Have any of you NetNewsWire users found NNW to be intolerably slow on any operations involving WebKit after installing Mac OS X 10.4.3? When I open a tab in NetNewsWire to view the link from an item, it takes forever to switch to that tab, and closing tabs and switching back is incredibly slow as well. I have no idea if the updates to WebKit are to blame, but that’s where I’m pointing the finger right now. To fix the problem for now I’ve told NNW to just open links in my default browser rather than using the internal browser.

On a related note, I’ve switched from Bloglines to NetNewsWire. I was a dedicated Bloglines user, mainly because I appreciated having the ability to view my feeds on any computer, but I’ve actually appreciated using a real desktop application as opposed to a Web application lately, mainly because it’s easy to leave NetNewsWire without reading everything and pick up where I left off whenever I want to. I generally opened lots of feeds at once in Bloglines, and found it difficult to avoid having several browser windows open at the same time, all pointing to Bloglines, or accidentally closing the browser and losing track of what I’d already read. The only reason this surprises me is that I had felt like I was on a one way trip away from desktop applications and toward browser-based applications. Apparently that’s not the case, yet.

Sony has released software that removes the rootkit installed by one of their copy protection schemes. (Via Boing Boing)

Updated to fix the link to the patch, and to note that the patch just removes the bits that hide the software Sony installs. The actual copy protection remains as it was. Also, read Ed Felten’s analysis of the patch.

Bad publicity for Sony’s DRM is busting out all over. First there was the post about Sony music CDs silently installing a rootkit when you insert them in your computer, and now we learn that Sony is using DRM to fight with Apple over opening the iPod. Of course the iPod works fine with unprotected audio files, Apple just doesn’t support competing DRM. I’m fine with that. (I don’t buy tracks from the iTunes Music Store.)

Lots of people seem to be talking about the attention crisis lately. There’s so much out there to pay attention to that nobody has enough time to pay attention to everything they’re interested in. The attention I pay to feeds I subscribe to waxes and wanes regularly. Sometimes I page through them hardly reading anything, other times I page through them sort of paying attention. I’ve never been one to carefully read much of anything, especially on the first pass.

Anyway, I can cope with the fact that there’s too much stuff out there to give my attention to everything that I might want to. I’d love to read the New Yorker and Economist and New York Review of Books and the local paper, and the list of books I’d like to read but haven’t even picked up is staggering. Then there’s the canon of great movies that I’d like to see someday, and all of the musicians I’ll never listen to, and the list goes on and on. Then there’s the stuff I’m drawn to like a moth to a flame that I regard as a total waste of time. I’m a sucker for repeats of certain TV shows and computer games and certain gossipy web sites and every minute I spend on those things is a minute I don’t do something I probably should be doing.

What really gets to me, though, is how hard it is to become well-informed on a subject and how easy it is to offer your opinion as though you’re well-informed on a subject. As bad as being spread to thin is, what’s worse is coming to accept the level of ignorance at which we all inevitably operate. Pick any important topic, think about it, and you realize that there is no such thing as being fully informed. Take the Wal-Mart memo on health insurance costs that was in the news last week. I’ve read several articles on it, all of which make some sense to me. And that’s one memo from one company. When you expand that to health insurance or to the even larger topic of health care, you realize that humility is indicated.

And yet what the world is really full of is people on TV shows, or weblogs, or in newspapers giving what sound like authoritative opinions on topics that they don’t really understand. How much of our attention do we spend on that sort of thing? Thinking about this information deficit has put me off writing about many topics. I don’t want to be one more voice offering “solutions” to problems that I don’t fully comprehend. I’d rather stick to writing about things I do know a lot about (developing Web applications) and pointing to good writing that inform rather than argue, and I try to spend my scarce attention on those things rather than on punditry.

I’m considering using Ruby on Rails for a big, important project. Today I was reading about the deployment options for Rails, and none of them sound all that promising. You can deploy on WEBrick, which is just a Ruby script. That works fine for development or for small internal sites, but isn’t appropriate for larger sites. The second option is to deploy on Apache 1.3 with FastCGI. The third option is to deploy on lighttpd, which at the time Agile Web Development with Rails was written, has “a number of major stability problems.” Obviously there are some big, popular applications written in Rails, but I don’t want to put the system administrator in a position where his pager is going off all night because of the deployment options forced upon us by choosing Rails as our development environment.

Obviously, if Rails continues to grow in popularity, this won’t be an issue. Someone will provide a way to run Rails applications on Apache 2 and lighttpd’s stability problems will be eliminated. In the meantime, though, is it worth making a full commitment to Rails? Chapter 22 of the Rails book has left me a bit shaken.

I am irritated by the fact that the Mac OS X 10.4.3 update today changed the behavior of the middle mouse button so that rather than opening links in my browser in a new tab, it opens the Dashboard application. Fortunately the change is easy to reverse in the System Preferences. Messing with basic user interface elements in a security update just seems inconsiderate.