If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinkingabout what you're writing in prompts and questions in software.Also interesting is a followup entry on whyeveryone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball .)

Here's a brief history and explanation of how cut and paste works in theX Windows system (to give it its formal name), prompted by this blogentry withthe entirely reasonable gripe that selecting something in a program andthen exiting the program causes the selection to disappear.

There are two separate cut and paste mechanisms in X, from two separateeras: the cut buffer and selections.The cut buffer is the older mechanism, and works by having programs storethe cut data into an X property on the

A while back I wrote about the two faces of RSS , in the process of which I held up Slashdotas an example of a site where I preferred the actual site to thesyndication feed by a large margin, and why.

I have to change that, because Slashdot has lost me as a regular visitorto their website, and what Slashdot stuff I read nowadays is almostentirely through their RSS feed. It's for the traditional reasons: awebsite redesign that actually injected 'design'.

Slashdot used to

We rebooted this server Monday around 6:50pm, so a number of the statsare truncated this week. Having said that, this week, we:

• got 11,369 messages from 257 different IP addresses.
• handled 15,931 sessions from 851 different IP addresses.
• received 87,698 connections from at least 31,657 different IPaddresses since Monday evening.
• hit a highwater of 6 connections being checked at once sinceMonday