Every year I seem to forget that, on the 31st of October, Pumpkins in greengrocers and supermarkets are as rare as budgie teeth.

The new version of Safari (1.1) is the only browser that supports the text-shadow CSS property (as demoed here courtesy of whatdoiknow.org). This is a great example of a property that will degrade gracefully on browsers that don’t support it; Safari users will get nicely rendered text with the shadow effect while other browser users will just see the nicely rendered text.

It’s good to see Safari progressing by including previously unsupported properties like this, however, there is a problem: Safari 1.1 is not available for Jaguar. Ian Lloyd at The Web Standards Project thinks this is a big issue:

Now, when Microsoft announced that it was cancelling future development on IE , everyone was up in arms. Want a new version of IE ? You’ll have to wait until the next operating system comes out, mate. People across the web were really hacked off that they would have to buy a whole operating system to get the new browser. Strangely, this is precisely the situation with Safari 1.1 – yet where are the protests?

I don’t think the situation is quite as bad as Ian is suggesting and I’m expecting Safari 1.1 for Jaguar to be released once the dust has settled on the Panther launch. If this doesn’t happen however, I’d be pretty disappointed with Apple.

Over the last three years, I’ve spent a substantial amount of time writing and maintaining this weblog. Aside from the hours spent fiddling with Blogger templates, CSS, and the PHP code that I now use to maintain the site, I’ve written a large number of words. Now if only I’d selected these words more carefully and strung them together to make a story, I’d have written a good sized novel by now! Shucks.

To demonstrate this fully, I’ve cobbled together a script that counts the number of words in a weblog and compares the returned figure with the word count of some famous novels. If you would like to try it, the script requires PHP to be running on your server and your weblog to be stored in a MySQL database.

• Download blognovels.zip (1.6K)
• Modify blognovels.php with your MySQL details
• FTP to your server.

Here’s the script in action. As you can see, I’ve sailed past The Wizard of Oz, The Thirty-nine Steps, The Jungle Book and Black Beauty and I’m now hot the heels of Gulliver’s Travels!

A Fish & Chip shop in Newcastle has added a new seasonal dish to its menu: battered Christmas Pudding. I might have to sample this culinery delight for myself, although, for the purposes of dietary balance, I’ll have to go on a strict no-fat diet for a number of weeks before attempting it.

Apple’s decision to quietly update their iBook line with G4 processors has surprised me. With a G5 Powerbook rumoured to be in the pipeline for release next summer, I would have expected the iBook revisions to take place early next year. Apart from some extra graphics clout, in-built Bluetooth and faster networking capability there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the new 12” iBook and the 12” Powerbook… well, not 450 worth of difference anyway.

Ashley Frieze has well documented is annoyance towards missing or mis-placed apostrophes with the Apostrophell page (‘Foxed’ being my favourite as the offending Taxi company is just round the corner from me). While I’m nowhere near as adept at spotting such apostrophe abuse and I’m able to witness it without being forced to write a letter, there is one grammatical error that, when I see it, makes me seethe. Some would argue that it’s acceptable and isn’t a grammatical error at all, but for me it’s all wrong:

• an historic

I saw it twice yesterday; leafing through a copy of Steve Jones’ book Almost Like a Whale in Waterstones and in a BBC News Online article that I can’t remember the address of.

The ‘h’ in ‘history’ is aspirated which means that it should be written ‘a historic’. Conversely, in words such as ‘hour’ and ‘honour’, the ‘h’ isn’t sounded, hence ‘an hour’ and ‘an honour’.

I decided to use Google find out how widespread the use of ‘an historic’ is in two popular news sites:

It appears that British journalists prefer ‘an historic’ and their American counterparts prefer ‘a historic’. So why the confusion? Why does ‘an historic’ sound right to people’s ears? Well, as I have discovered, in Old English, the ‘h’ in ‘historic’ was often not sounded so people said ‘an ‘istoric’ and it sounded correct.

So, it seems that vestiges of this way of speaking exist in our language and how you choose to say ‘historic’ dictates whether it should be preceded by an ‘an’ or an ‘a’. For the written word however, where the rules of the English language should be properly applied, there is no excuse for ‘an historic’.

