November 2004 Archives

I've been testing some things using Outlook 2003 on my Windows machine. Something happened when trying to view a particular PDF document from a link in an email and Outlook stopped responding. I killed it with the Task Manager, and consented to send the error report to Microsoft. The error report process nicely came back noting that there is an update to Office 2003 available that I should probably install. When I clicked on the link, it went off to the Microsoft site, but then came back with a message saying that I needed to use Internet Explorer to get the update (Firefox is my default browser).

I thought it was interesting that you have to use IE to get Office updates.... especially to see that on the same day that real-life exploits of the latest IE vulnerability have been reported.

Of course, my Windows machine is running XP SP2, so it wouldn't have been affected, but it still seems silly that Microsoft should tie updates to other application software to its browser.

UPDATE 24 September
Bruce Fulton points out that it's probably due to Firefox not handling ActiveX controls. I'm not sure I think updates to an application *should* be handled by active code running from a browser. It seems more architecturally sound to me to handle updates to an application (or an application suite) by having the update code run as part of the application itself - which is how Office updates are handled on the Mac.

I'm so tired of dealing with spam comments that I've turned comments off at the present time. I've been getting over a hundred comment spams every day, and even with MT-Blacklist I've still got to go through and delete them all, which is just too time consuming for me.

I'll probably re-enable comments that have been authenticated using TypeKey, but I've got some work to do to reconfiguring Movable Type before I can do that - maybe I'll find some time over the long weekend to do that work.

In the meantime, if you've got a comment you'd like posted, email it to me at oren at washington dot edu and I'll put it in.

Sigh.

I'm down in San Diego for the 2004 ECAR symposium. As usual, Richard Katz and his merry band have put together a very stimulating conference.

This morning started off with a talk by Larry Smarr from UCSD. Larry's been involved with many of the developments of modern information and networking technology over the last 20 or so years, so it's always wise to listen to his perspective.

This time Larry was talking about the sea change in computing that is coming about due to the evolving ubiquitous availability of high capacity fiber linking researchers around the world. He noted that the development of storage and networking technology is outstripping the development of computing power. The growth of projects like National Lambda Rail point us to a future where it is perfectly possible for researchers to have dedicated fiber links running independently of other network traffic at very high speeds.

He pointed to projects like hurricane forcasting or online microscopy (150 megapixel images) presenting real needs for this kind of bandwidth - in projects like these, the lack of high capacity, low latency bandwidth is limiting the amount of work that can be accomplished.

Larry and his colleagues are working on a project called the Optiputer, which is a "is an envisioned infrastructure that will tightly couple computational resources over parallel optical networks using the IP communication mechanism.".

Very interesting and powerful stuff.

This looks cool - Wired is a new music sequencing and recording package for Linux, now available for download in a 0.1 release. Via Slashdot.

I seem to have gotten MT-Blacklist working now - hopefully that will ease up on the amount of comment spam I have to deal with!

I haven't been regular about being on instant messaging for quite some time - in general the synchronous nature of IM tends to be too much of an interruption to the way I work.

But recently I've been using Apple's iChat AV and enjoying it, so I'm making myself a little more available - if you want to chat, I'll be on iChat or AOL IM as oren dot sreebny at mac dot com. I'm also on MSN as oren at cac dot washington dot edu. See you online!

My wife and life-partner Michele notes fairly frequently (usually in a humorously exasperated tone) that I tend towards the overly literal. Maybe it's an occupational hazard borne from spending too many years in front of computers dealing with bits and bytes.

Tim Bray, a fellow I admire quite a bit, reports this exchange on his Ongoing blog:

At the joint where I stop for coffee most mornings, there’s a little notice taped to the counter for the staff. It says “One pound = 455 grams.” This has been bothering me for weeks. This morning something snapped and I said to the pretty sales-girl “You know, that’s wrong.” “What?” “It says 455 grams but it’s really 454.” “What?” “That little sign there, it’s wrong, there are really only 454 grams in a pound.” “WHAT?” She wasn’t parsing me, and I was getting rattled. I think I failed to charm her. Anyhow, there are really only 453.592.

I'm getting something on the order of a couple hundred spam comments a day now.

When I tried to install MT-Blacklist it blew up on me, so I've got to go back and figure out what went wrong, which I haven't had time to do yet.

So in the meantime, I'm moderating all comments and deleting most of them. Hopefully I'm not deleting real comments as I go, but if you post a comment and it doesn't show up on the blog within a couple of days you might try again (and I apologize!).

Shelley notes the same problem, and wonders if she finds a solution if she'll be crowned Queen For a Day. Heck, Shelley - if you solve this problem I think you ought to be nominated for a Nobel Prize!

Matthew is also having problems with Thunderbird compacting folders, but his problems appear to be with folders stored locally on his hard disk rather than on an IMAP server.

Further testing here turns up the interesting fact that if I use the "compact folders" menu item from the File menu Thunderbird ends up crashing on my Mac (not on the Windows version though).

