I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the WWDC keynote details – just sampled the various discussions going on. I was however interested in a comment by Ted Leug that Apple were including DTrace in Apple’s performance tools. I wonder what Sun think about this. DTrace was a key Solaris feature and now it’s coming out for OS X and I seem to recall mention of projects that are porting it to Linux.

Mitch Tulloch raises a concern over how large enterprises would react to Microsoft moving to more regular, iterative releases. The answer for large enterprise who can’t handle releases coming out more often than once every six years or so is to only update when they are ready instead of every time there’s a new release. With Apple, this isn’t a great option because Apple don’t have very long support periods for older OS’s, but that’s not the case with Microsoft – a legacy of the fact that they deal with large enterprise and Apple in general does not.

It seems that the world of Java on Mac is always full of drama and gnashing of teeth and Chris Adamson has just the article to really kick it into full gear: Mustang for Mac PPC… any point now? Sadly, I’m inclined to believe that Chris may well be right – the Java 1.6 release for PPC is likely to be a less than wonderful release as Apple focuses it’s efforts on the Intel release.

Jason Calacanis’ entry on Wikipedia considering adding a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for people to contribute strikes a chord close to my heart. The argument that a WYSIWYG editor will cause more work for administrators is quite valid – making it easier for people to contribute will mean more contributions that need to be reviewed and checked. On the other hand though, the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor isn’t just that more people will contribute, but that domain experts in fields other than computing will be able to and be more inclined to contribute.

It’s census time in Australia and for the first time this year, you can complete the census online. Surprisingly, the eCensus is actually very well done. It supports Windows 95 and above and Mac OS 8.5 and above on IE, Netscape or Firefox – and that’s just the official specs. I didn’t think to run it through the HTML validator but I’d assume it would work quite well in pretty much any reasonably modern browser and a whole bunch of not so modern browsers.

A while back it was pointed out that the cool little footnotes plugin I wrote was always using the same ID names to link back and forth. It incremented the number of each footnote in a post, but started again from 1 for the next post. The problem with this of course is that on the main page all the posts are combined together and the footnote links wind up jumping to the wrong place.

I just stumbled across something interesting that I probably should have realized before. With TDD, the first thing you should do when you get assigned a bug to fix is write a test that reproduces it. This morning I was good and did just that, but surprisingly the test passed. Now normally when your test passes straight off, it means you didn’t write it correctly and you need to fix the test.

So Scoble’s looking for a wiki, seems to have gotten a few popular suggestions. Since he wants it hosted I can’t really offer anything – I don’t have the server space or sysadmin knowledge to handle something of Scoble’s popularity. Despite that, can I recommend that you make the quality of the editor your most important criteria? It will make a huge difference to the adoption rate of the wiki. I’ve discussed this before: Wiki Syntax Considered Harmful and Making Wikis Work.

NetNewsWire’s tabs have overflowed into that stupid little these-didn’t-fit menu because I haven’t had enough time to investigate all the things that I wanted to. Time to blog them and move on until they become a higher priority. Solr An opensource Google appliance sort of thing. Looks like a simple way to add search to an application to me – just hook it up to fire events over to Solr and use it to catalogue and search.

I’m not sure there are many platforms that make installing software more painful than Windows. Linux used to present a worthy challenge but apt-get and similar systems are so common and so comprehensive now that it’s generally smooth. Some of the main annoyances are: Clicking next, next, next, next just to get the install started. Are all those screens really needed? Couldn’t we at least skip the welcome screen? Icons, icons everywhere and not a scrap of user control.

A few days ago I did a clean reinstall of my Windows machine to clean up the mess of partitions and OS boot menus that had developed from trying out different OS’s. While reinstalling drivers, I discovered that my computer came with Norton Internet Security so I figured I may as well install it1, I also discovered an nVidia firewall tool and installed that too. Then I started downloading programs to install – firefox, Java etc.

Quite some time ago I talked about redefining and rewriting handler functions in JavaScript, but what if you want to add or redefine methods in an existing class? JavaScript classes1 are based on prototyping so the model is somewhat different to actual object oriented languages. Here’s one way to define a class, MyThing: function MyThing { this.doStuff = doStuff; } function doStuff() { } Note the use of function assignment in there, just like for handler functions.