Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

2U G4 racks

Rackmounted dual-gigahertz PowerMac G4

Awesome! I know a lot of people that wish Apple produced this, but if you need it now, it looks like this is a pretty wicked system.

Belgian joke

Fabien Roy, a co-worker of mine told a funny joke today. It reminded me of how Patrice Gautier (my previous manager from NetStruxr) would tell funny Belgian jokes. Fabien told me he had a good Belgian joke, and this is what he said...

One day, the Belgians told their King they were fed up with the French making jokes about the stupid Belgians.

So the Belgian king met with the French president and said, "We have to do something about this... how about you guys do something stupid so we can laugh about it?"

The French president said, "Okay, we'll build a bridge in the desert."

The Belgian king went home with news that the French had built a bridge in the desert, and the Belgians were laughing and laughing. In fact, they wouldn't stop laughing.

Eventually, the Belgian king had put a stop to this. He went back to France and told the president, "Okay, that was funny but we really need to end this. You can destroy the bridge now..."

The French president replied, "Well we would except for all the Belgians fishing on it."

The WWOL

Finally! The World Outline returns

Yes, you did, and it really drove me nuts. I still think it's the best idea UserLand has ever had. I started working on a Cocoa-based outliner that would use OPML and support the world-outline concept, but I ran into my own limitations in Cocoa skill.

Now I have a LOT more skill at Cocoa programming, but I still have a major hurdle... it's one UserLand had for a long time too. Until Frontier 6, their outliner didn't word-wrap. If you typed more text than fit in the width of the window on one line, it marched along that line, requiring you to scroll left and right. Unfortunately, NSOutlineView has this same limitation.

I got OutlineXplorer to the point where it read OPML files and showed their node types, but stopped working on it because for the life of me I couldn't get it to wrap text! Speaking with Mike Ferris at Apple's Cocoa Kitchen dinner, I found out that NSOutlineView would NOT do what I wanted and I'd have to make my own control. Lovely.

By the way Dave, if you're reading this, I still remember very clearly when you told me on the phone that I'd never finish it. I don't know if that was meant to motivate or discourage me, but I won't forget it.

FrontBase’s AS tool renamed

MacCentral: FBScriptAgent adds scripting to FrontBase

This is (from what I can tell) the same app as the "FBAppleScript" app that was announced last week. At the time it was released I wondered how they would get away with using that name, since, other companies had failed when trying the same thing (Visual AppleScript comes to mind).

They probably got a nice cease-and-desist letter from Apple (or a friendly phone call suggesting one would be on the way) and changed the name pronto.

I think this is a better name (still too geeky but whatever) anyway.