Month: May 2005

innovation?

Microsoft Notebook: The end of ‘my’ is nigh:

Those folders on your Windows desktop will still be yours — but in the future you’ll need to figure that out on your own.

Ending a longstanding tradition, Microsoft Corp. plans to stop using the word “my” as the default prefix for such folders as “My Documents,” “My Music,” “My Pictures” and others along those lines. Starting in the next Windows version, due out next year, folders will be known simply as “Documents,” “Music,” and so on.

Like this?
Imitation

What’s the old saw about the sincerest form of flattery?

[composed and posted with ecto]

synchonicity

Tim Bray on owning your work product:

ongoing · OpenDocument!:

Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheets
or presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them, independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice: OpenDocument.

If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-value
data that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, well
there’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page at
ongoing.

Kieran Healey from a day or so earlier on managing it with a ponderous toolchain: seems like a lot of work, but it still ties back to owning the stuff you make.

Never put information into something if you don’t know how you’re going to get it back out, unmunged. I usually apply that to database schemas — you should know what queries you plan to run against a database before you start — but in these days of format and version creep, perhaps it extends more broadly.


[composed and posted with ecto]

another MovableType refugee

On a New Server:

This site is on the new server now, using WordPress. Please let me know, in the comments, if you see any problems.

I get the sense that the last people using MT will be people developing for it, as if that was the point of a publishing platform.

Do I have an axe to grind with MovableType/6Apart? No, I don’t: I would never have played with this whole weblogging thing if it hadn’t been for MT. It was easy to set up and use: what else can a beginner ask for? But over time, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to work over the long term. I won’t rehash the problems I ran into (they’re all archived here) but WordPress made them all go away. When I see sites like Crooked Timber and now Ed Felten moving to WP, I realize it wasn’t just me.

It really makes me wonder what happens when someone has the First Mover position and doesn’t move with the times. They neither want nor need my advice, I suppose: to take a spare-room coding project and sell a stake in it for $11 million (I don’t know where I saw this?), all the while building a business with a monthly revenue stream (TypePad), suggests they know a few things I don’t. But even now, with MT 3.1.x out — one assumes the dust from 3.0 has settled — more and more thought leaders are moving away from MT.

As I say, they know something(s) I don’t but I still don’t get the wisdom of ceding marketshare when it would be so easy not to.

Tiger weirdness

Some features seem to have been inadvertently removed in the Tiger development and release cycle.

  • I can’t get X to work properly: I can run X-based apps locally, but can’t display any from other systems. Nothing to do with the built-in firewall, since I turned it off. I don’t even see any log entrails to work with.
  • Also, disk space seems to be in short supply: I attribute this to my music collection to some degree (it takes up half my 30 Gb disk) but also Spotlight’s metadata stores and the swapfiles used by the vm system.

-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 May 25 21:47 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 May 26 07:09 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 134217728 May 26 07:49 swapfile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 26 13:28 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 26 21:00 swapfile4
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 28 19:57 swapfile5

That’s a gigabyte right there . . . .

  • rsync doesn’t seem to work over ssh as it used to: I use it to back up my music collection and I now have to mount the remote volume with nfs and use rsync to synchronize two local directories, rather than doing it over the network.
  • And snmp is broken.

The obvious lesson for me is that I should have bought a fully-loaded PowerBook, but I couldn’t swing it then, still less likely now. More real memory would have meant less vm use and a larger disk would have come standard.

Also, getting used to cron’s deprecated state, in favor of launchd: in 10.4.1, it seems that you can use crontab files, same as always, and they get managed by launchd anyway.

I needed to find that out to get an automount set up. It looks like I am going to have to have my music collection automounted and then run from that, syncing up to the iPod and such. But it feels risky to me to run from what is essentially my backup system. That has to be improved upon. I have my 80 Gb FireWire drive that I may have to employ for this: just plug it in and rsync to it nightly.

unforeseen benefits to the TV-free lifestyle

Gee, it makes people want stuff . . . and it’s often stuff they don’t need/can’t afford. But they see that their fave celebrities have one (or more) so they want to burnish their lives with one as well.

Class Matters – Social Class and Status Markers in the United States of America – The New York Times – New York Times:

In the last 30 years or so, however, [Professor Juliet Schor] said, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups. A “horizontal desire,” coveting a neighbor’s goods, has been replaced by a “vertical desire,” coveting the goods of the rich and the powerful seen on television, Professor Schor said.

“The old system was keeping up with the Joneses,” she said. “The new system is keeping up with the Gateses.”

It’s not as easy as just buying stuff . . . .

“Class now is really like three-card monte,” [Professor Conley] said. “The moment the lower-status aspirant thinks he has located the nut under the shell, it has actually shifted, and he is too late. “

The bottomline seems to be how many people you have waiting on you, how much time you spend being served by others.

Perversely, it also signifies how much control you surrender to these providers. Do you really want to offer any advice to someone giving you an $800 haircut? Or do you assume they know what they’re doing? Likewise, Masa, a restaurant in New York that offers a $350 prix fixe meal: are you likely to make any requests about how the food should be prepared?

Who imagined being a high-roller would also entail being a hostage to these rarefied servitors?

DesktopManager and Tiger: not a good match

I was enjoying DesktopManager in Panther but it didn’t compile in Tiger until today: I built it and used it for a bit until I saw these messages in the Console:

May 24 13:37:20 white /Applications/DarwinPorts/Desktop Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/Desktop Manager: The function CGSGetElementForCStringKey is obsolete and will be removed in a Tiger update. Unfortunately, this app, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance.

My system doesn’t need any degrading, so out it came. Shame: it’s a handy thing to have. Perhaps it will be revised.