When do I get crazy-assed bikini models with sexual addiction issues lurking in the bushes? I think I could handle that. Instead, I get this tripe.

Hilarious mailing list exchange in which John C. Welch, who suffers no fools, goes from being helper to stalker in just four moves. Keep reading into the comments to see the inevitable appearance of a lawyer-wannabe (and his subsequent about-face). A must read.

After four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Unix, the operating system born at Bell Labs 40 years ago has established a legacy likely to endure for decades more. It can claim parentage of a long list of popular software, including the Unix offerings of IBM, HP and Sun, Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux. It has also influenced systems with few direct roots in Unix, such as Microsoft’s Windows NT and the IBM and Microsoft versions of DOS.

The [Association for Computing Machinery] may have said it best in its 1983 Turing award citation in honor of Thompson and Ritchie’s Unix work: “The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others.”

Following Jeff Atwood’s recent catastrophe with his Coding Horror website, he asked his readers if anyone could help with or suggest ways in which he might recover the images that had been lost when his web-server’s hard disk went off to its final resting place. One of Atwood’s readers came up with a remarkably elegant and clever way of recovering some of those images from the browser caches of Coding Horror readers (complete with code samples). This is the sort of hack I love: clever, imaginative, effective and single-minded. Awesome stuff.

Another reminder folks that we should all be obsessive about doing our backups and restores.

A large part of my professional work involves the build and deployment of WordPress-based websites. Now as any designers/developers among you will appreciate, it can be extremely annoying frustrating to sign off a build only to come back later to see that your client has (inadvertantly) messed things up because WordPress has placed too much power in their hands.

I was delighted then to read “10 WordPress Dashboard Hacks” because there are some really useful code snippets presented therein:

• Remove Dashboard Menus: At last I can remove certain menus from the client’s view — whilst obviously still leaving full control for the Admin user
• Define Login and Dashboard Logos: Great for branding.
• Disable the “Please Upgrade Now” message: I never want my clients to do this. I think this is one of my responsibilities.
• Customise Dashboard Widgets: Again, it’s about keeping control. Not exposing the client to things which could be hazardous.
• Provide Help Messages: Because they’re helpful (if done correctly).

Some of these are definitely going to be rolled out on to some of my client’s sites in the near future.

Using Graphics Card Memory as Swap. Interesting idea: “Graphic cards contain a lot of very fast RAM, typically between 64 and 512 MB. With Linux, it’s possible to use it as swap space, or even as RAM disk.” [via]

Spacewar! was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Stewart Brand — 33 years old at the time — to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a young Annie Leibovitz (23). Play the original 1962 game code running on a PDP-1 emulator in your Java-enabled browser. [via]

Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.

A JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG’s work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Become the proud owner of a high-end desktop “Mac” without paying the Apple Tax. A very cool project indeed.

Rachel Andrew:

Browsers these days are actually pretty good. Most of the time, if I have built and validated something and it works in Firefox, I can be pretty sure that when I do my testing in the latest versions of Opera, Safari, Konqueror and yes even IE8, everything will be fine. This is what we asked for, back in the early days of the web standards movement, and I do think we are getting to that point.

If modern browsers tend to deliver a consistent experience when presented with valid, sane CSS and (X)HTML this only makes more frustrating the sight that we are presented with in older versions of Internet Explorer – version 6 more so than 7, although both have their issues.

As someone who does a fair bit of non-trivial CSS development I thought I would share my practical tips for dealing with IE.old.