Curiouser and Curiouser!

Math is pointless

I haven't actually had to face down an algabra problem for quite some time, maybe 10 years in fact, so the answer to this cutey had me stumped for several minutes:

Theorem: All numbers are equal.

Proof: Choose arbitrary a and b, and let t = a + b. Then
a + b = t
(a + b)(a - b) = t(a - b)
a^2 - b^2 = ta - tb
a^2 - ta = b^2 - tb
a^2 - ta + (t^2)/4 = b^2 - tb + (t^2)/4
(a - t/2)^2 = (b - t/2)^2
a - t/2 = b - t/2
a = b

So all numbers are the same, and math is pointless. [ QuoteDatabase ]

Hint: I made life more difficult for myself by working backwards.

Giving consolas a run for its money

Tao of Mac has posted that the new Longhorn fonts have escaped into the wild.

I remembered Don Park was pretty keen on Consolas as a coding font so I gave it a spin and, even on MacOSX, it looks pretty good at 9pt. Maybe even better than ProFont.

A squirt of grease is good for Rails

I've just installed Julien Couvreur's XmlHttpRequestDebugging script for GreaseMonkey. I've been using Safari since I switched because it looks so much nicer than Firefox but as I starting trying to debug some Ajax stuff in a Rails app I'm working on I found myself reaching for FireFox and it's more capable developer tools. Then, by chance, I remembered that someone had worked on an Ajax debugger and that lead me to Julien's script.

What can I say? Thank you Julien, great work . This is a tip top tool.

Give peace a chance!

...

I believe Jesus would have picketed the White House were he around in physical form today.

...

[ Chris Bateman on Religious Games ]

Are we ever ripe for a second coming. There is a wonderful line in the Andy Hamilton radio series Old Harry's Game where Satan goes skiing on a lake of fire with a nun strapped to each hoof. I think if Andy did it again Bush and Cheney would have to be candidates. I also love what Andy did to the Pope's, but you'll have to find and listen to it to find out.

A nice cup of cocoa maybe?

Can anyone recommend me some books for getting started with Objective-C and Cocoa programming?

Although my language of choice is Ruby these days and I'm not keen to start using a language without garbage collection I find myself thinking about writing some Mac software. I don't really have an app in mind yet, just a few vague thoughts, but the interface makes me want to do something with it ;-)

Recommendations?

Justifiably a cultural icon

This video of David Bradley talking about inventing the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combo is priceless. You just have to watch it for Bill Gates expression.

Getting along with Pages

As part of my switch to MacOSX I bought a copy of iWork which includes Pages and KeyNote. I bought it for KeyNote which looks (in everything except slide sorting) a nicer application than PowerPoint. However I've been using Pages a lot in the last month and it is a very capable replacement for Word for everything I do with documents.

My one Pages bugaboo (and the thing which might force me to buy Word for Mac) is that it's Word support doesn't extend to the comments and "track changes" features. If, as I do, you work collaboratively on propositions, specifications, and white papers this is can be a problem.

Pages will import/export from Word format quite well so my current approach is to export Word from Pages and send out a document for review. Then open the returned documents in Word on my Windows desktop where I go through the comments and make the appropriate amendments in the Pages document.

This is workable but far from ideal. I'm hoping Pages will support multi-author features soon.

Get Haxie

Now that i've drained my bile duct somewhat, a question:

Is anyone familiar with the MacOSX haxie called MenuMaster?

MenuMaster allows you to arbitrarily modify the menu shortcut key bindings across MacOSX applications. I think this is a good thing since many bindings are obscure or the authors just decided not to have a shortcut for some function you find you use a lot.

However it requires injecting a haxie platform into MacOSX called Application Enhancer and I'm a little uncertain about how good an idea this is.

Can I tap into any experience here?

Update: They have two other haxie's which look interesting: WindowShade X for it's Minimize in-place feature, and Labels X for allowing you to name the MacOS X labels in the Finder. I don't use the coloured labels because I can't remember what a particular colour is supposed to signify. I think if I could be satisfied the APE introduces no unpleasant side-effects I'd buy these to enhance my MacOSX experience.

Update: l.m.orchard writes to tell me that Tiger actually gives me the ability to change the menu shortcuts for apps via the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences page. It works a treat. Thank you l.m. He also mentions that WindowShadeX is rock solid for him which is good to know because I think it looks very useful.

Something else I'm sick of hearing

Another thing which annoyed me today was hearing peoples reactions to the new lottery scratchcard called (something like) "Going for Gold." A common reaction seemed to be:

If the government want the Olympics let them pay for it.

I hate to break it to you but the governments money is our money taken from us, by force, through the mechanism of taxation. If it's paid for out of tax (or borrowing which is just deferred taxation with a variable interest rate) then we're all paying!

Jeez.

I wish the whole bloody Olympics was funded out of scratch cards. At least that would mean that the people who wanted the Olympics (and I'm not one of them) would get the Olympics they deserved.

