You know those Flash banner ads? The ones that feature silhouettes of dancing girls hawking mortgage refinancing? Or popups that play audio? Or the classier but mildly bandwidth-hogging corporate videos? While I appreciate that advertising is paying for content creation, it doesn’t erase the fact that a lot of Flash content is really annoying- and it can measurably delay pageload times on my crappy home DSL connection.

But then a colleague at the University turned me on to ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that not only automatically disables the loading of flash content, it comes with this added little bonus: being able to load H.264 content from YouTube that is normally only sent to iPhone users, while us poor non-mobile Luddites are stuck with much crappier video quality. But no more, thanks to this handy plugin. I’ve been using this thing for a couple of weeks now and love it. If you’re a Safari user, install this bad boy without delay!

K.C. Green, tellin’ it like it is.

If you hadn’t heard already through Digg, Slashdot, or any one of a number of places that have probably been spewing the news for a while, CodeWeavers has put their money where their mouth was, and is giving away license codes for CrossOver since the President “met” their Lame Duck Challenge.

This offer is only good today, October 28th, 2008, so get it while the gettin’s good.

(CodeWeavers’ site is getting hammered right now and has been replaced with a bare-bones-bandwidth-saving page, so if you missed news of the Challenge, Mac|Life has this article that provides some backstory.)

It’s easy enough to see machines that are on your segment of the network, and browse through any files they might be sharing. But these days machines do a lot more than simple file sharing. There’s no way, though, to tell at a glance if a machine is running ssh, sharing out its iPhoto library, or something similar.

If there are Macs on your network, you can use Flame to quickly suss out and display the services running on the machines in your VLAN. It’s still under development, but it still seems pretty handy. Enjoy.

Lest you develop the impression from my last few posts, gentle reader, that I am a one-dimensional, Windows-hating Mac fanboy, rest assured that my reservoir of bile is nearly inexhaustible, and certainly sufficient to allow a liberal spew of disdain over all major contemporary operating systems and their associated applications.

Take, for example, iWeb. I’ve never found it very useful, but that’s primarily because I’m already comfortable with a more technical suite of applications, comprised chiefly of BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and WordPress. Though I eschew iWeb as a development tool, its merits are nonetheless readily discernable; in a nutshell, it makes website creation very easy for users who know nothing about HTML, Javascript, XML, RSS, AJAX, or any other dollop of the alphabet soup in which the modern Web floats, and no reason or motivation to learn about it.

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Its progress is insidious. It takes hold from within. Often viewed initially as a benign thing, it can quickly metastasize, growing alarmingly strong and fast, until its host has been subsumed, converted into a ruthlessly efficient vector for spreading it further into other, unsuspecting individuals.

I’m talking, of course, about Mac ownership.

Our department is now pretty much Mac-centric, but most of the other units in our division are still Windows-only shops (to say nothing of Linux). Yet just the other day one of the desktop techs, a staunch Windows user, declared that he’s in need of a new laptop. Since being able to run both OSes on a single machine would be a benefit in his work, he came over and asked about our group’s experience with Boot Camp and virtual machines. Now, since you can’t run OS X as a virtual machine in a Windows environment without hacking the OS, the only reliable single-machine solution is really to get a Mac laptop, and that’s the conclusion he seemed to have arrived at, too.

Now, it’s a given that he’ll be running Windows as his primary OS. But OS X will be there for the times he needs to roll out to help a Mac user. As a long-time Windows user who is (justifiably) deeply skeptical of the usual Mac fanboy faggotry , he’s certainly not going to just start guzzling the Kool-Aid.

But now he’ll have the cup right there on his desk. It might be empty, at first, but it’ll be there, waiting.

Sooner or later, he’ll take that first little sip.