Apple released iPhoto 2 and iMovie 3 for download today. So far, I’m extremely disappointed with iPhoto 2. I’ve only used it for a few minutes, but it looks like none of the improvements I was hoping for were included, and I think it’s actually slower on my iMac than iPhoto 1.0 was.
iMovie 3 looks nice, though. They finally made titles look somewhat respectable. Yay!
Lest anyone think I’m picking on Nick too much, I will now demonstrate my concern for his well-being by suggesting that he not ride his Segway on the sidewalk. He may or may not be likely to injure pedestrians, but I’m worried I’ll hit him with my car.
My car collided with a bicycle last night (I think it hit me, actually) when I was pulling out of our apartment building’s garage. Luckily, the biker wasn’t hurt, but she got thrown off her bike pretty good. If she’d been riding on the street instead of the sidewalk, I don’t think this would have happened: The sidewalk is very close to the building, which means that my visibility exiting the garage is poor. It’s plenty to see if there’s a pedestrian walking at three miles per hour, but a bike or Segway going 10–15 mph is too far away to notice before I pull right out into it!
So Nick, even if there aren’t any pedestrians around, please don’t speed your Segway down the sidewalk. Especially the one right outside my apartment.
In his weblog, Alexei…
Talk amongst yourselves.
I was following the directions in the ice cream maker’s booklet, but it was obvious that it was going to turn out white (with black specks), rather than green (with black specks) like the stuff at Baskin Robbins. Food coloring to the rescue!
Food coloring is cool. Also food processors, but that’s a story for another day.
I wrote too much, and as a result, I think my point was obscured.
Basically, it’s this: Since the typewriter keyboard was invented, people have been told to press the space bar twice between sentences. Now computers come along, and they (and their human slaves) insist that people only press it once. Generally, computers should be designed to work for people, not the other way around.
It should not be necessary to refrain from pressing space twice to accomplish the (desirable) goal of proper kerning. If people like to insert two spaces, let them. If people want to insert one space, let them save the effort–although usability experts will tell you that the time spent retraining and having to think about this every time you finish a sentence will far outweigh any benefit. The computer should always be capable of doing the right thing either way.
Computers can be smarter than this! Sometimes (e.g., TEX), they are. Sometimes (e.g., Microsoft Word), they aren’t.
Erik Barzeski asks why people still put two spaces after a sentence. Eric goaded Nick into insisting they shouldn’t. I think it shouldn’t have to matter. Fact: There should be more space following sentence-ending punctuation (period, exclamation point, colon, semicolon, question mark, what have you) than between words. Fact: Computers are smart enough to figure this out for you. In fact, this is the sort of thing they’re much better than humans at.
Commenters on Erik’s entry point out that style manuals still tell you to use two spaces, even though one is “all that’s required.” It’s worth mentioning that style manuals, for the most part, ignore desktop publishing. They’re still assuming that you’re either writing with a typewriter (where two spaces make things more readable) or that you will be professionally published (where the typesetter will add the correct amount of space for you.) Desktop publishing gives the ordinary computer user the ability to royally screw up their own documents. Unfortunately, they usually take full advantage of this.
Nick claims that type designers add extra space after periods to make a single “space” the right thing to use, but given what I know about how computer fonts work, I’m dubious that this works correctly. Somebody needs to explain to me how font software, which works in very limited context, can tell the difference between “I live in St. Louis,” (which needs a thin inter-word space after the first period and “John lives on Rose St. Louis doesn’t.” (which needs a thick sentence-separating space after the first period). Fonts come with glyphs and a complicated set of layout rules for assembling them based on character sequences. But really, it’s up to the text software as a whole–that would be your word processor or Web browser or email program or the OS routines that they make use of–to use the rules of English to figure out where your sentences are, and insert the appropriate amount of space, regardless of how many times you hit the space bar. Computers are good at tasks like this.
HTML is based on SGML, which was designed by Real Publishers back in the 1970’s. So it does the right thing (ignoring the amount of whitespace you used and inserting its own). TeX, which Donald Knuth wrote to help him typeset his books (also in the 1970’s), does the right thing too. Ironically, word processors like Microsoft Word were designed in the 1980’s for desktop computers too small and slow to do anything as complicated as insert whitespace–and you were going to be printing either on a daisywheel or a crappy-looking dot matrix printer, so why did it matter?–so they almost always do the wrong thing when it comes to how Real Documents should look.