Today I am a very angry man.

So, I made the mistake of turning on the news today and hearing all about the wonderful things our security forces are doing to make the world a better place. And all the pundits, talking heads, and common folk with their reactions.

So, I'm supposed to get used to armed police on the streets of London for the next 2 decades? I'm supposed to be happy to pay an extra £0.5m, and upwards, per day to pay for this privilege? Oh and more for the mayors armed, plain clothes, policemen on the tube? This is on top of our chunk of the $700 billion the sham liberation of Iraq is costing by the way.

I'd like us to consider an alternative. How about we start by throwing Blair to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and make an apology to the sovereign nation of Iraq for illegally invading their country, killing many thousands of their people, and allowing their national treasures and resources to be looted and destroyed. How about that?

I'd also like to see any proof anyone has that this enhanced police presence makes us one iota safer? I'm not talking about whether the rubes the BBC interviewed today "feel reassured." I mean really, actually, less likely to be killed in a bombing or other attack.

I'm sick of this.

No longer pissing in the wind

I know have 5 problems registered at the Apple bug reporter site (which is just a hideous application by the way, I hope this isn't the standard of Web Objects apps!) They're all for things which are niggly like Bluetooth troubles, the spell checker not working properly in Pages, and icons disappearing from the dock seemingly at random.

MacOSX certainly isn't free of these sort of Windowsisms but they do seem far fewer in number and, so far, less likely to be of the variety that will make you wish Turing had never been born.

Another quanitifiable difference between the Apple and Microsoft experience here is that I am actually reporting these bugs with Apple. Better yet the response to the first bug I posted suggests that real engineers are attempting to diagnose my problem. I can even track their progress myself. Just think of it!?!

I've no idea if, ultimately, Apple will fix my problems. Certainly Apple release cycles are more of the kind where I can imagine fixes in my life-time. However, what's most important to me is that I don't feel like I'm pissing in the wind any more. If and when Vista finally arrives Microsoft customers should expect wet trouser legs as per usual.

Load another salvo of turkeys.

Doc: Not only this, but "vista," I just learned, means "chicken" in Latvian.

Makes sense: since Apple already booked all cats names (Panthers, Jaguars, Tigers, etc.), Microsoft is turning to birds. "Windows 2006 Chicken", it feels familiar and not threatening. To compete with MacOS X Lion we'll get "Windows 2010 Turkey"... [ Paolo ]

Sounds about right for such a fowl operating system.

Don't blow smoke up my ass, it will ruin my autopsy.

I've just seen the 2nd act of Meet Joe Black. I hadn't meant to watch it but something about it held me.

It reminds me of the questions I ask myself about whether life is what I expect, or want, or could make it.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. -- Thoreau, Henry David

I don't want to be one of those men but it's hard.

A secret service to be proud of

Those gargantuan footprints – and some good detective work by the Italian police based on unsecured cell phones (evidently from a batch issued to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Rome), hotel bills, credit card receipts, and the like – have given us a glimpse into the unexpectedly extravagant "shadow war" being conducted on our behalf by the Bush administration through the Central Intelligence Agency. So let me skip the normal discussions of kidnappings, torture, or whether we violated Italian sovereignty, and just concentrate on what those footprints revealed. If the President's Global War on Terror has been saddled with the inelegant acronym GWOT, the Italian rendition operation should perhaps be given the acronym LDVWOT or La Dolce Vita War on Terror. [Tom Engelhardt]

With people like this fighting our corner in the Global War on Terror we can all sleep a little safer in our beds. Those of us staying in 5 star hotels on the taxpayers dime can anyway.

More bombs, More cringeworthy coverage

Another incident in London. So far it seems as if the scale was not as large as before, or that something went wrong for the attackers. In one case it may be that only the detonator went off.

However the BBC news reporting is just as bad as before. This time I have registered a complaint with BBC news:

To whom it may concern:

I would like to register my anger at the inane reporting by BBC news, around ten to two this afternoon, in response to this 2nd incident. I heard one of your team ask an eyewitness to a device going off "can you tell us how worrying this was?"

For goodness sake. If you have nothing sensible to ask an eye witness then please just keep your mouth shut.

The BBC coverage of both of these incidents has made me cringe. Your brief should be to *inform*. In my opinion you are failing badly.

Regards,
Matt

Or at least I would have registered my complaint if the BBC servers weren't giving me a constant 503 error. You'd think the BBC would have learned to cope with server load...

Finally it went through.

My first MacOSX mystery

Okay this is happening often enough now to be considered a problem: Icons are disappearing from my dock.

It seems to be the same icons each time and, anecdotally, it seems to happen after the system has been to sleep, but not every time. The affected apps so far are:

• CocoaMySQL
• Airport Client Monitor
• SSH Tunnel Manager
• iTerm

I keep putting 'em back and they keep disappearing. I haven't moved the applications, they work if I invoke them from the Finder or the dock (once I've dragged them back in).

