around wikipedia looking for Mac OS X automation / launcher sofwtare.
Unclear on exactly what constitutes “notability”, I contacted the person responsible for the proposed deletion seeking clarification and citing Butler, LaunchBar, and Quicksilver as similar articles and rather than a helpful response, I was directed to the articles mentioned in the delete template. You know, the ones that were unclear to me. Not only that, but he thanked me for pointing out those other articles and tagged not only LaunchBar, but Quicksilver for deletion as well! (Sorry about that guys) Clearly this person is not acquainted with Mac software. I can almost understand the decision to delete Proxi, but Quicksilver? Are you serious?
At this point, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about Proxi’s entry, if anything. But it makes me wonder. Of what benefit is it to the users of wikipedia to remove articles just because they don’t live up to someone’s subjective view of notability? Proxi has a small but loyal group of users. I suppose it’s notable to them. I’m sure there are thousands of articles that meet the same criteria. There are guidelines for wikipedia articles, but sometimes I get the impression that the enforcement isn’t much different than this:
