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

House of Horrors

CNN: Girl expelled for writing story about killing teacher

It's a good thing I'm long out of high scool. I never would have made it through, not in the US, anyway.

In Grade 9, most of our class really despised our English teacher, Mr. House. In the 3rd quarter of the year, he failed the majority of the class, (an honours class, no less) almost every case a direct result of people's bad feelings towards him. During this quarter, we were asked to write a short play and act it out in front of the class. The group I was working with responded with "House of Horrors", a skit where one of us played Mr. House as a contestent on a very unfortunate game show. Whenever the Mr. House character got an answer wrong, someone beat him with whatever object the question was about. Suffice it to say Mr. House didn't get the big prize at the end of the show, and surely wished he knew more about baseball bats.

As much as I couldn't stand Mr. House, I guess I should be thankful I didn't get expelled or suspended for my part in the House of Horrors. It still bugs me that I was failed that term, the only fail I ever received.

Pashua, build GUIs using scripting languages

via Duncan's Jotter... Carsten Blüm: Pashua

About 5 years ago I tried something like this for Windows using VB6. I called it dynaForm. I maintained a Frontier suite called dynAuthor back then, I guess that was branding. Unfortunately, VB is intentionally crippled to make it impossible to write something like that in VB. Certain properties of controls can only be set at design-time, not run-time, so it was not possible to give developers enough power to make it really useful. I wanted it to be a way to make GUIs for Frontier apps.. I even had a way to generate the VBScript code that made and control the dynaForm GUIs from a Frontier outline.

I'm sure this will be a very useful tool for many people.

Patented AIDS drugs for developing countries now 2/3 off

BBC News: Clinton brokers landmark Aids deal

SubEthaEdit update, Panther-related improvements

SubEthaEdit 1.1.4 was released yesterday. SubEthaEdit is the multi-user collaborative text editor that used to be called Hydra.

I used SubEthaEdit earlier this month at a two day inter-company requirements gathering meeting with 4 other OS X users. It was a beautiful and productive way to record and finesse our discoveries. I wish I had spoken up about it at the Plone Conference, because there were lots of PowerBooks and iBooks there running Mac OS X... we could have made some great notes together. I'm sure it won't be a problem getting people using SubEthaEdit at the Mac OS X Conference next week, alas, I'll be in the Exhibit Hall for two days and only in one day of sessions.

Xcode

It's October 24th and I've suddenly lost my patience... where can I get Xcode?!?!