Help! Help!

Go go HS820

Too groovy. My thanks to Lee for sharing how to pair up the Motorola HS820 with the MacTop, now I can mobile Skype ;-)

The trick is that it will only pair in one way. From the headset switched off you hold the button until the lights flash to show it is on, then you continue to hold the button for several more seconds until the light comes on solidly. At this point it will pair. Contrast this with the V3 which will pair as long as the headset is on.

Another blast from the spice weasel!

This news just in:

Billy West, voice actor extraordinaire, recently mentioned in a recent video blog entry that there is a straight to DVD Futurama movie in the works:

There’s gonna be a Futurama movie, coming out on DVD, I think we’re gonna start doing it soon. There were talks and I guess they’re really happy about moving forward with it ‘cause the DVDs of Futurama sold really well. [via SweetDex, via Asterisk, via Justin French]

Woo Hoo! Straight to video baby... this is what I'm talkin about! Bam!

Cruftyness isn't everything

Ted Leung noticed my uninformed ramblings yesterday about Lisp not being a suitable language for DSL's whilst pointing to another post from someone reminiscing about using Lisp for this very purpose. He also points to a video of a Lisper building a little language for parsers.

I think my point about Lisp and DSL's was perhaps too strongly put. I guess what I was thinking was that I can imagine creating a DSL using Ruby which non-Ruby people could easily use. I think the ease with which PHP people start using Rails may be some small testament to this, or I may be stretching the evidence to fit my hypothesis.

So my point is that Lisp DSL's are probably only of use to Lisp hackers since the DSL looks like Lisp and Lisp is crufty! :-)

The video is really cool to watch though. It was very interesting to see someone so in command of his language go simply about solving a problem in this way. Worth watching whether you want to use Lisp or not.

So, to summarize, I still think Lisp is way cool and I bow to the mastery of the Lisp hacker. Nevertheless, you'll prize my copy of the PickAxe from my cold, dead, hand!

So it ain't perfect

Okay here's something bad. It seems that the Tiger 10.4.2 update has done something funky (in a bad way) to the Airport extreme in my PowerBook. I'm connected to my wireless network but the OS thinks I am not. It shows no bars in the network level meter and shows me as having

No network selected

It could be worse, it might be saying these things with me not actually able to connect.

Browsing Apple's forums it's clear I am not alone in having Airport problems with the new update but it's not clear what to do about it. Some people appear to be overwriting the Airport kernel extensions with those from their 10.4.0 CD. I'm not confident enough in my mastery of MacOSX to attempt this kind of thing yet.

I guess I'm hoping for 10.4.3 soon.

Update: No sooner do I post this than someone in #macosx tells me that the Airport 4.2 update is available. I installed that, logged out, and now my Airport is singing all 5 signal bars again! Totally cool :-)

Blame where blame is due

By the way, everyone bored of my droning on about how cool my new PowerBook is should go flame Paolo. He was the one who planted this seed. Oh, and Beth, who watered it!

We decline

Business firms have been the principal forces behind the promotion of governmental regulation of the economic life of the country. Through competitive and trade practice standards; licensing and other limitations on entry into the marketplace; tariffs and taxation policies; government research subsidies and defense contracting; and various other uses of the coercive powers of the state to advance private interests, the business community has fostered rigidities that help to insulate firms from the need to remain creatively resilient and adaptive to change. My book, In Restraint of Trade, documents the development of such behavior between 1918–1938.

As I have previously observed, a number of historians have shown how such institutionalizing practices contribute to the decline of civilizations. If a society is to remain creative and viable, it must encourage – not simply tolerate – the processes of change. At this point, the creative interests of society (as people) come into conflict with the structuring interests of institutions (as organizational systems). Whether the autonomous and spontaneous processes of change will prevail over the preservation of established institutional interests, may well determine the fate of the American civilization!

The forces of institutional dominance – with their centralized, vertically-structured, coercive systems of control – have encountered the decentralized, horizontally-connected, voluntary methods of cooperation. Mankind is in a life-and-death struggle not simply for its physical survival, but for its very soul. The contest centers on the question of whether human beings shall continue to be servo-mechanistic resources for the use and consumption of institutional interests, or whether they shall be their own reasons for being. Will institutional or individual interests be regarded as the organizing principal of society? [Saving a Dying Corpse - Butler Shafer]

80% less crufty

About this time last year I was realising that Lisp probably wasn't the language for me. It introduced me to metaprogramming with macros, new ways of looking at OOP, and generally blew fuses in my mind. But it was also arcane and irregular. I could have handled the brackets if it were not for the generally cruftyness of the whole thing. Like Lucas I also found the naming ugly although I don't think his strategy of aliasing is going to work out unless he only deals with his own code.

