AppleInsider last week: “Apple has threatened a cessation of the Apple developer seeding program due to the confidentiality breaches. As a result, AppleInsider will not publish information reported from the most recent set of developer notes associated with build 7H50.”

AppleInsider today: “‘Mac OS X 10.3.4 build 7H51a includes changes to the Software Update application,’ the company reportedly told testers in a set of seed notes. ‘To help test these changes, we are delivering this build through Software Update.’”

Good job holding the moral high ground there.

Isn’t it funny how offering free gigabyte email accounts is suddenly newsworthy? After Google’s introduction of Gmail, at least two “competitors” have been very widely publicized. First Spymac matched Google’s disk space offer, and today Reuters of all places is telling us that an Israeli portal site is doing it, too.

What I’m wondering is why these companies were happy with just matching Google’s offer, rather than, say, upping the ante to 2GB? After all, the costs of email storage start to mount only after user adoption and a significant pile of received emails. And that probably means “never” for a site like Spymac.

Perhaps my blog should start offering ten-gigabyte email accounts. I just fear that besting Gmail by an order of magnitude would upset all the genius financial analysts out there and undermine the upcoming Google IPO.

Accidentally went over the limit on my MasterCard today. How did I notice? The Search Inside the Book™ results at a9.com stopped working. Apparently they check your card on every access. Is it just me, or is this seamless interconnectedness of everything getting to a pretty frightening level?

dyork: The height of a small cap should be equal to the x-height of the typeface. In most cases, the difference between the x-height and the height of an uppercase letter is big enough to make “fake” small caps look bad even to the casual observer. The obvious problem is the difference between stroke widths of the cap and the small cap, but there are more subtle differences as well. Most real small caps cuts have tweaked the “optical size” of the letterforms to suit the smaller size of the characters.

Unlike haruspex, I don’t really think that this is your problem. It seems to me that the correct browser implementation would be to render the small caps only if there’s an appropriate small caps font available, and revert to normal rendering otherwise. Apparently nobody is doing it this way, though…

Okay, credit where credit’s due: in the previous post I talked about Apple’s default installations of cyrus and PHP being substandard. Their bundled python and perl installations leave little to be desired, however. It’s pretty amazing to see PostgreSQL’s PL/Tcl, PL/Python and PL/Perl building and running on an out-of-the-box consumer OS without any additional software.

I do have one wish for the next Mac OS X release, though: please, please, please bundle readline. Much of the already included software would find and use it, resulting in a much better cli experience.