Seems like Apple aren’t holding back in their promotion of the new version of iTunes and the Music Store for Windows; they’re teaming up with both Pepsi and AOL to help sell music and iPods. This from the Macrumors live updates from the Apple Music Event:

Bono says he appreciates what Apple’s done and that’s why he’s here to “kiss corporate ass. I don’t always kiss corporate ass”

Once aloft, he was said to be “reading a flight manual in the capsule of the Shenzhou V spacecraft…”

I bet he wished he’d done that before being launched into space. It would be interesting to find what out China decides to call their first person in space; ‘astronaut’ and ‘cosmonaut’ are already taken. Any suggestions?

I seem to have lost the ability to write. Hopefully I’ll find it again soon.

WaSP demonstrate the depressing consequences of the Eolas ruling on Internet Explorer – every time the browser sees an ActiveX object, it will pop up a dialog instructing the user to continue loading the page.

Eolas/Microsoft: Bringing the Web to its Full Potential:

As Phil points out, there are workarounds to this, but with the vast time and money needed to ‘fix’ existing sites, web users are going to be plagued by these pointless dialogs for ever more. Unless of course, they upgrade to a better browser.

A big topic this week has been the OS X Dock and how Mac users are getting the most from it. The O’Reilly article that started the discussion was a kind of Through the Keyhole style look at how Mac users are using their Docks. While the ensuing discussion on the subject was a little less interesting (Here’s mine!) I thought I’d still chip in and explain how I use the Dock. The truth is, I don’t, and my reason is this: when I use the it, I can’t help feeling that it serves more of a purpose to Apple than it does to me.

The Dock is OS X’s unique identifier. On no other platform can you see something on the screen that identifies that platform so clearly. To potential Mac buyers and casual browsers in the Apple store, it’s the first thing they see; the magnifying effect as they roll the mouse over an icon, the bouncing icon as the application is launched, the genie effect when windows are minimised or maximised. I can imagine an Apple sales rep saying something like ‘Look what happens if you hold down Shift when you minimise a window! It’s serves no useful purpose, but it looks great doesn’t it?’. As well as being slick, the Dock is playful and fun, and while I’m no product designer, I know that this is one of the things people look for when they’re choosing one product over another.

In a recent lecture given by Steve Wozniak, he was asked what he thought of the controversial brushed metal effect, he replied ‘I think it’s adequate’. I’d say the same thing about the Dock, if you’re using a handful of programs on a regular basis, it’s adequate, but if you use many apps and utilities and need to categorise them, it’s limiting. I don’t dispute that The Dock is easy to use and intuitive, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a device to turn people on to the Mac platform first and a useful program and file repository second. I don’t blame Apple for this; when OS X was released it needed something to set it apart from the rest and the Dock provides this unique element. If the Dock helps to sell more Macs, especially to Switchers and first-time computer owners, then that’s great. Thing is, I’m already sold on Apple products and have been for the 10+ years that I’ve been using them.

In December last year, Zeldman published an OS X switchers guide in which he linked to a screengrab of his desktop. In it, we see the Dock demoted to the lower right hand side of the screen and Dragthing docks on the left. I had dabbled with the non-registered version of Dragthing for OS 9 and while I liked it, I couldn’t justify the cost of the software when the Apple Menu was good enough. Furthermore, Dragthing required a little imagination to stop it looking ugly with its default gradient colours. Zeldman’s screen grab made me realise just how configurable Dragthing is and his set up seemed like the solution to my Dock woes. So, I installed it, registered it, consigned the Dock to the status of permanently hidden and now I’m 100% happy with my setup.

So here’s my Dock, even though it isn’t an Apple Dock. As you can see my most regularly used programs and files are categorised and can be accessed using the tabs. Unlike the Apple Dock, running programs are stored in what is called the ‘Process Dock’ which can be seen in this full screen grab.

I believe that the Apple Dock is suffering from the ‘One Button Mouse Syndrome’; it’s crying out for more functionality for those who require it. However, judging by Apple’s stubbornness with the solitary mouse button, we could be waiting a long time to get it.

The Original Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products. Here are my favourites:

• ACME Atom Re-Arranger
• ACME Dehydrated Boulders
• ACME Jet-Propelled Pogo Stick

[via BoingBoing]