I think that's why I like Ruby so much. It's full of metaprogrammingy goodness but with 80% less cruft. Also the regular syntax style makes it great for DSL's which is not, I would hazard, going to be the case for Lisp.

Dr. Frankenstein would use Longhorn

Take a look at this beta image of Microsoft’s latest operating system. It makes me want to throw up. I am so happy I own a mac. First of all, having everything transparent makes it hard for my eyes to focus on the content, they are going all over the place trying to look for solid ground.

Second, there are artifacts of the old look and feel WITHIN THE NEW ONE. How confusing can you get when you have a pair of X’s, both which look like they should close the window and both in different styles. It is amazing how little can get done with billions in the bank. [Microsoft’s Complete Lack of Taste - Technoblog]

All the previews I have seen of Longhorn have looked terrible. The Windows UI is like Frankensteins monster in the movies. The special effects get better but it still looks like your worst nightmare come to life. I think it was Freewheelin Franklin who used to say

"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.".

for Microsoft dope could read vision. Longhorn appears to be a testament to the failure of throwing money at a problem.

At the risk of confirming my status as another boring born again Mac zealot I'm finding the Mac UI a very productive environment (Okay Terry you can shoot me now!) Switching from Windows has largely been a matter of relief rather than confusion. This thing works.

The Radio Event Horizon

I've wanted to move my blog from Radio for quite a while. It has served me well and I've had fun with it but I feel those days are gone. It's been a while since I saw Radio as a product with a viable future and I have no more interest in working with Usertalk despite having a number of blog ideas I'd like to develop.

However a working, developed, blog platform with a large chunk of content creates a pretty strong gravity well. Migrating to another product is going to be hard. I've not found a product which could give me the escape velocity I need.

I love working with Ruby. I'd love to have a blogging platform that was written in Ruby. But, then again, now that I have a Mac I can finally use Tinderbox and, apparently, Mark Bernstein is working on making Tinderbox a 1st class blogging tool.

Maybe this time next year I'll be using a new tool and developing new ideas again.

Water-cooled felines

My cats are really feeling the heat today. Letheragy and cats go together so well that I usually can't tell, but I wasn't rousted out of bed this morning to make breakfast for the furry critters and that's unheard of.

I was trying to think of ways to help them cool down and the garden hose seemed to be a non-starter. Then I hit on this trick:

• run an ice cube gently along the fur on the torso, enough to wet it

Result: cool cats.

Well I'll not be dashed

I've just done the upgrade of Tiger to 10.4.2 (thanks Tao of Mac). It went smoothly. Exactly two weeks since I last had to restart the MacTop, not bad when you think I've only had it for 3 weeks!

No sign in the release notes of anything new vis-a-vis BlueTooth so probably my Motorola HS820 still won't work, I'll try it out later.

Oh and I've disabled Dashboard. I never use it.

Disable Dashboard Eminently simple. defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES Either of the following to turn it back on again. defaults delete com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO [From RixStep]

After logging out and back in again you won't notice any change in the Dock Icon for Dashboard but it's definitely not running.

What do you do with a shitty stick?

Oh, speaking of the accursed Adobe, I got a missed call and voicemail from someone from their customer satisfaction team (or somesuch). He said he wanted to find out about my experience with Adobe and would call me back that afternoon.

That was, what?, a week ago?

I curse you Adobe: May all your customers realise how little you deserve their money and drop you like the shitty stick you are.

Here's hoping for a better life

Begin by turning off all the LEDs on your keyboard. My keyboard doesn't have any LEDs. You must turn off the LEDs on your keyboard. My keyboard doesn't have any LEDs. I can't help you if you don't turn off the LEDs. -- Excerpt from a Dell customer service call [Modern Times - The Obvious?]

You don't have to track very far into this story to find out that Dell are closing their online customer service forums either as another cost cutting exercise or, possibly, to stifle criticism from customers. It wouldn't surprise me if, rather than engage with critics and attempt to resolve their dissatisfaction, Dell would rather try to suppress them. Let's not try to work out the value of happy customers who want to sell your brand for you:

Me: Withers!
Withers: (for it is he) Yes, sir?
Me: Prepare my clue-by-four post haste!
Withers: I'm sorry sir, but it's not back from the menders after the Adobe incident...
Me: damn and blast!

I've had my share of fights with Dell support over the last three years. Most I could resolve by keeping a solid log of everything said and walking them back over broken committments and errors until they gave in although, in one case, I did have to get in touch with the MD's office and make a nuisance of myself before anyone would talk sense about solving my problem.

Dell kit is not expensive but crappy service is one of the reasons. This time I've gone Apple and am hoping for a better life.

