2002

Technology meltdown

/ current events

The New York Times has a review of the new BMW 745. In addition to pointing out that dealers allow new buyers 3 hours to get acquainted with the car before actually driving it, the reviewer mentions this anecdote:

My beagle, whose job description is “scan roadsides for squirrels,” is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.

I like high-tech gadgets as much as the next guy, but come on! This is technology run amok.

Arming the peasants

/ current events

From the New York Times: A Faulty Rethinking of the 2nd Amendment

There is one striking curiosity to the Bush administration’s advancing its position at this time. Advocates of the individual-right interpretation typically argue that an armed populace is the best defense against the tyranny of our own government. And yet the Bush administration seems quite willing to compromise essential civil liberties in the name of security.

With all the other civil liberties George II (and even moreso, Ashcroft) is keen to delete, he definitely shouldn’t be so gung-ho about leaving guns in the hands of the peasantry.

De-spamming tools

/ net stuff

We all hate spam, right? (I’m assuming that anyone who actually likes spam is probably a spammer, and therefore not the type to read this blog) We hate receiving it, and those of us who have websites have to face the prospect that if our pages contain any e-mail addresses, that spambots will attempt to strip-mine those addresses from our web pages, consuming resources on our web servers and making us complicit in their evildoing.

The simplest and most Draconian approach is to remove all e-mail addresses from your site. But that goes completely contrary to the two-way spirit of the Internet. You could just show a graphic representation of your e-mail address, but that’s inconvenient–your legitimate correspondents would need to hand-type it into their mail clients. (And what happens when spambots are wired up to optical-character recognition software? And what about people who have image-loading turned off?) Some people have gone to extraordinary length to foil spambots. One approach is to create a spambot trap, also called a tarpit. Another approach is to encode your address in a way that most web browsers will represent as a normal, usable address with a clickable link, but will confound an unsophisticated spambot. I was impressed by this one, which actually uses javascript and prime-factoring encryption to conceal the underlying address.

I’m telling ya, it’s a jungle out there.

Shadow of the Vampire

/ movies

Watched Shadow of the Vampire with Gwen last night. Excellent movie. In a way, Willem Dafoe was wasted in the role of Max Schreck, because Dafoe is already creepy-looking, but the character had so much makeup on that even Britney Spears would have been creepy-looking. But he did a wonderful job with the part.

And while this is hardly the first movie where the story involves a movie-inside-the-movie, where the movie and the inside-movie have parallel plots, this one seemed to subtly blur the lines in a way that I like.

Aches and pains, two days later

/ personal

I’ve noticed that when returning to some kind of exercise after a hiatus, it’s not the day after that I feel stiff and sore–it’s two days after.

So it is now with running. Various minor aches and pains in my legs. But you know what? The pains are symmetrical. This is a good sign.

Running again

/ personal

I just got back from a run.

This wouldn’t be news for most people, but everyone has a story. Mine is that on two separate occasions, I’ve broken my hip and my pelvis, and I’m still walking around with eleven screws and a plate in the left side of my pelvis from the latter accident. So ever since, I’ve been a bit leery about running. I tried it a bit after I recovered, and sure enough, it was kind of painful. So I backed off, thinking perhaps I needed more time to really recover, and I’d try again. Well, it’s been over two years since I last tried it, and over the past few days I’ve been talking myself into trying again. Tonight there was nothing else I particularly wanted to do, it was hot, and I’ve always enjoyed running on hot nights, so I pulled on the lycra and the shoes and went for a loop around the neighborhood. 1.7 miles. Not much distance, but OK for a start. I did feel a tiny sting on the outside point of my trochanter, but I consider that an annoying pain, not a worrisome pain. And a little tightness breathing, but that’s normal. Overall I felt pretty good.

We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. I want to be able to stick with it this time. I don’t like taking crap from my body.

Mixed messages

/ tidbit

Bumper stickers spotted side-by-side on the same car:

My child is an honor student at Bowie High and Follow me to the Yellow Rose (a well known strip club).

File this one under “Things I don’t understand” (that file-folder is very thick, yes). I don’t have anything against strip clubs or high schools, but the juxtaposition is pretty weird.