(Actually, it’s possible recent word processors get this right too; I don’t know, I haven’t used one in years. I strongly suspect, though that in the name of “backwards compability” and “consistent interface,” they continue to make ordinary people care about stupid stuff like how much space there needs to be after a period to make things readable.)
What do I do personally? I always hit the space bar twice. I used to use one space. Laura said I should use two. She pointed out that two spaces make my text more readable in forums–like email and Usenet–that tend to display exactly what I typed, using a fixed-width type, just like a typewriter or a 1960’s-era teletype (which is what they’re pretending to be). It turns out she was right (and the style manuals agree with her). So now I always use two spaces, and the right thing always happens: When I send email or write news, the extra space helps readability for those who read it in a fixed-width font, and when I’m composing an HTML or LaTeX document, the amount of whitespace I use is ignored and the computer does the right thing automatically.
Why didn’t anyone tell me? I was wondering why no Frasier showed up on TiVo. I also wondered what happened to Ed and The West Wing last night, but that turns out to be the fault of some lame made-for-TV movie.
CNET is reporting that AOL Time Warner announced a net loss of $98.7 billion for 2002. Ouch. That’s more than the GNP of most countries. It’s more money than I make in a year, certainly.
Steve Case and Ted Turner are both leaving the company, which reinforces my long-held belief that those mergers were probably a bad idea. Turner has probably regretted selling out to Time Warner for years. Certainly since he first heard the phrase “AOL Time Warner.”
That’s a shame, since it means that the aim: links that are scattered around the Web won’t work with iChat. A bit of poking around does reveal that iChat responds to the iChat: URL scheme, but I couldn’t make it do anything useful for Web links; iChat:compose?card=«uid» will open a chat with the person with UID «uid» in your Mac OS X address book, but that’s Not Helpful.
I did figure out how to crash iChat from the Web browser, though. Whee.
/* mod_speling.c - by Alexei Kosut <akosut@organic.com> June, 1996
Let’s see. It’s 2003 now. 2003 minus 1996 (let me get the calculator) is 7. Seven years. Seven years? That was seven years ago? Holy cow. Sure, sure, in the meantime I’ve received three diplomas, called eleven different bedrooms home, and learned how to make tuna noodle casserole. But still… seven years!
Of course, I still think of Back to the Future as having taken place just yesterday. I probably don’t want to know how long ago 1985 was, or that right now we’re actually closer to 2015. Please don’t tell me.
In their article on 802.11g, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman write that “Companies pay a separate fee for each [FCC] certification–which may account for part of why the cheaper AirPort Extreme Base Station doesn’t have an external antenna jack.” I had wondered about that—it seems to me that those who would be interested in the external antenna jack are most likely to be purchasers who have absolutely no interest in the built-in modem (and vice versa).
Also: “the FCC mandates that any wireless networking equipment that can take an antenna must feature a hard-to-find connector.” I find this amusing. I’m not sure why; I think it’s the idea of having to find a “hard-to-find” connector. Of course, I imagine they came up with their own connector, thus making it hard to find by virtue of its proprietariness. Also, if it sells well, doesn’t it suddenly become easy to find? Will they have to change connectors every six months? And if “devices can’t use [the USB] Mini-A receptacle”, why did they go to the trouble of creating such a detailed specification for one?
When completely changing the nature of the parameters to a function in a C-like language, make sure to change the signature. If you don’t change the signature, at least change the name. That way, the compiler will let you know if there’s code that calls your function that you forgot to change.
I appear to be in some sort of programming craze this week. Today’s entry: NCIDpop.
Back when we moved to St. Louis, our phone line came with Caller ID, basically for free with SBC DSL. But since we don’t own any Caller ID hardware, we couldn’t use it. Eventually, I realized that the modem in the ancient FreeBSD box I use as a router supported Caller ID, and I found John Chmielewski’s Network Caller-ID package, which let software running on the FreeBSD machine (with modem) notify my other computers when there was an incoming call.