I'll try harder from now on

Or if they had considered the American intervention in Lebanon, they would easily have found the following evaluation by their own military of a situation much like that of Iraq. Of the involvement in Lebanon in 1982–1983, Lieutenant Commander Westra states:

"American policy was formulated without adequate consideration of the complexity of the Lebanese conflict or its political and religious antecedents. Additionally, our policy was pursued from a purely American perspective without consideration of the goals and motivations of numerous factions involved in the fighting. As a consequence of these policy shortcomings, American military forces were mistakenly committed as a first resort before all diplomatic and other means had been exhausted."

"The key problem of our involvement in Lebanon was that American military forces were mistakenly committed in order to solve a complex set of political problems that had no military solution. By submitting future regional conflicts to a "Lebanon Test," policymakers will have an in-depth model delineating the multitude of considerations and pitfalls affecting policy formulation and the use of military force to secure the objectives of policy in regional conflicts."

If many in the military knew better, wouldn’t this information reach the President? Mightn’t it even seep out to the bloodthirsty editorial writers and thence to the gung-ho public? [ Bush’s Folly - Michael S. Rozeff]

How much more of this imperial folly from the US and British governments are we going to stand for? I think it's a shame more people in the UK didn't reflect on what Blair (and to be fair a raft of previous UK governments) have done and choose to vote against extending his time in office.

I think we needed a breather and an opportunity to reflect upon what kind of country we want to be and where our interests lie. I don't believe they lie in interfering with Middle Eastern politics, propping up the Saudi regime, etc...

It may be that ceasing to intervene in this area is going to cause us economic turbulence but I think that's inevitable anyway with the policy we are persuing. I also think that all the money being funnelled into Iraq and the War on Terror could be better used.

I've heard what I think is a lot of nonsense about why the London bombings occurred. Especially people talking about why they aren't related to the war on Iraq. The usual claim being that 9/11 happened before the war on Iraq so it can't be related. I find it hard to believe that even the people peddling this nonsense really believe it.

Question: Why didn’t the terrorists strike Switzerland instead of England? After all, the two countries share the same “freedom and values,” don’t they?

Answer: The Swiss government didn’t attack Iraq. It doesn’t meddle in the Middle East. It didn’t participate in the brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people. It doesn’t maintain an empire of overseas bases. It doesn’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The Swiss government minds its own business.

That’s why the terrorists did not strike Switzerland.

Of course, the same cannot be said of England, whose foreign policy in the Middle East can be summed up as follows: Whatever the U.S. government does, the British government supports and joins. Thus, the British government participated in President Bush’s recent war on Iraq – a war against a sovereign and independent country that never attacked the United States or England or even threatened to do so. It is a war that has produced the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people – not just American and British soldiers, but also Iraqi soldiers and civilians – none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the United States.

That’s why the terrorists struck in London instead of Bern.

That’s also why the terrorists struck in New York, both in 1993 and 2001, and at the Pentagon.

The terrorist retaliations are rooted in anger and hatred not for American and English “freedom and values,” as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair maintain, but instead in anger and hatred for U.S. and British foreign policy.

Why would it be otherwise? Why should foreigners – especially radical, violent ones – react any differently to the killings and maiming of their family, friends, and countrymen than Westerners do when their family, friends, and countrymen are killed or maimed by foreigners?

Consider the torture, rape, sex abuse, and murder scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Why wouldn’t Middle Easterners react in much the same way that Americans would react if American men were treated in a similar manner in some foreign prison?

What will be the response of government officials to the terrorist strikes in London? You guessed it: more severe government crackdowns on civil liberties to protect us from the terrorists, which not surprisingly was the same position that they were taking before the terrorist strikes in London. [Terrorism Comes With Empire - Jacob G. Hornberger]

As citizens I think we fail to be interested in what our government really does and the effects it has. The world is so interconnected, how can be believe that invading other countries and killing their people, however justified we feel, will not provoke reactions from them and those that empathise with them?

On the day of the London attacks I couldn't escape the feeling that if I lived in Iraq I'd probably be so numbed to the concept of bombs going off and people being killed that, unless it was one of my own dead or missing, that I'd shrug and, maybe, hope for a quieter tomorrow. We think we are safe here, so it's obviously shocking to be targeted for an attack.

People being killed is terrible but let's seek perspective. Our military, on the orders of our elected government, have been killing people en masse for some time now and, despite the rhetoric about minimizing civillian casualties, there are a lot of dead men, women, and children who didn't sign up for a war in their homeland.

I am sorry to the people who have died, here and abroad, that I haven't done more to bring my government to account for it's actions. All I can do is try harder from now on.

I was listening to Question Time on the radio this evening and the question was asked

Are we reaping what we sow?

Simon Hughes and Brian Eno were the only ones who seemed to me

And so it begins

Jeez what a load of hogwash:

Once buried, it will be time to avenge them.

Perhaps the villains' expectation is that the Briton will quail as the Spaniard, reacting to massacre with headlong flight from foreign fields. I think not. About me, I see older Scots with a steely flint in their eyes. The reckoning will come. There is a soul of honor beneath the ribs of death. [Josh Trevino via ScriptingNews]

Irritating prose style aside... have you learned nothing? To talk of vengeance and reckonings while that very scene is playing out?

