OS X: Free up Hard Disk space:
Really good advice here. I saved 1.4 GBs using just the Delocalizer app.
I saved 1.2 Gb: good deal.
Now playing:After All by David Bowie from the album “The Man Who Sold The World” | Get it
Month: November 2004
WPBlacklist problems
I have installed WPBlacklist but it isn’t working! What’s wrong? This might be due to any of the following reasons:
1. Have you activated the WPBlacklist plugin from the Plugins panel on the WP Administration screen? If not, you need to activate the WPBlacklist plugin.
2. Do you get PHP errors when you try to post a test comment but your comment appears anyway? In this case, you might have certain entries in your blacklist which are not regular expression safe. Usually, this happens when you have an entry in your blacklist with a “/” not preceded by a “”. So, all you need to do is search your blacklist for such entries and either edit them so that each “/” is preceded by a “” or delete the entry altogether. This happens particularly in the case of URLs where you have “http://” – which should read as “http://” to be regular expression safe.
Yesterday and earlier today, I was having some problems with comments: the comment would be posted but the person leaving the comment would get an error screen: it seems that somehow the blacklist had fallen victim to the item (2) above. I ended up dumping my whole blacklist (emptying the table) and repopulating it. Kind of annoying since the most likely way for stuff to be added is via the plugin or the publicly available blacklists.
these English are crazy
Trust me, he said, it’s going to be fun:
The pain in our legs this morning, I like to feel, is because we spent yesterday kicking away at the horizon. It broke. The view’s great.
But they can turn a phrase . . .
Now playing:Oh, Sister [Live] by Bob Dylan And The Rolling Thunder Review from the album “Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (Bootleg Series Vol. 5) (Disc 2)” | Get it
Neil Gaiman’s 60 Second Writing Course
Since my NaNoWriMo adventure was done almost as soon as it started, I found this to be interesting and very sensible.
Neil, As Nov. 30 quickly approaches and National Novel Writing Month comes to a close I realize that a good chunk of my 50,000 words is utter crap. So I was wondering if you could comment a bit on your rewriting process. Do you just start from the beginning of the book and go through it page by page? Or do you skip around fixing things at random? Any tips of advice you can give would be great. Especially since I wrote this without any type of outline or without much thought before starting. So, I’m not talking about a little tweak here or there, but major overhauls to large sections. Like I said any kind of advice you can offer, things that make it seem less painful, would be great.Thanks,Steve Stanis
What I try and do is:
1) Finish it.
2) Put it away. Drawers are good. Don’t look at it for a week or so.
3) Read the whole thing, doing my best to pretend that I’ve never read it before.
4) Fix the big things. (These tend to be things that pop out at you when you read it, like noticing that you’ve led up to the prison escape, and then meeting the prisoners after they’ve escaped, and realising that it might really have been a good idea to write the escape. Or that the first chapter would really work better as chapter 5.)
5) Read it through page by page and fix the line by line things. Notice that Omar mysteriously becomes Mustapha on page 50 and stays Mustapha until page 90 when he becomes Mustafa. Pick one and make it consistent. Wonder whether anyone will notice that you’ve put Paris in Belgium. Decide to leave it there, on the basis that no-one will notice.
6) Get up in the middle of the night and move Paris back to France.
Does that help?
time to adopt the spyware purveyors’ methods?
On the topic of Lycos’s misguided attempt to attack spammers with a DoS attack:
[IP] F more on [Technical] Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attac:
From: Mary Shaw
Date: November 29, 2004 11:00:53 AM EST
To: dave at farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] [Technical] Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attack business
Reply-To: Mary ShawAren’t the people who casually download screen savers roughly the same
people who casually download other stuff that turns their computers
into zombies?If Lycos wants to distribute a screen saver that fights spam, why
don’t they concentrate on a screensaver that de-zombifies the
computers to which it is downloaded? Depriving spammers of the
bandwidth they’re getting from zombies should have the same effect on
spam with reducton instead of increase in useless IP traffic.While they’re at it, they could add virus protection.
Charity isn’t the only thing that begins at home.
iPod doesn’t write files contiguously? drains battery life as a result?
iPod – restore and maximize battery life:
If you erase and add files in a normal manner you will get fragmentation. The iPod hard disk will have to work more to read your music and your battery will suffer.
This needs to be tested, I think: since the update process is initiated by the desktop system, it should be trivial, or even obvious, to ensure that files are written to contiguous blocks.
Apple does not recommend running disk utilities like Norton Speed Disk, Disk Scan and Disk Defragmenter. It’s not really needed as the drive is not written to and erased nearly as much as a typical hard drive. If you’re emphatic about cleaning up your drive it’s best just to do a full Restore with the Apple Software Updater. This reformats the drive (defragmenting it in the process) and has the added benefit of creating a new clean iPod database which over extended periods of use can get corrupted.
I can see how seeking and scanning could run down battery life, but I’m not convinced it’s needed.
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Strange things can happen to you while you blog. You might even change your mind.
Months ago I described my vegetarian desires that I had given up for love. Whenever Ted travelled, I would make meatless dishes and imagine what life could be like without butcher bills. I wasn’t that excited about my marriage compromise to be a carnivore and hoped somehow I could turn Ted onto tofu.
