waffle

The time has come again for me to point to explaining links of Name days, that freakish phenomenon again. I might not bother if it wasn’t my own name day today.

Big ups to Tim Bray for calling bullshit on the phrase “User-Generated Content”. Generation implies something that just happens as part of an automated process. Generating heat, for example (although it’s not generated in the purest sense of the word). Creating content, however - aka “writing entries” or “taking photos” or “talking about something” - requires interest, inspiration and creativity. It’s as far from generating things as you can come.

Even if you’re a cynic and think the internet’s all spam these days and that it is mostly generated (which actually is true), please don’t disparage the efforts of the people who are not dollar-eyed abusive goons by making up words like “User-Generated Content”. If you desperately must have a separate phrase and a separate phrase for the things actual people actually make at that, why not use “actual content”?

In short: What WordPress spits out is generated. What I write and tell WordPress to spit out is bunkcontent. Don’t conflate my role with that of WordPress, and don’t call me a “user”.

140+ mostly unedited pages from the original cut of the highly technical Mac OS X Internals book. Covers the Lisa, A/UX (Apple’s first UNIX-based OS) and the iPod OS (briefly). There will be an exam tomorrow.

Xcode is apparently notorious for being slow, but despite being solid in a lot of areas it’s also quite buggy in some. I’ve been running into an indentation bug a few times now and I mustered up the ire to finally report it using Apple’s bug tracking system Radar.

If you work inside Apple and have access to this monstrosity, I’m told this link will work for bringing the issue up. The rest of us plebeians can use my personal copy of the bug for all technical details. Yes, I keep a personal replication, meticulously groomed, of all bugs I ever file on apple.com. All two.