If it weren't so absurb it would make me very angry indeed.

Second thoughts

I'm questioning (especially after speaking to Beth earlier) my response to todays bombings. I don't feel about it so much as I think about it. Given that it's now clear that there are at least 4 deaths and dozens of serious casualties, some of them at Aldgate East tube (which I use for college), I wonder if that betrays a lack of empathy on my part. I feel a sort of weary sense of dread. My thoughts are focused on how we identify with this event and how we respond to it. But now is not the time.

The Command+W blues

One thing I haven't gotten used to on the Mac is controlling my urge to misuse Command+W. On Windows the Alt+W combination brings up the window menu and it's my habit to use it to see which windows I have open. I've lost count of the number of times I've managed to close my current window instead of getting the desired effect.

This seems to be the only windows habit of mine which is persistent and irritating. I've also noticed I am having occasional troubles copying & pasting on windows now when my fingers end up doing ALT+C and ALT+V. I guess this is actually a good sign :-)

Find me a better Finder

On Windows I'm an avid user of the excellent Directory Opus which is a connoisseurs tool for working with lots of files & folders. By constrast the Finder is something of a low point in the whole MacOS X experience. A little spade work with Google suggests I am not the first person to feel this way.

I'm open to recommendations for a replacement. I've already come across Path Finder from CocoaTech. The screenshots don't look vastly different from Finder itself so I'm not sure what to make of that.

What do advanced file juggling monkeys like me use?

And I'm sick of the BBC coverage already

After about 5 minutes I'm completely sick of the BBC coverage of whatever incidents have taken place today.

I just got a phone call from my Mum to make sure I was okay. They'd heard reports of bombs in the centre of London. After assuring her that I was okay I flipped the TV on to see what was happening. I shouldn't have bothered.

Beyond the possibility that there has been a bomb on a bus (certainly something happened) and some sort of disruption on the tube they have absolutely nothing to say yet they insist on wittering on about it anyway.

You can tell the presenters have been eagerly practicing their waffle and speculation since 9/11. Now is their moment in the sun.

If this is the best the BBC can do then I suggest we close down BBC news and save the tax payer some money.

Update: The BBC website has, predictably, melted down. I'm switching on the TV every half hour or so to comb the coverage for useful information of which there is very little. My hope is that this is not the precursor to something worse.

The International Hobo has roots

My good friend Chris Bateman has started blogging. I guess I must have harped on about how cool blogging is once too often ;-)

If you're at all interested in games, game design, heck even if you just play games, i urge you to take a look at what he has to say. Chris' thinking is way ahead of the pack and he's doing stuff which will have a major impact on the games industry in due course.

Through his company International Hobo he is carving out a niche doing demographic game design. I'm hoping he'll publish some of his research on the blog, it's interesting stuff even to a layman (okay i'm a layman and a psychology student) and really driving how his company does its business.

The place for innovation may be the bottom end of the market. Katamari Damacy (why not Damashi? It confuses me every time) sold nearly 200,000 copies in the US, and was almost certainly developed on a budget the fraction of the size of most top-end video game projects. But I bet it made a profit (or very nearly so). tranquility may be modest, but I bet the people behind it haven't made a loss.

To the gaming hardcore, I say this: Don't expect the expensive top end games to continue to meet your needs forever. Play what you like in the high market, but don't disparage those games in the high market which aren't really meant for you. Keep your eyes instead on the low market - this is where the innovation will be - it's the only place that we can afford to be innovative.

I feel like such a fool for overlooking the low market for so long, and I'm not going to make the mistake again. Right now, we're experimenting with numerous projects on comparatively small budgets, and I'm thrilled to be doing so. They have the luxury to be a little more inventive. It may not work out for us - who can see the future - but on paper, at least, it seems like both sound business sense and satisfying creatively. I guess we'll see what happens over the next few years. [Excerpted from: Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts]

Reading this it's hard to believe it's the same guy who taught me UnderWear and beats me at the fabulous Kill Dr. Lucky! :-)

London Metropolitan University is a compete shambles

Today I received a letter from Robert Aylett the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of London Metropolitan University where I am studying for a postgraduate diploma in psychology. The contents of the latter are as follows:

I am writing to inform you of possible disruption to the publication of module results and the confirmation of awards as a result of industrial action by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE).

NATFHE has conducted a ballot, the outcome of which is that NATFHE members have voted in favour of action to boycott the assessment process. NATFHE has indicated that the action will take the form of withholding student marks and boycotting assessment boards. Teaching staff who belong to this trade union have be advised by the Union not to release marks and grades for items of assessed work.