But now, as I’ve posted recent pieces describing carpaccio appetizer and Burger King vocabulary, I am becoming more comfortable with my carnivorous practices. I’ll even confess I have cravings. Hey, I eat meat! It’s the way we live. It fits our family.
Living without meat is more than just tofu (we rarely eat it and when we do it, it sure isn’t that wobbly white stuff you see in the dairy case).
We don’t eat meat for a variety of reasons, some related to health, some economic (not whether we can afford meat but if the planet can afford it), some ethical.
I grew up eating all kinds of animal parts, meats and organs, and while it may not have done me any harm, it’s a different world today. The way animals are raised (the fact that we pay other people to raise animals for slaughter, something we wouldn’t or couldn’t do ourselves) is part of it: the antibiotic feeds, the conditions of feedlots — veal pens, anyone? — are all things we don’t want to subsidize just to satisfy a craving.
Those issues touch on health and ethics concerns. The economics are another issue: what if 1.1 billion Chinese decided they needed a steak or burger everyday? What if 1 billion Indians gave up their traditional diets for our American — not Western: this is an American phenomenon, not European — diet? As it is in this country, much of the beef cattle are grazed on subsidized public lands with subsidized irrigation as well as fed subsidized corn and grains in the feedlots: the romance of “where the buffalo roam” is just that — a lot of idealized nonsense. So we — my household and others like us — are subsidizing the slaughterhouse industry, whether we like it or not. (This could be tied back to the old Red State/Blue State divide of late, where it was revealed that the rugged individualists of the Red States couldn’t live without the largesse contributed by the effete Blue States: I’m not going there, other than to point out the connection.)
I don’t want to moralize or lecture, especially another adult who is raising their own family in a conscious and thoughtful way, but to adopt a practice you don’t agree with out of love for another, even while that practice might be harming the ones you love and yourself, doesn’t make sense.
sellout?
I had a conversation today with someone on the state of popular music, specifically the new U2 album, just released today. The person I was talking with insisted U2 have sold out, reaching out to the lowest common denominator to sell more copies and make more money. If they really want to squeeze out the dollars, would they be doing deals like this?
Anyway, I have read and re-read this searingly honest piece by Dave Eggers on the very idea of “selling out” and what utter nonsense it is. Especially if you look over U2’s catalog and track the risks they’ve taken. For one thing, a 25 year career with only 11 albums doesn’t suggest a group looking to rip off their fans. For another, take a listen to Pop and Zooropa: those hardly sound like sales-driven releases. I’m listening to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb now and I’m hearing echoes of their earliest releases, but nothing that sounds like a radical departure or contrived “smash hit” sound.
Any band that sold over 30,000 albums was a sellout. Any writer who appeared in any mainstream magazine was a sellout. I was a complete, weaselly little prick, and I had no idea what I was talking about, and goddamn if I don’t wish I could take all that back, because I knew nothing then, just as you know nothing now. You simply cannot judge someone, especially someone whose work you have respected, when they disappoint you, superficially, once or twice. Think of the f*ckheads who turned their back on Dylan when he started using electric guitars, for Christ’s sake. What kind of niggardly imbecile would call Dylan Judas when he plugged into an amp? What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of rules, to stay forever within a narrow envelope which we’ve created for them?
I recommend reading the entire profane but illuminating rant: I was no better than that myself. As we learn, in life as well as in art, “no” is the easiest answer but not always the right answer.
the halo effect
Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com:
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster raised his 12-month price target to $100 from $52, citing a survey conducted by his firm showing that Apple’s popular iPod digital music players are helping boost sales of its signature Macintosh computers.
Another analyst, Robert Cihra, of Fulcrum Global Partners, also boosted his price target, although less dramatically, in a separate research note to clients. He set a new target of $65, up from $53.
[ . . . ]
In a note to clients, Munster wrote that a Piper Jaffray survey of 200 iPod users in the United States found that 6 percent were formerly PC users who had bought a Macintosh computer after their purchase of an iPod.Another 7 percent of those surveyed said they planned to buy a Macintosh, according to the survey.
Customer satisfaction with the digital music player also was very high, Munster said.
“We believe that the remarkable satisfaction with the iPod creates a word-of-mouth wildfire that generates new customer interest in Apple products,” he wrote.
Munster has an “outperform” rating on the stock.
People like what works.
Now playing:Going For The One by Yes from the album “Highlights – The Very Best Of Yes”
And I thought a novel in 30 days was nuts
The Dare – Making the 24-Hr Comic:
To create a complete 24 page comic book in 24 continuous hours.
That means everything: Story, finished art, lettering, colors (if you want ’em), paste-up, everything! Once pen hits paper, the clock starts ticking. 24 hours later, the pen lifts off the paper, never to descend again. Even proofreading has to occur in the 24 hour period. [Computer-generated comics are fine of course, same principles apply].
No sketches, designs, plot summaries or any other kind of direct preparation can precede the 24 hour period. Indirect preparation such as assembling tools, reference materials, food, music etc. is fine.
Sounds fun but 24 hours? I suppose you could make it 24 one-page panels, but still, that’s 24 good illustrations: not sure how much easier that is than smaller ones (more detail vs less, etc.).
My NaNoWriMo exercise ended early when the vertigo hit me: I got some good ideas out of the experience and with any luck, I’ll push them around a little more.