I’ve never been 100% happy with the ncid client, though. It’s written in Tcl/Tk, which means that it’s nicely cross-platform, but since its only mode is a window with a listing of recent calls, it took up window space, and a Dock/task bar slot, and I spent far more time dealing with the window than the volume of calls I receive warrants. To add insult to annoyance, when there actually was a call, I usually couldn’t find the window quick enough to check it before I needed to answer the phone.
So I wrote my own client. NCIDpop makes use of the native facilities in Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP (the three OSes I run most of the time) to stay out of my way unless there’s a call, in which case it does its best to get in my face. So I can always keep it running and never worry about having to hunt for the Caller ID info.
It was fun writing a small cross-platform network app. I got to brush up on my UDP sockets and Win32 programming skills, and I finally found an excuse to write code to emulate (badly) Address Book’s “Large Type” feature, which I’ve always thought was cool.
It turns out that even though XML was not designed to be human-writable, humans write it anyway. Humans like me. In my weblog. And it seems like two out of three times I validate my XHTML, it doesn’t. Sometimes because I didn’t close a <li> tag, or because I keep forgetting that <blockquote> doesn’t nest inside <p>, but I also keep trying to embed links (usually to LiveJournal) without escaping & first.
There are probably lower-tech solutions to these problems, but mine was to take the source code to the W3C MarkUp Validation Service and hack it into a Movable Type plugin, so my entries can be automatically validated before I post them, and I can fix any parsing errors before they get published. You can download MTValidate along with my other MT plugins.
The Opposite of Sex The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert Election Tadpole Rebel Without a Cause Stagecoach Citizen Kane Road Trip About a Boy Malcolm X Flashdance Happy Times Sunshine State The Good Girl Midnight Cowboy Persuasion The Slums of Beverly Hills Lawrence of Arabia Mr. Smith Goes to Washington All About My Mother Three to Tango Gandhi The Man Who Wasn’t There School Ties Last Orders The Amazing Panda Adventure O Footloose Crush Apollo 13 Strictly Ballroom Cool Runnings The Powerpuff Girls Movie The Truman Show The Right Stuff The Importance of Being Earnest Italian for Beginners Monsoon Wedding Legend Days of Thunder In the Bedroom Boiler Room Y Tu Mamá También The Color of Money Bandits Iris
I have come to the conclusion that Netflix is evil. Truly evil. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Red kidney bean chili. With chocolate chip cookies, and salad with Japanese-style sesame-soy dressing. The latter comes in a bottle from the store, but it tastes good. Tonight (once the bowl is frozen enough) the ice cream maker is making cookies and cream.
And if that weren’t tasty enough, the plan for this coming weekend is to go binge-eating at local restaurants.
A while back, I complained about the lack of spell checker in Movable Type. I resolved to write one, and I think I’ve finally got it working. Readers can now check the spelling of comment previews on my weblog, and I can check the spelling of entry previews. Please let me know if there are any problems—if you can’t leave a comment, email me.
If you want to install this on your own Movable Type weblog, the MTSpeling module is available for download.
In other Movable Type news, a few weeks ago I installed Subscribe to Comments on my weblog, so you can sign up to receive email when comments are posted to an entry.
It turns out many of the things that Mail is missing can be simulated using judicious application of AppleScript, Perl and keyboard macros. I’ve made my scripts available for download if anyone else is interested in trying them.
Regular disclaimers apply, of course. Running these on your computer will delete your email, reformat your hard drive, post your most intimate secrets to Usenet, and dry-clean your shirts.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m looking for a job.
Now that Rescomp has an IMAP server, I finally took the opportunity to try out Mac OS X’s Mail application on my “real” mail—I’ve previously tried it a few times, but never with the same quantity and type of mail I actually receive. Normally, I use Mutt from a Unix terminal, but I’ve always liked the idea of using a graphical client, and Mail has always seemed pretty well-designed and feature-complete to me.
