February 2005 Archives
I haven't been blogging much lately - not because there haven't been interesting things to note and ruminate on, but because I've been so !@#$* busy trying to get stuff done to get ready to leave the country for my Vietnam bike trip.
We leave tomorrow night, and most of that work stuff didn't get done anyway, but off we go.
So I won't be blogging here for the next two weeks, but for those who are interested we hope to be posting regularly to our Vietnam Bike Blog. I look forward to sharing tales with all of you when we return.
Cliff Lynch from CNI was here at the UW on Valentine's Day, and the talk he gave is now available from from the Catalyst Spark Sessions web site as both mp3 and Real streaming.
I wasn't able to attend the talk, and haven't yet listened to the file, so I can't comment on the specific content. But Cliff is always worth listening to.
I like this quote from Tim Bray's Ongoing weblog:
The proportion of thought leaders who use IE on Windows is trending to zero.
and his resulting conclusion (when talking about Google's new tagging feature):
releasing anything IE-only generally sucks.
At work in a previous job we used to joke about sending packages "Einstein Express - when it absolutely has to be there the day before yesterday."
I was reminded of that when I saw CNET's blurb on the new Casio Exilim Pro EX-P505 camera in their coverage of the PMA 2005 trade show:
The novel Past Movie mode uses a buffer to start recording 7 seconds before you press the shutter release.
Wow.
Ryan Barrett, a Silicon Valley software engineer with a distinguished resume, has put together a brief look comparing Pine and Gmail.
I started off this morning by managing to delete all the messages from my Inbox, which had almost 3000 messages in it.
Somewhere on the OSAF Wiki there was a page where they described several different common patterns of using email. One of them was methodically deleting or filing each email into a folder as it is read. Another was leaving all email in the Inbox and coping with it there (the fact that I can't find that page now might suggest something about the effectiveness of wikis for managing lots of into) . Much as I'd like to behave in the former fashion, I'm much closer to the latter.
I was setting up a new account in Thunderbird on the Powerbook, looking at the same set server and folder set as my existing account, in order to use a different From: address. That worked fine, but I then realized there was a better way of accomplishing the same thing, so I deleted the account.
It was only after deleting the account that I realized that I had mistakenly set up the account using the default access method, which on Thunderbird (like many mail clients) is for POP instead of IMAP, and set to delete messages from the server after retrieving them.
Why would anyone ship an email client that by default deletes your messages from the server?
While there was a certain degree of liberation in suddenly being freed from all of the tasks I had facing me, I quickly realized that I was going to be in deep doo-doo without some of the messages in that Inbox.
Luckily, I was able to discover that, since I have Thunderbird on my Powerbook setup to make my Inbox messages available offline, there was a file named Inbox in my ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles directory. Seeing as the file was almost 66 megabytes and had a timestamp of just before I made my boneheaded mistake, I figured it was likely to be my Inbox - and it was!
The next task was how to access the Inbox, or the copy of it that I quickly made.
My first thought was to use Thunderbird's Import facility, which can import mail from other programs, including Eudora, which uses the same mbox mailbox format as Thunderbird.
But the filenames for the Inbox file and the copy were greyed out when I ran the Import utility, so I couldn't select them.
My colleague Zephyr suggested opening the file with Pine on the Powerbook.
I created a new collection in Pine, navigated to the Inbox file, and opened it - which worked beautfully! I was then able to save the 3000 messages back up to a new folder on the IMAP server, and all my messages were again accessible. Whew.
That's no way to start a day.
But the moral of the story is, when you really need flexible ways to work with email, Pine is your friend!
Finally some good news on the intellectual property front!
From the BBC:
EU software patent law faces axe
The European Parliament has thrown out a bill that would have allowed software to be patented.
Politicians unanimously rejected the bill and now it must go through another round of consultation if it is to have a chance of becoming law.
During consultation the software patents bill could be substantially re-drafted or even scrapped.
Joel Spolsky, who produces the FogBugz bug tracking software (as well as writing the popular Joel on Software blog) has written an introduction to a new book called Project Management with FogBugz.
The introduction is terrific reading.
