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
Help with Lupus (not money, just lobbying)
If you have a moment, please check out this Action Alert from the Lupus Foundation of America. They’re not after your money; they just want a little help in getting the attention of Congress-critters who seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the urgent and the important. (Ritalin for all of ’em: that’s my prescription.)
And thanks. Many thanks.
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.
Selective quotation
As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller’s famous “First they came…” quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years – not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.
Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: ‘First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.’
But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren’t on Niemöller’s list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.
What could make Niemöller’s point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.
Establishment clause? Never heard of it
Here’s a press release from the mayor of Lebanon, Tennessee. Apparently we should “regardless of religion… come together as Christians”. Note also that “tolerance” is singled out as evil….
“Man has achieved highs and suffered lows during our history of struggling with the wiles of Satan in Satan’s quest for our souls…. When our only recourse was to have a savior, God sent us Jesus….tolerance by Christians has caused our nation to slide further and further away from God…. Let us call upon the Lord together by gathering on the National Day of Prayer…. We do this when we, regardless of religion, sing and pray together calling upon God to intervene and forgive our sin and heal our land. For one hour, surely we can leave the signs on the buildings and come together as Christians“
Coincidentally, I read that “cheerful piece of religious propaganda”, as Andrew Sullivan calls it, just after I’d finished an article which provided the perfect context for it. In the May 2005 edition of Harper’s Magazine, there’s a piece by Chris Hedges called “Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters”. After a thoroughly depressing account of the annual convention of the NRB, he concludes with a personal recollection:
“I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the ‘Christian fascists’. He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.“
Exactly. Today, Lebanon, Tennessee and Colorado Springs. Tomorrow?
(All links and emphases are mine.)
Tiger Mail
The new email client in Tiger is… frustrating, but promising.
Thumbs down for the lack of keyboard accelerators, the weird toolbar icons (which totally violate Apple’s own UI guidelines), the pale blue folder panel, and the funky animation when you choose a message from a set of search results.
Thumbs up for “Smart Folders”, and the way they interact with the rules-based filing and filtering. A smart folder is like the smart playlists in iTunes: the contents of the folder are defined by an arbitrarily complex predicate.
I’ve defined two smart folders: ALL-UNREAD, and UNREAD-4-ME. (I’d like to colour-code them, but no….) The ALL-UNREAD folder contains all unread messages. UNREAD-4-ME contains those unread messages in which "Any recipient" contains "geoff". (I wanted to define it based on the "To:" header only, but no….)
For example: when a new message arrives from my boss, Samir, addressed to me, my rules cause it to be filed in the folder "Active/G2". The unread count for that folder is displayed in the folder panel. In addition, the message satisfies the criteria for both of my smart folders, so it will show up in both of them. Of course, as soon as I read the message it will disappear from those smart folders. On the other hand, the unending stream of messages on the "mac-users" and "solx86-interest" aliases will be filed away and will only show up in the ALL-UNREAD folder.
The bottom line is that this lets me see at a glance how many new messages are addressed to me, and how many I’m getting by virtue of list membership. If I’m in a hurry, I can simply scan the UNREAD-4-ME folder, and I can do this using just the space bar and delete key.