An Irish Wish

Will Durant. “One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” [Quotes of the Day] [Finklea.com]

OS X comes with a list of all the words in Webster's 2nd International Dictionary (234,936 of them to be precise). These words can be found in the file /usr/share/dict/words. I find it useful to search this list if I'm not sure how spell a given word by using the following command:

% more /usr/share/dict/words | grep [pattern] | more

This should return a list of words from the dictionary that contain your [pattern] (don't type the square brackets) of interest.

Another interesting file is /usr/share/dict/propernames, which is a list of common (mostly Western) names (useful if you're having difficulty coming up with a name for your newborn).

Making Radio Fly

Yesterday, after helping a friend install Radio on XP, I realized how blazingly fast his usage was versus mine. I had read that there were some 'issues' with using Radio server on the same Mac that you browse from, but even when I switched from IE to Chimera, the speed up was minimal.

Since Radio is not yet available for Linux (HINT HINT!!) I thought I'd install Radio on the XP box I have here and see if I could move my files across platforms. It took a bit of hide & seek in the migration of the files, but after about 30 minutes, everything transitioned smoothly.

I'm excited to say that Radio has never been this much fun! It is SOOOO fast now and I'm a much happier Radio user. In this new setup, I'm able to access my Radio install from the public Internet as well as from my local network so I still have the same great access at close to a 5x speed increase.

Of course, this leaves me wondering why, with all the great improvements in OS X and its use of BSD and Apache, is Radio so much slower on a Mac. Any ideas?

Grasping XML

A great resource for XML and XSLT tutorials can be found at:

http://www.xfront.com/

A Gentle Introduction to XSLT through HTML Templates can be found in the collection here.

Rescuing XSLT from Niche Status. XSLT is one of the most exciting technologies to come out of the XML family. Unfortunately, its incredible power and associated complexity can be overwhelming to new users preventing many from experimenting with it or causing them to quickly give up in disgust. In fact, unless the method of teaching and the common style of use for XSLT is radically changed to make it more accessible, XSLT will be relegated to niche status like SGML and other powerful technologies. — David Jacobs

“zeldman.543jh” [PHP Everywhere]

Beyond Success

“As we communicate the vision we have for others and the expectations we hold for them, we create an almost magnetic pull that draws them in the direction of those expectations.”

– An excerpt from, “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro.

The 15 Secrets to Effective Leadership and Life based on legendary Coach John Wooden's Pyramid of Sucess.

Welcome Mr. Finklea!!

Everyone, please give Ben Finklea, the latest Radio user, a hardy “Bienvenidos!” and welcome him to the world of blogging. Please visit his blog located at www.finklea.com.