He starts by talking about restaurants in his neighborhood of Manhattan, particularly a very popular one called Isabella's:
Here’s a clue as to why Isabella’s works. In ten years living in this neighborhood, I still go back there. All the time. Because they’ve never given me a single reason not to.
That actually says a lot.
Then he talks about other restaurants that have lots of problems, even though the food may be better than Isabella's. And then he says:
Eventually, Isabella’s became a fabulously profitable and successful restaurant, not because of its food, but because it was debugged. Just getting what we programmers call “the edge cases” right was sufficient to keep people coming back, and telling their friends, and that’s enough to overcome a review where the New York Times calls your food “not very good.”
Great products are great because they’re deeply debugged. Restaurants, software, it’s all the same.
Great software doesn’t crash when you do weird, rare things, because everybody does something weird.
Microsoft developer Larry Osterman, working on DOS 4, once thought he had found a rare bug. “But if that were the case,” he told DOS architect Gordon Letwin, “it’d take a one in a million chance for it to happen.”
Letwin’s reply? “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday.”
Engadget has a nice tutorial on how to build a low cost multitrack recording studio around a Mac Mini (though it applies to using any Mac or Firewire-equipped computer).
(thanks to Matt Haughey for pointing this out)
There's a good interview in Reason with author Neal Stephenson. Public Knowledge's Mike Godwin does the interview.
It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.
Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez!
You should be listening to WWOZ, America's best radio station.
image from the Penny Postcards from Louisiana site
I was looking to change the content of the RSS feeds over on our Vietnam Ride blog and wondering how to do that, and of course I found the answer at Elise Bauer's wonderful Learning Movable Type site.
If you're using Movable Type you really need to know about this site.
Thanks, Elise!
I've got a Memory Stick problem.
I was downloading some photos from my Sony DSC-S75 camera into iPhoto when the camera ran out of battery and shut down.
After plugging it into the wall power, the iPhoto wouldn't resume the download.
Looking at the camera volume on the Mac desktop I see one folder, DCIM, which has a subfolder named 100MSDCF that has all my pictures in it.
There's also file on the camera volume named MEMSTICK.IND which has a lock icon next to it. I suspect the lock on this file is my problem.
I copied the photos off the volume and imported them into iPhoto just fine, then erased them from the camera volume. Then I shot a new photo on the camera, but when I attach it to the Mac, iPhoto won't even recognize there's a camera there.
When I use Command-I on the MEMSTICK.IND file it shows that it's locked, but when I uncheck the "Locked" checkbox, it just gets reset again a minute later.
Am I going to just have to give up on this particular memory stick? Seems like ungraceful error handling, to say the least.
Am I the only person left without an iPod?
Wired News has a piece on the proliferation of iPods on the Microsoft campus.
"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."
The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.
So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.
That's a sure way to compete.
Doc points out this good interview with Steve Jobs in Business Week.
Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That's a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.
But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?
So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't.
Over the holidays I fell in love with a seasonal tea blend from Tazo called Joy, a blend of black, green, and oolong teas that tastes heavenly with a bit of honey and milk. Now that I've used up all the boxes of it that I bought up, I wrote to Tazo and told them that they should make it available all year round.
Jen, the "Shaman's Apprentice" at Tazo, wrote back saying:
We do produce another blend of black, green and oolong teas called
Montage that you can find as a full leaf tea year round. While the
blend is different than Joy, it might be something you could enjoy
during the "off-season".
Jen gave me three different sites where I could order Montage. The first site I visited had Montage for $7.25 but had a $15 minimum on orders. The second site would only sell me two packs at once, for $15.98, and they wanted $7.95 for US Postal shipping in 5-10 days. The third site would sell me one package, for $8.75, and only wanted $4.00 for Fedex Ground shipping, but their order page didn't even encrypt the credit card number!
I guess I'll try to find a local retailer here in Seattle that stocks Montage....sheesh.
I saw somebody ride by the other night as I left work with bright blue lights in her bike spokes, and I had to stop her and ask her what they were - "Hokey Spokes!" she said.
These LED equipped bike lights go in your spokes and form patterns or messages as you ride. These are way toooo cool....I gotta get some!