She-Devils

/ movies

Chicks in leather hotpants, hotrods and vintage motorcycles, and enough piercings and tattoos to start a sideshow–and that’s just the audience.

The Alamo Drafthouse, quite possibly the most wonderful movie theater ever, held a drive-in double-feature at the defunct Longhorn Speedway. She-Devils on Wheels with Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! With two live bands for entertainment, and Satan’s Cheerleaders to introduce everything. But wait, that’s not even the good part: Tura Satana and Haji were there in person, signing autographs, answering questions, and generally creating an aura of lascivious legitimacy at the event. Did I get pictures? Oh, you bet. Including one that answers the question (in case you’ve ever wondered) “What does a woman with fake tits look like by the time she’s a grandmother? As disturbing as that question sounds, the answer is moreso. I’m not talking about Tura or Haji, by the way (Tura’s gained some weight, but still looks pretty good; Haji just looks great)–I’m talking about a member of the audience.

Admittedly, not all was perfect. They had set up a PA at the front (for the benefit those of us not in cars, like me), and it was getting its signal from the back by low-power FM–but with a useless antenna, so the audio frequently was overwhelmed by static. When Tura and Haji were taking questions, a mound of fire ants got riled up, and I’ve got some bites to show for it. And finally, the second feature hadn’t even started at midnight, so I bailed and came home. I’m not complaining–I had a good time.

More notes on the upgrade

/ technology

More notes on the upgrade to OS X. Just installed Quickeys X. I have been a longtime user of Quickeys, and while I probably didn’t get as much mileage out of it as some people, I found it to be extremely handy. So I am extremely disappointed by the new version, which is much less capable than its predecessor. Some of this is perhaps excusable–the software clearly had to be re-written from the ground up for OS X, and perhaps some features were intractable to implement. But there are others that they simply dropped–like inserting a custom-formatted date (which I used all the time)–which clearly would not have been difficult to implement. What had previously been a handy macro type that zipped you to a certain directory when in an Open File/Save File dialog, or opened that directory when in the Finder, has been confusingly split into two separate types, and the one that zips you around when opening/saving files operates so slowly that it’s almost not worth using (and can be easily stumped).

Perhaps with time, I’ll figure out how to bend this version to my will, but I suspect that I wasted my money on this. There’s a freeware macro utility for OS X, and that’s probably a better deal (hell, the price is right). I’ll have to check it out.

It’s not easy being green

/ current events

“Imagine. Ice skating in the deep South in 90-plus degree weather, on an ice-rink completely powered by solar energy.”

I love the idea, but I’ve recently learned that the greenhouse gases associated with the manufacture of solar cells are pretty significant. So there’s no easy way out. The Rocky Mountain Institute has long promoted the concept of “negawatts”–that is, making more energy available by not using as much of it in the first place. I think this should be our highest priority.

360 ride

/ cycling

30 mile ride with Caesar today, northbound on 360. Wind out of the south. Fast. Whee. Light traffic. Caesar showed me a shortcut that I like.

Oh my God, it’s full of stars!

/ tidbit

One of the lines from 2001 that sticks in my head is when Dave gasps “Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”

That’s my reaction to the new Hubble photos. One of the images shows 6,000 galaxies in the background, and if I recall correctly, the field of view in that image is equivalent to that of a dime viewed at 70 feet.

Death to Smoochy

/ movies

Just saw Death to Smoochy. Good movie–clever, sharp dialog, manages to balance sweetness with sharpness pretty well. And I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is always a plus. As usual, they were playing something weird-but-appropriate before the movie started. In this case (unsurprisingly), it was footage of the Evil Purple One, though mercifully without the sound. I asked the guy who came to take my order if he could perhaps bring some “mild hallucinogens to help make Barney easier to stomach.”

Follow-up on censorship

/ tidbit

Follow-up time:

Turns out the blogger I mentioned in this conundrum never asked for the offensive website to be removed, he just mentioned it to the index’s, uh, curator.

