Category: MovableType 3.0

fortune(6) graced me with this one today:

Seems like this farmer purchased an old, run-down, abandoned farm with plans to turn it into a thriving enterprise. The fields are grown over with weeds, the farmhouse is falling apart, and the fences are collapsing all around. During his first day of work, the town preacher stops by to bless the man’s work, praying, “May you and God work together to make this the farm of your
dreams!”

A few months later, the preacher stops by again to call on the farmer. Lo and behold, it’s like a completely different place — the farm house is completely rebuilt and in excellent condition, there is plenty of cattle and other livestock happily munching on feed in well-fenced pens, and the fields are filled with crops planted in neat rows. “Amazing!” the preacher says.

“Look what God and you have accomplished together!”
“Yes, reverend,” replies the farmer, “but remember what the farm was like when God was working it alone!”

So much for the footprints on the beach . . . .

Now playing: Just by Radiohead from the album “The Bends” | Get it

Working with darwinports, it looks like building OpenSSL on a UFS volume (mounted as NFS) and installing from there to a local HFS+ volume has problems. For some reason, the port won’t install due to some filename case issues if the source files are on an NFS volume. If I do it all locally, it works fine.

I don’t get it. I would have suspected the target filesystem to be the issue, rather than the source one.

Guardian | The King William’s College quiz:

The King William’s College quiz

It’s 100 years old and it’ll still outsmart you. The King William’s College quiz is devised for the intellectual torture of the school’s pupils, and this is your chance to suffer with them. Answers in the new year…

I’ll be taking this to a multi-family Christmas dinner tomorrow.

I got two on my initial scan. How did you do?

I have about 12 total messages in my GMail inbox: I haven’t used it very much at all. It’s fine, but I haven’t yet worked it into my dysfunctional work style.

Judge of my surprise and amazement when I found 81 spam messages in there today: since all the email I have sent and received was to trusted individuals, I have to assume the spammers are just taking usernames they find in the wild and just appending domains at random. They assume everyone has a GMail account, so just spam everyone@gmail.com.

This revelation (perhaps obvious to everyone else) suggests spammers, like the poor, will always be with us.

MSNBC – iPod Nation:

In just three years, Apple’s adorable mini music player has gone from gizmo to life-changing cultural icon

Just this week, I was wondering about the phrase “iPod nation.” I hadn’t heard it, and wondered why not.

Anyway, new iPods are rolling out this week: they look like the 3G models with the same controls as the Minis. No idea on capacities, though I assume they’ll be larger than the Minis, given the shortage of parts.

now playing: Conquistador from the album Greatest Hits by Procol Harum | Buy it

I was working with iTunes’s custom playlist feature today, with an eye to burning a CD and making a custom case sleeve. I inadvertently applied the wrong artwork to a track and when I created a mosaic for the sleeve, I realized the artwork for that track was wrong. So how to fix it?

I tried applying the correct artwork (dragging and dropping from Amazon is so useful), but that just adds an *additional* image: who knew you could have more than one?

So I figured I’d just drop down to the filesystem and remove either the images or any links to them: I assumed the image files were stored in disk and associated with a given track in the XML datastore. After searching around and then hitting Google, I learned that the art is actually inserted into the file. I guess there is some space for non-audio data in the file (comments, meta-data, whatehaveyou).

Sigh.

So I dropped the track from the playlist and my iTunes Library and re-imported it from the CD I had (fortunately) already burned. Sure enough, the re-imported track, having been burned as a WAV file and then reduced to an mp3, had no image file. Associating it with the rest of the album tracks got me what I needed, but what a convoluted journey.

Surely, there is some way to edit an mp3 file and remove or alter any extraneous stuff like that? In any event, perhaps this will be useful to someone else . . .

Daring Fireball: The Location Field Is the New Command Line:

The conventional wisdom was in fact correct — the web has turned into a popular application development environment. Where I’d gone wrong was in getting hung up on the idea of it needing to be high-quality before it could become popular.

I was thinking in terms of the apps that I used every day, circa 1996: BBEdit, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Eudora. There was simply no way that a “web app” could ever provide the same quality experience as the “real” apps I was already using.

Amazing that someone would think that their application experience — running graphic design applications with no mention of anything related to business software — was typical and that, based on that, web apps were doomed to failure. Did John Gruber not realize why Netscape came in every flavor of OS under the sun? Had he never heard the quote about relegating Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers?”
Continue reading “Talk about “not getting it””

The March of Folly: Troy to Vietnam: if Barbara Tuchman were still alive, would she be compelled to replace Vietnam with Iraq?

I love all her books but this one stands out as a must-read. She analyzes the mistakes made by powerful and well-organized nation states and how they have made sometimes fatal decisions that can only be defined/described as folly. Her examples are the Trojans and that horse you’ve heard of, the Renaissance popes’ provocation of the Protestant Reformation, Britain’s loss of the American colonies, and America’s (and France’s) involvement in Vietnam. To quote the publisher’s blurb:

Barbara Tuchman defines folly as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.” In THE MARCH OF FOLLY, Tuchman examines 4 conflicts: The Trojan Horse, The Protestant Secession, The American Revolution, and The American War in Vietnam. In each example an alternative course of action was available, the actions were endorsed by a group, not just an individual leader, and the actions were perceived as counter productive in their own time.

A great read, for any student of history or politics, especially for the section on the loss of the American Colonies: I suspect very few Americans realize how little support the Revolutionary War had at home in England and how many prominent people of the time supported the colonists’ goal of independence.
Continue reading “war as a numbers game”