“In our active, goal-oriented culture, we learn to distrust stillness and to engage in busywork on the surface of life.”

– evita101

I should start posting one of these every day.

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“Success is often the first step toward disaster.”

–Pat Riley

Thanks to Signal vs. Noise for this sublime advice. Good night.

As I Was Used To Building, Using and Troubleshooting Windows XP Systems And Was Not Converted To Mac, Proper, Until Last Year

I was delighted to find this old gem about keeping your Windows system running virtually forever without fear of resource hogging. I used to think that, no matter what you do (or try your hardest not to do), Windows will always slow down in due time because of the DLL and registry access/writing. Well, that may still be true today, but at least you can keep it from happening at a faster rate.

To over-generalize and sum up the article in one sentence: pay attention to an entry called “Handles” in the Task Manager; keep the number below 12,000 by shutting down services that uses them the most, and you’ll be just fine.

That’s good software writing. It’s succint, easy to skim/read/try and practical.

Good night.

John Siracusa: “Leopard’s new look has been compared to the Aero Glass look in Windows Vista…

…While I think there are few legitimate similarities, this comparison comes up as often as it does because the two designs share one prominent attribute: the gratuitous, inappropriate use of translucency to the detriment of usability.”

What I wrote when the transparent menu bar was announced last June:

So I was partly wrong, then, in hoping that Mac OS X will differentiate itself from Windows Vista by featuring less similar look (ie. more opaque vs. more transparent, white vs. black).

And my opinion regarding the Dock’s pseudo-3D look and reflection effect was:

“I feel that the said shadow is more of a gratuitous embellishment than subtle, pleasant design touch.”

So, dear reader, please remind me to “normalize” the Dock when I get my copy of Leopard next week by typing:

% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
% killall Dock

At the Terminal prompt.

Good night.

(Thanks as always to John Gruber.)