The University regrets, therefore, that there might be significant disruption to the assessment process. In particular it might not be possible to confirm module outcomes for the affected modules. Also, it will not be possible to make any awards based on these modules. The University recognizes the inconvenience and disruption to students that this industrial action will cause and regrets that NATFHE members have choosen to take this action. The University is also in close contact with the Union and is seeking to engage in talks to resolve the dispute.

If action continues we will keep you informed by setting out the latest position on the following web site www.londonmet.ac.uk/admin/assessment/latest

Well now, what do we think about this?

First off the URL referred to doesn't work as of the time of writing. I spoke to Robert Aylett in reference to his letter and my impression was not positive. In full Sir Humphrey mode he deflected responsibility from the management, prerring to refer me to a prepared statement by the quislings at the Students Union (Did you know the University wrote their constitution for them? Think Iraqi government and you'd not be far off). What of a sincere apology for inconveniece? I would hold my breath.

Unfortunately I would have to say that this is par for the course for management at London Metrpolitan University. How does the saying go?

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate.

So, what do I do? I really want to punish the University for being such a dreadful service provider. Although I have enjoyed the course for the most part that is despite the efforts of the University, rather than because of them.

My best advice to any prospective student is to think hard about whether to give your money to London Metropolitan University. Ask yourself what kind of academic environment you want to be in and carefully compare your alternatives. HE in the UK is not a rosy picture anywhere but I'm quite certain there are better places than this. I will be considering them myself although I will be hampered in doing so if I do not receive my last set of assessment results.

Bring on the joy

Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work. This will mean abolishing the annual rating or merit system that ranks people and creates competition and conflict.[Deming quoted at MiniMicrosoft]

There is quite a lot more about the trouble managers face at Microsoft (and presumably many other organisations too) with having compensation competition and the fall-out this brings.

Skype glitch

I'm having problems with my Skype voicemail. Or, rather, Skype are having problems with my voicemail -- realising they've extended it that is

It works. People do get forwarded to it, I get notifications and can listen to the voicemails. What isn't working is my Skype account page which lists VoiceMail as having expired on June 10th and other people do not seem to see a voicemail icon against my name in their contact list (where others do have the icon).

I'm trying to get to the bottom of this through the support site but not getting very far, very fast.

Cat Oriented Programming

See what I have to put up with?

Basil... Parsley... Ooo! Thyme!

Bucky is my hero

I feel a mixed blessing coming my way

Heh

We are?

On this day in 1776, we decided we had enough of King George, and didn't want to live in his company colony any more, and told him he could take his empire and shove it. They're still a little bitter about it over there, but it turned out pretty well over here, more or less. [Scripting News]

We are?

No roaming Skype for me!

Well this is annoying. I can't get my Motorola HS820 bluetooth headset to pair with the PowerBook for use in Skype. In fact the PowerBook doesn't even detect it as a Bluetooth device whilst my V3 does. What's up with that?

Who pays? Who benefits?

I finally got on to speak for my 82 seconds (all the time Larry King Live could spare for the peace message) about how this war is a catastrophe and how we should bring the troops home and quit forcing the Iraqi people to pay for our government's hubris and quit forcing innocent children to suffer so we can allegedly fight terrorism somewhere besides America. How absolutely racist and immoral is it to take America's battles to another land and make an entire country pay for the crimes of others? To me, this is blatant genocide. How dare we export our brand of flag-waving death and devastation to a people who have been through so much already? It wasn't bad enough that our sanctions killed tens of thousands of Iraqis before we even started an active aggression against them. Now we have to create confusion, chaos, and disorder there. How dare our president and Congress, and we Americans, allow this to continue?[Cindy Sheehan - It's not worth it]

04/07/2005 10:21 by Matt Mower | Permalink | comments:

More about:

• amerika
• iraq

Always say 'no' initially

The scene in Ghostbusters, where the three parapsychologists are fired by the university, is among my all-time favorites. Dan Ackroyd's character warns the other two:

I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities, and we didn't have to produce anything! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there.

The rule of survival in every bureaucracy is "Safety first." Corollaries are: "Don't make a mistake." "Keep your head down." "Do it by the book." "Don't make waves." But the central, unbreakable rule of a master bureaucrat is this one:

Always say no initially. It's a matter of leaving room to retreat. You can retreat from no to yes, and the person asking you to do something is happy. If you have to retreat from yes to no, you've made an enemy.

I remember that one clearly. It was the answer given to a reporter by the Washington bureaucrat with the longest tenure in 1976, upon her retirement. He had asked her how she had survived for so long.

The free market's law is to say yes initially. The salesman wants the commission. To the question, "Can I get it in blue?" the salesman answers: "Will you sign the contract if I can get it for you in blue?" After the contract is signed, the salesman puts the pressure on the company to deliver it in blue. [Academia and Paralysis by Gary North]

Feel the closeness

I don't know why but the scene towards the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the alien mothership is teaching the human computers a basic tonal language always provokes a strong emotional response in me.

And is the Pensicola Florida reference in Contact a homage to Close Encounters? It being the place that one of the humans who comes off the mothership went missing.