BUT - if I do a Control-Click on the Inbox folder and then pick Compact This Folder from the popup menu, it seems to expunge the deleted messages from my Inbox just fine. That's good enough for my everyday use, though it might be nice to have a button on the toolbar that acts as a "Compact Inbox" click. Thanks to Dave Wall for showing me that I could do that!

So I now have two different theories on why the Compact Folders is crashing T'bird on my Mac - one is that I just have so many folders that if it actually has to go through them all and open them to see if there are messages that need to be expunged that it might well be receiving some sort of time-out before it completes, and perhaps T'bird isn't prepared to deal with that particular error condition (I have 200 IMAP folders on the server, using up about 1.2 Gigabytes of disk space). The other theory is that there is some sort of corruption in one or more of my folders that causes T'bird on the Mac to throw up.

But I'm still using it!

An interesting post from last weekend by Shelley Powers, that somewhat echoes my own platform experience. I've added Shelley's Burningbird blog to my list of regular reads.

A few years ago, I never would have thought this could occur. I had written a best-selling book on COM/COM+ and ASP for O’Reilly, I was a member of the Microsoft Development Network, had passed several Windows certification tests, attended Windows conferences almost exclusively, and programmed primarily in VB and VC++ and just a little Java. In addition, I scoffed at the Macs with their cute graphics, and decided if I were to go with a second environment, away from my beloved Windows, it would be Linux.

This weekend, though, I was able to install several open source applications far more easily than I ever could on Linux, primarily because Mac users won’t tolerate piecemeal packages, cryptic installation instructions, and a hackers attitude of “well, if you have to ask how something works, you shouldn’t use it". Best of all, they work out of the box on the Mac – no mucking around with Windows ‘tweaks’.

I'm also increasingly finding OS X to be the *nix for the rest of us.

I hereby join the rest of the tech world in noting that the Firefox browser had its official 1.0 release yesterday. Congratulations to Mitchell Baker and the rest of the Mozilla crew! It's a great browser - I use it as the default browser on all of my computers. If you're still using IE, especially on Windows, you really ought to switch.

Some very interesting uses of cartogram mapping techniques to visualize the US Presidential Election results from Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan. Thanks to Dave Weinberger for pointing this out!

From the out of the mouths of babes department....

Last night my six-year-old son started crooning along with Ella Fitzgerald doing Cole Porter. When I looked at him in wonder, he said "I like to copy the song!" Then he said - "If you copy the whole song, then you've learned the song."

That about sums it up.

It's my experience, in both of my former lives as a musician and as a programmer, that I've learned first by copying what others have done, modifying it bit by bit, until understanding has deepened to a point of originality (or sometimes, my inability to achieve a good copy becomes its own originality). The myth of the creative genius creating brilliant works of art from completely blank slates is just that... a myth.

In jazz, if enough people like to work off your creation as a starting point, it becomes that most revered of compositions - the jazz standard. If the current enforcers were around, we probably wouldn't even have such a thing.

For the last couple of months I've been living with Thunderbird as my primary email client. The good folks at Mozilla have released Thunderbird version 0.9.

So far I've tried it on my Macs and it seems much faster and more responsive overall than previous versions.

There are new features that enhance usability, and it seems to me that both of these features will exacerbate the trend towards very large inboxes, which has implications for those who have to manage large mail servers - generally speaking, the larger an IMAP folder is, the more processing time it takes to open, read, or perform other operations on it.

The big new feature is "saved-search folders", which creates what looks like a folder in your folder list, but is really just a view into your inbox based on a filter. So I can have, for example, a "folder" of all messages from Joe Blow, based on the string "Joe Blow" occurring in the

from:

line of the email. This means that I don't have to find and drag all those messages into that folder, and new messages are automatically added to the folder as they come in, but without being removed from the inbox. This is similar to how views work in Google mail.

The other new feature is "message grouping", which lets you organize collapsing groups within your folders, based on criteria like when it arrived. Here's the example screenshot, of an inbox with groups based on arrival date.

0.9 does not fix the problem I'm having on the Mac platform of the software crashing when I try to compact folders (which, as far as I know is the only way to expunge deleted IMAP messages in Thunderbird). This seems to be something peculiar to my account, as it doesn't happen on my other test accounts, nor can I find anyone else who's seen this problem. It is very odd, though, that it doesn't happen if I use the Windows version of Thunderbird. I'll continue trying to track down the details on this one...

Overnight another 103 spam comments posted to the blog.

What the heck is the deal with these?

I used to think that the idea was to get the links published in lots of places so that those links came up higher in Google searches for those particular uhhh.... topics.

But I took a couple of the latest batch and tried the links - and they don't even go anywhere or resolve at all! What the hell do these folks hope to accomplish with these ads? It don't make no sense to me... color me aggravated.

My depressed thoughts on the election are posted over on our Vietnam Bike Ride Blog.

I've received several hundred comment spams to this blog in the last 24 hours.

Go away you lame-brain scuzzballs! Don't you realize that your comments never make it onto the blog?

All you're doing is causing me work and clogging things up on the server.

May you all rot in a long lasting hell.