I had expected Mail to work slightly differently than how I was used to reading mail, and I was prepared to change my behavior slightly to accommodate it. But within the first hour, I had identified three major issues that seriously cramped my ability to read mail:
He took away our Expanded Basic and now we just have Basic analog service. Turns out we’d only asked TiVo to record one non-broadcast program in the last few months anyway, so it seemed a waste of $25 (soon to be $35) a month to have thirty extra channels we never watched.So goodbye MTV, AMC, TNT and Nickelodeon! Goodbye CNN, CNBC, The Learning Channel, ESPN2 and ESPN! Goodbye Fox News Channel, FX, ABC Family, CNN Headline News and Lifetime! Goodbye TNN, Shop at Home, The Weather Channel and Disney! Goodbye A&E and Animal Planet!On the plus side, Charter turns out to be too cheap to install the right filter on our cable line (I’ve always found it a little amusing how it costs the cable company more—not including license fees—to provide basic analog service than extended), so we get USA, Fox Sports Midwest, TV Land, Comedy Central, MTV2, The History Channel, VH1, E!, MSNBC, Court TV, the Cartoon Network and the Food Network for “free.”
(If I were really bored, all of those networks would have had links attached to them. But now that the cable guy has come and gone, I can finally leave the apartment. So I will. Those who really need to find the MSNBC Web page can use Google.)
This week’s dinner menu: mashed potatoes with sour cream and chives, green beans vinaigrette, and deviled eggs. This week’s lunch features tuna salad with store-bought bread, and generally so far the cooking has seemed less of a hassle than last weekend.
No, I don’t understand the title reference, and I used it! It does seem that we’ve made a dinner completely out of side dishes, though. Yum.
This morning, I took the last of the meatloaf and gravy and scrambled it up with some eggs. Pretty tasty. Yesterday, I put some into an omelet with cheese. Mmm. We finished the spinach and potatoes on Friday. Too bad. They were good. I think we ate enough cream this week to supply a small army, though. Strangely, there’s still some ice cream left from two weeks ago.
Everybody seems to be comparing Apple’s new 12″ PowerBook to the iBook and the PowerBook Duo 210, including Apple. It’s smaller in every dimension than the iBook, but heavier (4.6 pounds vs. 4.2) and deeper (8.6″ vs. 8.5″) than the Duo. Okay, but why is everyone ignoring the PowerBook 2400? It’s lighter than the new PowerBook (4.4 pounds), and remains the narrowest laptop Apple has ever made—10.5″ wide vs. the 10.9″ of the Duo or 12″ PowerBook.
I’ve always had a bit of an affinity for the PowerBook 2400, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I think it’s because the PowerBook 2400 is based on the Alchemy motherboard, just like my PowerBase 180. I have a fondness for the Power Mac 5400 and 6400 (the 6400/180 being nearly identical to my PowerBase, except with an Apple case) for the same reason.
By the way, in case there was any doubt that the 17″ PowerBook has enough room for a full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, consider this: The new PowerBook is nearly a quarter of an inch wider than the Macintosh Portable, the 16-pound “luggable” Apple introduced in 1989, which came complete with a full-sized numeric keypad.
How are spell checkers supposed to be effective when things like “calender” are real words?
I dug out my USB-serial adapter, installed Palm Desktop 4.0 on my iMac, and set up iSync. A little more complicated then it needed to be, but eventually I got it to work—by the way, why isn’t there a USB device class for serial adapters? It seems a pretty glaring omission. Luckily, mine has a driver for Mac OS X. Overall, iSync works pretty well, although it’s rather slow (this is probably due to my datebook having an average of at least one entry per day, dating back to the purchase of my first PalmPilot in 1997) and doesn’t synchronize some Address Book fields with my Palm.
I was very disappointed with iCal, though. Whoever designed it doesn’t appear to have had me in mind; that is, someone who doesn’t work regular days and for whom one-word calendar descriptions aren’t enough. I sent feedback to Apple; maybe a future version will be usable for me. It’s a very pretty application.
In the meantime, I could turn off iCal synchronization, but unchecking “Calendars” in iSync doesn’t make things any quicker, and as long as the iSync conduit is active in HotSync Manager, Palm Desktop’s datebook doesn’t get synced (is there any way to do both? I’d like to use its address book and Mac OS X’s, also), so I guess I’ll leave it on for now. Maybe I’ll go sign up for .Mac and publish my calendar on the Web.
He must have spent twenty minutes showing us the new themes in iDVD 3 and Keynote. I was a little bored. Other than that, though, the MacWorld Expo keynote was pretty impressive. The updates to iPhoto and iMovie look nice, and I’m happy that they’ll be free downloads.