The amazing Jenster (who doesn’t have a web page, otherwise I’d point a link at her), who tipped me off to the dating-hell story believes the story to be a fake. She points out in particular A) the time-zone problem in international chat sessions; B) the extreme improbability that the guy would be able to meet her in the baggage-claim area after they had both taken international flights from two different points; C) the improbability that someone who hopes to have any credibility as a tech writer would have ever fallen into a situation like this in the first place. I think she’s on to something, which raises the question (if you’re a linguistic pedant like me, it does not beg the question): why invent such a story?

Language-recognition algorithm

/ language

This is fascinating. Italian researchers have found a way to identify the source language of a text just based on how that text has been treated by a compression algorithm. It gets better:

The scientists performed a further test of their technique by analyzing a single text that has been translated into many different languages — in this case the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The researchers used their method to measure the linguistic “distance” between more than 50 translations of this document. From these distances, they constructed a family tree of languages that is virtually identical to the one constructed by linguists.

Blogging & hate speech

/ tidbit

The kind of conundrum only a blogger could face: Blogdex recently removed a hate-speech website from its index. A discussion ensued, in the course of which the person who originally complained about the website in question accidentally outed himself. Now, here’s the thing: I really want to dislike this guy for being such a cringing pansy that he promotes censorship to protect his delicate sensibilities, but the thing is, he’s got a good blog.

Ultimate bad date…?

/ tidbit

Now this is what I call a bad date. Not to be cruel, but the clue-phone was ringing for a long time before this woman got around to picking it up. I’m signed up on nerve.com too, and I’ve gone on some bad dates (including a comically bad one this past Wednesday), but I haven’t had any experiences remotely like this one.

Eeyore’s Birthday

/ personal

Eeyore’s Birthday was held this past Saturday. I went for a couple hours, saw some of the usual suspects. Big hippie-freak fest.

I debated bringing my own camera, but it’s hard to just enjoy yourself when your trying to document everything.

This whole OS X upgrade

/ personal

This whole OS X upgrade thing is still consuming way too much of my time. I need to go for a bike ride.

Installing the update from 10.1 to 10.1.3 was a huge pain in the ass, since I had had the audacity to move some apps around. The updater couldn’t find them, and so installed “stubs” containing the modified resources (but not necessarily a complete app) where it did expect them. I wound up moving the new resources into the old apps, very carefully (yes, this is possible). Then I had to delete the old stuff, which turned out not to be very easy. Seems that there was an invisible file that really didn’t want to be deleted. I wound up breaking into Terminal and using sudo rm .recalcitrant_file to take care of it. There’s probably an easier way, but I’m not sure what.

Mail clients for OS X are also a pain in the ass. Capsule reviews of the apps I’ve tried:

Eudora

The OS X version of this, for me, is a step backwards because I can’t seem to make it support Japanese, and Steve Dorner’s team hasn’t gotten the internationalization message. Plus the fact that it’s still beta. How long has OS X been out now?

Mulberry

Ugly. Weird. I’m not a UI queen, but sheesh, I spend a lot of time in my mail client, and I don’t want to have to look at that.

Entourage

Slow and gimmicky (it’s from Microsoft, so this is not a surprise). I’ve also read that it starts going haywire when you have a really big mail database. Mine isn’t really big, but why risk it.

Sweetmail

This now has a beta version for OS X, but it won’t boot to my machine. Probably checking for a Japanese OS or something.

Powermail

In theory this does handle Japanese, but it failed to import my old Japanese messages from Eudora correctly, which is a problem. Perhaps it would have better luck extracting them by way of Mail.app.

Mailsmith

I love BBEdit, especially now that it has Japanese capability, but Mailsmith still doesn’t. It has lots of other virtues, but no Japanese=no good for me. I read some criticism somewhere that it’s too expensive. Get real. How much time do we spend on e-mail? Lots. If a product can make your life easier, it’s worth a few bucks.

So that leaves us with Mail.app, which is included. That’s what I’m currently using. It has embarrassingly weak filtering (“rules”) capabilities, and a distinct paucity of keyboard commands. But it seems to be fast and reliable. I’ll switch if I find something better though.