Author: geoff

Caesar's Bath thread: "what's all the fuss about?"

Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin‘s blog: the Caesar’s Bath question: ‘list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”‘. So let’s see….

  1. Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious…. I’d rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.

  2. SUVs: They’re ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. (“Are you compensating for something, perhaps?” No, that’s tacky.)

  3. TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I’ve been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth….

  4. The Matrix: It’s not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think “brains in vats”.) But it wasn’t even a good film…. (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)

  5. Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C’mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can’t believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun – OK?

The new Al Stewart album

Just listening to tracks from the new Al Stewart album, “Beach Full of Shells” on a great Internet radio station: Radio Frontiers. A nice mix of old and new Al music, and a nice crowd on the IRC chat. The DJ, Peter, is repeating it on Saturday; I’ll find out the exact schedule and update this. (UPDATE: 1pm EST.) No special software needed, really: I’m using iTunes. (Oskar reports that WinAMP with the MP3Pro plugin is crisper.)

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

In conjunction with getting my new car, we decided to donate my Mazda Miata to charity (specifically to the Lupus Foundation of America). After filling out a form on their website, we were contacted by the company that handles the transport for them (and many other charities, I imagine), and they came to take it away. Just two more things to do: cancel the insurance, and take the plates back to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. It turns out that the former depends on the latter, so tomorrow morning I’ll be stopping in at the Watertown RMV to return the plates.

While I was at the RMV website, checking on opening times and so forth, I started thinking about whether to get a custom, “vanity” license plate for the new car. Here in Massachusetts, the rules for cars are simple: 2-6 letters, letters that might be confused with digits can only be used in “recognizable words”, and nothing “inappropriate”. (You can use digits, but there are too many restrictions – they want to keep their options open.) And you can check online to see which combinations might be available. To my surprise, all of the following were reportedly free:

GEOFF
GEOFFA
EVOLVE
EVOLTN
EVLUTN
DARWIN
SECULR
HHGTTG

Hmmmm……

UPDATE: I’m going to apply for EVOLVE. They shouldn’t have any problem with that….

UPDATE: It turns out that EVOLVE had (just) been taken. Curses, foiled again…! So I went with my second choice, DARWIN. Quite apart from affirming evolution through natural selection, and celebrating one of the most influential scientists in history, there’s a nice Mac geek connection too.

HHGTTG – oh dear.

Saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this evening. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. You know it’s bad when the high point is spotting the old Marvin robot (from the BBC TV series) queuing in the Vogon office. And to those who say that it’s what Douglas would have wanted – yes, I agree, it’s full of things that exemplify his weakest tendencies. Douglas’s strength was satirical dialog, skewering pompous bureaucratic gobbledygook and content-free marketing pablum with equal energy. However, he was also a geek, always fascinated with shiny toys – even if he didn’t know how to use them properly. Giving Douglas a large SFX budget was like giving a bipolar wine-taster the keys to the cellar. He was (admirably) obsessed with the environment, and endangered species; his book Last Chance To See is wonderful. But that doesn’t mean turning HHGTTG into a “green” manifesto. It’s a comedy, dammit! (But I noticed that hardly anyone in the cinema was laughing – including me.)
And whoever wrote that stupid theme song should be forcibly re-educated and compelled to take up a new line of work.

On the unreliability of imagination…

“Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”

Mill, J. S. 1874, A System of Logic, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers

More on Tiger Mail

Having dug into this a little, I can confirm that when the new Mail.app converted my existing cached IMAP folders to the new format, it left the old messages in place. For example, I have a folder called CoolTech which has 4281 messages totalling 18.1MB. (I got this from the cool new Account Info window in Mail.app.) If I drill down into ~/Library/Mail/IMAPxxx/AAtech/CoolTech.imapmbox I can see two subdirectories: CachedMessages and Messages. Each contains about 4,300 files. (Remember: I’ve been receiving new messages and deleting some since I did the Tiger upgrade.)

So we’ve established that upgrading to Tiger will double your on-disk mailbox usage – at least, if you’re an IMAP user: I don’t know about POP. The question is, how to clean up? How about the Rebuild command? The Help describes it thus:

For IMAP accounts, the table of contents file is moved aside, and locally cached messages are also discarded. All the messages are retrieved again from the server to your hard disk and the table of contents file is rebuilt from the newly downloaded messages and from data in the old table of contents file.

So let’s go ahead and try it…. [long pause with lots of network and disk activity] No, it doesn’t work. Or rather, it works exactly as advertised: all of the message files in the new Messages subdirectory were refreshed, but the old CachedMessages directory was left untouched.

Obviously I know how to walk the tree deleting the old stuff (using find in a Terminal window), but it’s odd that Apple didn’t provide for this.

Blog meme: five people you'd like to blog with

Over at total information awareness I encountered a new blog meme: name five people you’d like to blog with. I interpret this as “name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you’d like to read and link to”; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar. Anyway, here are my five, avoiding the obvious choices like Einstein, Mark Twain and Ben Franklin:

Hopefully these choices are self-explanatory. My guiding principle is that of the 17th century English diarist, John Evelyn: Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (‘explore everything; keep the best’).

The blogs where I read about this said something about “tagging” other bloggers, but that seems inconsistent with the spirit of blogging. Memes spread if they deserve to. Let’s see if this one does. Your turn. (However, if I were tagging, I’d choose Terry, Alec Muffett, and Jonathan Schwartz.)

Congratulations Chelsea

I took a few minutes this afternoon to watch the culmination of a great season for Chelsea FC: defeating Bolton 2-0: “Chelsea sealed their first championship for 50 years with victory at Bolton. Frank Lampard struck twice in the second half as manager Jose Mourinho added the Premiership to the Carling Cup in his first season in charge.” I watched all of the second half of the match, and I thought that both Lampard’s goals were delightful. I’m not particularly a Chelsea fan (in fact I’m not a dedicated supporter of any one team: I’ll cheer for Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool – sorry, Steve), but Chelsea’s championship victory is very well-deserved.