Easy Disk Sharing

Via Tao of Mac I'm look at a LinkSys NSLU2 for easy sharing of my USB2 disks on the network.

Another company that doesn't deserve your custom

Leon Breedt thinks Adobe are a pretty arrogant bunch:

If there’s one thing I hate, its software that thinks it knows best and decides to take over the task of displaying particular file types. [Die, Adobe]

I couldn't agree more. In my last dealings with them they didn't return calls over two weeks, failed to do what they promised, and then, when I called them on it, said our business wasn't worth it to them. Thanks for wasting our time.

Adobe, like Symantec (another company I dislike), have too little respect for customers and don't deserve them.

We've certainly had a terrifying crop this year

I'm watching I Claudius like I do most years. It's fantastic story telling by the best British actors of a generation.

A favourite quote comes during the beginning of the reign of Caligula, not long after he announces his deification. Claudius is bemoaning the state of the children of Germanicus:

Herrod: You know what they say about the tree of the Claudians, it provides two kinds of fruit; the good and the bad.
Claudius: Well we've certainly had a terrifying crop this season.

Take us to fear factor 5 Mr. Cheney!

Most embarrassing was a statement by Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this month in which he insisted that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes," a characterization that quickly became the butt of jokes on late-night talk and comedy shows. The evident gap between rhetoric and reality became even more apparent last week when the overall regional commander, Gen. John Abizaid, told lawmakers that the insurgency was as strong now as it was six months ago, and when Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld attempted to reconcile Cheney's assertion at the same time that he admitted that the insurgency could continue for another 12 years.

Of course what he means is not that they would win in 12 years but that this is the longest possible amount of time they could conceive of stringing alone a duped Amerikan public. Of course they'll need some new fears whipped up to pull that off.

*Onboard Starbug. Blue Alert sign flashing.*
Rimmer: Go to Red Alert.
Kryton: Is that really necessary, sir?
Rimmer: Yes it's necessary.
Kryton: Are you sure, sir?
Rimmer: Of course I'm sure!
Kryton: Absolutely?
Rimmer: Yes!
Kryton: It does mean we will have to change the bulb, sir.
Lister: We sure are a Mickey Mouse operation, aren't we?

Impeach your president (and ours too)

Lew Rockwell is looking past the death throes of the lame duck, but do you really have to wait three years?

So there we have it: three more years of a lame duck president who is stuck in two losing, bloody, terrorist-recruiting wars, and has presided over one of the great domestic flops in American history. All he needs is a good recession to complement soaring gas prices, and his fall will be complete.

Surely there has never been a better time to try out that impeachment process? Perhaps on the back of a public trial America can clean house a little? Redress the balance a little? Maybe force your government to obey it's own laws (after you've put them back of course). As an added measure maybe every senator and congressperson who supported the war should resign in acknowledgement that they didn't do their homework? That would be a nice gesture I think.

Oh, and whilst we're about it, how on earth do we impeach Blair? Is there even a way to do that? Anyone know the UK legal position? If it's possible, what would it take?

A pretty poor band-aid

I've just received a spam phone call from a company called Direct Telecom who are an authorized Orange reseller who receive a datadump of about 20,000 phone numbers every couple of weeks and then spam them with offers of Orange upgrades. I tried to find out where they get the numbers from but they hung up on me.

Just to be on the safe side I have registered my mobile phone number with the Telephone Preference Service. I know I had already registered my home number, I thought I had registered my mobile number as well. This time I can be sure because I've blogged it here.

Registering with the TPS reveals a problem with their service. They say:

You should reflect on the fact that registering may well prevent you from receiving information which you would really like to have - thereby cutting you off from relevant and worthwhile opportunities. For charities, telemarketing is an economical way to raise awareness and much needed support.

This is a fair point. I am a subscriber to a number of charities and whilst the only calls I have ever had from them have been attempts to raise the amount I give, I guess I would probably not block them if that was an option. How do the TPS address this?

If you are happy to receive telemarketing calls from some companies but not others, contact the companies who you do not wish to hear from and ask them to remove your details from their call lists.

So, no solution at all. If I want to allow any calls I have to allow all calls and then put up with being hounded? No thank you.

The real problem is that I am not in control of my information. I have to rely on other people to play fair and the TPS is a pretty poor band-aid for this wound.

Owning our identities

Well here's an idea:

Let’s take this further. One of the most awful aspects of identity theft is the damage it does to your credit rating. You can have a hundred fraudulent transactions taken from your bank account in a day, but you can’t repair your credit rating — or your reputation — for years. This can be devastating if it stops you getting a mortgage or a credit card. So why shouldn’t we start charging credit rating agencies for the information they gather about us? If we all got shares in a credit-rating agency in return for our data, we could vote out directors who refuse to modernise, and get a better service. [Camilla Cavendish

The full article is well worth reading.