empty resources, everywhere.

if you were bored enough to google for (say) "python networking tools" you would end up with numerous impoverished ad-pusher "programmer" resource sites as top hits. for additional humor, you may want to follow into that top hit "bigwebmaster" and take a look at Python/Scripts_and_Programs section. [i'll spare you the link, and deny the additional hits to this hole] corner indicator: 0 resources and growing! [note the exclamation!] a whole page of pedestrian classifications, all empty: Contests (0), Countdowns (0), Counters (0), Customer Support (0), Database Tools (0), Development Tools (0), Discussion Boards (0), E-Commerce (0), Education (0) ... ad nauseam

increasingly, casual googling resembles smashing one's head to a nearby wall to improve one's vision...

shuffle, part deux

a worthwhile shuffle II review in macintouch. i agree with most of it; i do belong to that portion of the male population who cannot tell green and amber colors apart. having used the new shuffle for a couple of weeks, i agree that the clip is done just right. this one definitely belongs in moma: it shows how to be a minimalist without being inhuman or stupid.

[amusing contrast: ikea's coffee mug design ad, which shows how a little gap at the bottom of the cup stops the water from pooling during washing. a little drop gently rolling down. whow. wonderful bottom design. alas, this mug happens to have a handle that some people can barely put an index finger through, and obviously there is no room for any other fingers. so one finger to carry eight ounces of hot liquid... very, very bright: good bottom, but nearly useless handle for actual use.]

omniweb...

while everyone is switching to firefox 2.0, i have switched to omniweb. so far a great browsing experience, well worth $14 for a family pack license. now all my macs have ow instead of ff. [i know geoff will chide me for even bothering to think about the underlying browser, but i cannot help it. twelve years after mozilla, most browsers are still tedious portals with bad makeup, spotty skins and amateur plugin facelifts. sure would be good to have it free and open source, but i would rather have imagination...]

boooooooks...

added some 700 books to the librarything. [alas pssst keeps giving me the same set of hits from other libraries. sigh. found a large overlap with, amongst others, erik naggum's library. his is not bad at around 2000 books.]

note to self: mini reviews of recent good books.

ipod transfers between libraries

several macs, several itunes libraries, some ipods. once in a while, it is simpler to copy a tune off of my ipod than to rsync from my main music repository. here is what i do.

• get at the ipod filesystem one way or another. eg:

  $ df
  ...
  /dev/disk1s1               2028600  2021400     7200   100%    /Volumes/MAXI
  

• copy content to someplace else:

  $ cp -rp /Volumes/MAXI/iPod_Control/Music ~/ipod
  

• fix content cleverly marked with the "invisible" attribute

  $ cd ~/ipod
  $ ls
  F00     F01     F02
  $ /Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -a F00
  aVbstclinmedz
  # V for invisible on
  $ /Developer/Tools/SetFile
  Usage: SetFile [option...] file...
  -a attributes     # attributes (lowercase = 0, uppercase = 1)*
  -c creator        # file creator
  -d date           # creation date (mm/dd/[yy]yy [hh:mm[:ss] [AM | PM]])*
  -m date           # modification date (mm/dd/[yy]yy [hh:mm[:ss] [AM | PM]])*
  -P                # perform action on symlink instead of following it
  -t type           # file type
  
  Note: The following attributes may be used with the -a option:
       A   Alias file
       B   Bundle
       C   Custom icon*
       D   Desktop*
       E   Hidden extension*
       I   Inited*
       M   Shared (can run multiple times)
       N   No INIT resources
       L   Locked
       S   System (name locked)
       T   Stationery
       V   Invisible*
       Z   Busy*
       ...
  
  $ /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v F00
  $ /Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -a F00
  avbstclinmedz
  $ cd F00
  $ /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v *
  ...
  

• incorporate now visible music into laptop itunes library.

[it may be simpler use a bit of python to read the mp3 tags, construct the artist/album/track.mp3 hierarchy and copy..]

library thing...

librarything: best thing that ever happened to my library...

intelligent design, science education and public reason

a disqueting white paper: intelligent design, science education and public reason by robert a crouch, richard b. miller and lisa h. sideris, poynter center for the study of ethics and american institutions, indiana university. [sep 06]

we believe that the recent attempts to discredit evolutionary theory and to insinuate intelligent design into public school science curricula is no less than an assault on the dictates of public reason and dispassionate inquiry and their valued and well-earned place, not only in educational institutions but in political culture and public policy more generally. While intelligent design may soon vanish from debates within state legislatures and local school boards across the country, the pernicious effects of the more general attack on the value of reason in public will, we believe, linger.

two haikus

autumn light
flickering with leaves -
train dreaming.

red traffic light -
a flock of sparrows
twirl and pass.

[oz/2006]

getting it down and done...

i have now been back in the IT space for nearly two months. with an enormous number of projects and issues on the go, i find that i really, really need a good tool that is a cross between an outliner, database, notebook/blog and a task list manager. several useful to good ones are mac-only, look really pretty and come with a sheepish "export" function [eg. devonthink, mori, omnioutliner, notetaker, lifebalance, et al]. alas, not good enough: i spend a large part of my time on linux and bsd desktops, and part of the time all i have on me is a palm.

wishful thinking: run everywhere, sync across, suck less.