The new PowerBooks are definitely impressive. I’m a little dubious about the worth of a 17″ screen on a laptop (will it even fit on a coach-sized airplane seat-back tray?), but the 12″ PowerBook is something I’ve been wanting for a while. A G4 processor, SuperDrive, and built-in Bluetooth in a tiny under-five-pounds case. Wow. I want one.
Apple also introduced a new Web browser, Safari. I’m using the beta to write this, and while it’s nice, it doesn’t impress me all that much. Some of the unique features are nice, like the bookmark management and use of Cocoa spell-checking for forms, but it’s missing enough features I’m used to in Mozilla and Chimera (like tabs), that I don’t plan to switch anytime soon. Steve claimed Safari was fast, but Chimera still feels faster to me.
I’m also a little disappointed that they chose to use KHTML as the basis for Safari’s HTML rendering, and not Gecko. They’ve done a pretty good job, but I like Gecko better, and regardless of technical plusses or minuses, I would have rather have seen Apple’s development efforts benefit Mozilla instead of KDE!
It’s off to Memphis now, where hopefully Dell will fix it. Even more hopefully, but much less likely, they will charge me somewhat less than an arm and a leg. At least this time they didn’t make me ship the laptop myself (when we moved, I conveniently threw out all the laptop shipping boxes I had from last time, which means I’d have to spend another $30 to let the UPS Store put the laptop into a box). They sent the Airborne Express driver out with a box. I was pretty impressed with this part of the service—I called Airborne Express around 2:30pm, right after I got off the phone with Dell, and they were able to arrange for same-day pickup, bringing a box and everything. I have always been impressed with Airborne’s service, unlike other carriers I could name.
It’s too bad I can’t say the same for Dell. I called their tech support number to set up the repair, and after an interminable wait, I was finally connected to a call center employee who I doubt worked for Dell, and I doubt was even in the country. He was friendly and tried to help, but didn’t know much about my problem, wasn’t able to tell me how much my repairs might cost, forgot to tell me some information about how the Dell repair process works (luckily, I’ve done it before), and the phone call took forever. At least he believed me when I told him the PC Card slots were broken. The last time this happened, they made me go through all sorts of hassle before just letting me send the darned thing in.
This will be the third time this laptop has visited Dell Repair, and the second time I will have had to pay for it. Tip: If you’re buying a Dell laptop, get as extensive a warranty as you can afford.
Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco is tomorrow morning. As is usual, the rumors sites are abuzz with speculation, rampantly contradicting each other. If previous years are any indication, they’ll be a little right and mostly wrong.
I won’t be at Macworld this year, since I’m in St. Louis. I attended the exhibits last year for the first time in a while (not the conferences), and that was fun. I also watched last year’s keynote on TechTV. I’m a little disappointed that they’re not going to broadcast it again this year (they didn’t for New York, either. Something about Apple being unhappy about TechTV inserting commercials). I guess I’ll have to watch it on QuickTime. But on the plus side, 11am Central time is not nearly as early as 9am Pacific time was last year.
Laura linked to my Web page this evening, so I decided to take this opportunity to update it, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. There’s still nothing there, but at least it matches my weblog now.
The other week, I saw Footloose on DVD. One of the songs from the soundtrack is Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out For a Hero.” I’m not sure I’d heard it before, but it sounded incredibly familiar, and I couldn’t place it. Yesterday, I listened to Amazon’s clip from the soundtrack, and I realized immediately: It sounds just like Meat Loaf.
It turns out that “Holding Out For a Hero” was written by Jim Steinman, who wrote the Bat Out of Hell albums. He also wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Bonnie Tyler’s other big hit from the 80’s, and which also sounds like Meat Loaf, at least now that I’m thinking about it.
I noticed the other day that some of my RSS feeds did not validate, because they contained relative URLs. In fact, it occured to me that using relative URLs in weblog entries in general can be dangerous, because an entry can appear in multiple locations, each with a different base (using absolute paths fixes this, although not the RSS feeds, since those need absolute URLs).
So I wrote an MT plugin that adds a global filter resolve_urls. Enabling this in a template tag goes through and makes all links absolute, resolving any relative URLs against the site URL of your weblog. I’m using it now wherever <$MTEntryBody$> appears on my site, both in HTML and RSS.
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