That’s a shame, since it means that the aim: links that are scattered around the Web won’t work with iChat. A bit of poking around does reveal that iChat responds to the iChat: URL scheme, but I couldn’t make it do anything useful for Web links; iChat:compose?card=«uid» will open a chat with the person with UID «uid» in your Mac OS X address book, but that’s Not Helpful.
I did figure out how to crash iChat from the Web browser, though. Whee.
/* mod_speling.c - by Alexei Kosut <akosut@organic.com> June, 1996
Let’s see. It’s 2003 now. 2003 minus 1996 (let me get the calculator) is 7. Seven years. Seven years? That was seven years ago? Holy cow. Sure, sure, in the meantime I’ve received three diplomas, called eleven different bedrooms home, and learned how to make tuna noodle casserole. But still… seven years!
Of course, I still think of Back to the Future as having taken place just yesterday. I probably don’t want to know how long ago 1985 was, or that right now we’re actually closer to 2015. Please don’t tell me.
In their article on 802.11g, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman write that “Companies pay a separate fee for each [FCC] certification–which may account for part of why the cheaper AirPort Extreme Base Station doesn’t have an external antenna jack.” I had wondered about that—it seems to me that those who would be interested in the external antenna jack are most likely to be purchasers who have absolutely no interest in the built-in modem (and vice versa).
Also: “the FCC mandates that any wireless networking equipment that can take an antenna must feature a hard-to-find connector.” I find this amusing. I’m not sure why; I think it’s the idea of having to find a “hard-to-find” connector. Of course, I imagine they came up with their own connector, thus making it hard to find by virtue of its proprietariness. Also, if it sells well, doesn’t it suddenly become easy to find? Will they have to change connectors every six months? And if “devices can’t use [the USB] Mini-A receptacle”, why did they go to the trouble of creating such a detailed specification for one?
When completely changing the nature of the parameters to a function in a C-like language, make sure to change the signature. If you don’t change the signature, at least change the name. That way, the compiler will let you know if there’s code that calls your function that you forgot to change.