[sure i know about the hipster pda. i do use moleskine notebooks on matters that have no immediate impact on my professional productivity...]

underbrained reader

sony's new portable reader system can (for now) only support (unsecured) BBeB Book, adobe® pdf, txt, and of course, as a survival necessity: rtf and microsoft® word.

no mention of odf.

sigh. books with chains or basic txt. i guess i can wait until someone less toady to drm gets this right.

aperture 1.1 vs lightroom b4

finally i have the hardware to run aperture and lightroom side-by-side. my current preliminary view is that aperture really is a better thought-out working photographer's tool, with lightroom running hard to overcome a panic "beta" release [help me develop this now; you can pay me later!] with a surprisingly clunky and unimaginative interface/flow. [must be nice to have so many photo(shop)graphers on the side who are now writing and bubbling about lightroom. several books with boring images already in preparation...]

i would like to do a real review later, though not until i put several thousand images through both of these and bibble. [alas my usage of lightroom will only continue until the end of beta...]

[after i wrote this note, i discovered that apple upped the ante with the release of aperture 1.5... and i just thought of a way adobe can still win the day: just open-source lightroom...]

feature hole theory of design

interesting if not entirely edifying discussion of closures in java, from jag's blog entry titled black hole theory of design. i suppose closures in java would be useful in providing less clumsy functional dispatch mechanisms, but as in ruby and perl et al. the mechanism is just another mechanism, a plangbling, a fan-feature. it will not play a fundamental role, [as suggested by the theory] influencing the other core elements of the language, or its implementation. it is simply too late for that. is it worth its complexity budget? hmm, how else can java possibly compete with gruby?

big shrug...

[oblink: the lambda papers. i thought these would be coming out in a book form, but i have no idea what happened. rpg did not respond...]

r6rs, almost...

latest draft of r6rs released. [as a scheme implementor, i wish this fine language mattered more. instead, its imitators with clunky syntaxes and bad libraries get all the fanfare...]

charlie nails it.

found in charlie's diary entry spinning the hamster wheel:

One of the dirty little secrets of the computing industry is that staffing ratios are supported by Microsoft. It takes roughly one support person per forty desktops in Windows environments (one person-hour per working week wasted on coaxing balky software into doing its job, is a more accurate way of describing this), while large-scale UNIX desktop installations have staffing ratios between 1:200 and 1:1000. But bureaucratic politics is such that in any organization, an inefficient department with forty employees has far more clout, prestige, and (ultimately) money assigned to it than an efficient department of four ... because most managers are woefully inequipped to judge the relative merit of computing proposals and interpret human activity as productivity, rather than as evidence of inefficiency. We have therefore fallen into a situation where less efficient solutions competing in the marketplace are preferentially selected.

[charlie, not having had a career in system adminstration, somewhat over simplifies. endless updating/patching/upgrading of N different favorite variants of a common unix derivative does not exactly support the nice 1/10 efficiency ratio he suggests. solaris shops, on the other hand, may support the argument better.]

a big checkmark...

second episode of house, cane & able, ends with a moving ballad:

gravity
is working against me
and gravity
wants to bring me down

next morning, i see a new album in my neighbourhood starbucks:
continuum, by john mayer.

flipped it around. the fourth song is gravity.

ah. good stuff, i thought i may order it online. visited chapters-indigo, and found it under new and hot music.

i feel like a big demographic checkmark in someone's spreadsheet.

recently noted quotes

So, when the intelligent design folks announce with great fanfare that the bacterial flagellum is too complex to be explained by natural selection...well, it's hard for evolutionary biologists to suppress yawns. -- joan roughgarden

the truth is, most people like clicking - they just hate waiting. -- marty neumeier [the brand gap]

growing up means creating a civilization that does the best for the most. -- david brin [ad astra, 2004]

to install adium, drag the duck to your applications folder. -- adium installer

there are a few experiences that those of us who are filthy rich with it just don't repeat, and bathing a cat while drinking peppermint schnapps comes to mind for reasons i'd rather not discuss right now. -- daniel gilbert [stumbling on happiness]

although often a useful writing technique, passive verbs also advance effects without cause, an immaculate conception. to speak of ends without means, agency without agents, actions without actors is contrary to clear thinking. -- edward tufte [beautiful evidence]

if a person is poorly, receives treatment to make him better, and then gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health. -- peter medawar

real sysadmins ...

have a way with their passwd files...

# cat >> /etc/passwd
z1:x:999999:999999:xanadu-z1:/tmp:/opt/extras/zoneshell
^D

[found it somewhere on softpanaroma. reminiscent of the
way real programmers write C programs...]

one, one two, check, check...

blog check check, one two three... testing, testing...
[sun community blogs not picking up mine...]

[update: it picked up the test. will it pick the next one?]

nonsense, endless, endless...

panda's thumb shreds and discards The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design

[political incorrectness is not nearly as big a mistake as deceit and stupidity]

not the right aperture for this image...

new macbook.
new aperture 1.1.
installs and runs just fine.

upgrade 1.1.1 and 1.1.2...
all of a sudden, my macbook at 1280x800 is not good enough for aperture. i am short of about 60 pixels.

reminds me of larry wall's quip:
where is some sand when your head needs it?
[or some concrete, as the case may be.]

installed lightroom. works fast, smooth. no complaints about anything. now i have the new book on aperture, but already greater expertise on lightroom.

thanks apple.
how do you lose dedicated customers?

like this.