Because I clearly don’t have enough widgets in my life, I’ve set up an account on Twitter. Want more details on the minutia of my life (until I get bored with it)? Follow me on Twitter.
Blame the whole thing on Penny Arcade.
Because I clearly don’t have enough widgets in my life, I’ve set up an account on Twitter. Want more details on the minutia of my life (until I get bored with it)? Follow me on Twitter.
Blame the whole thing on Penny Arcade.
Are you one of the few friends I have that actually still uses IM? Ever wonder why I’m almost always set to some kind of “away” status? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this article from Joe Kissell explains in excellent detail some of the challenges that IM presents to my way of dealing with the world.
From considerable reading and from personal experience, I’ve learned that introverts have a number of other tendencies. And taken together, these traits may shed some light on why I (and numerous other introverts I know) have a hard time with IM, Twitter, and the like. For example, introverts typically need to concentrate on just one thing at a time, and are often particularly sensitive to interruptions and distractions.
Another typical introvert trait is wanting to compose one’s thoughts carefully before sharing them (either verbally or in writing). Once again, while this doesn’t prevent me from carrying on verbal conversations at a normal speed, it makes rapid-fire online textual conversations rather unnerving. For me, interacting with other people in real time online is just as draining as interacting with other people in person. So my feelings about participating in, say, a lively multi-person chat are about the same whether we’re talking about iChat or a party. I can hold my own in the conversation and it’s generally fine, but because it takes a lot of energy I prefer not to do it very often.
The whole article is definitely worth a read.
Want to know how fast my new Eight-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro is? Ridiculously fast. It’s so fast that I’m going to have to change the way that I work. I’m used to only doing one thing at the time, and I’m used to setting up “big” operations like ripping a CD or encoding a DVD to run unattended while I go play a video game, read a book, or just plain go to bed. My new computer (christened “Thor”) treats such tasks as routine commonplace things that don’t even slow down other operations.
This morning, I ripped a 95-minute DVD into PSP-friendly MP4 in ten minutes. With my Powerbook, this is the sort of thing that I literally had to setup to run while I was either sleeping or away at work — easily a 10-12 hour task during which my computer was absolutely locked-up and unusable. My new Mac Pro didn’t even slow down during this ten minute frenzy of encoding. The output from top indicated that the process was just casually using 125% CPU without degrading the overall speed of the UI or any of the applications I had active.
Spotlight searches are instantaneous. For the first time, the items pop into the results in real time as I type. Leopard made an extremely noticeable performance benefit in this regard on my Powerbook, enabling me to drop Quicksilver as my app launcher of choice, but the Mac Pro is in another frame of reference entirely. Using this beast is showing me exactly how much lag I had grown used to on a daily basis, and it’s retroactively shocking.
I expected my new computer to be fast. Yes, I’m still surprised by how obscenely fast “fast” actually is, but let me assure that absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the silence that continues permeate my office. The Mac Pro is somehow no louder than my Powerbook. I’ve had towers before. I’ve built fast desktops with really nice fans. I expected a lawn mower. I was willing to trade silence for sheer computational power, but in the end, there was absolutely no compromise. Even after experiencing the silence, I expected the noise level to jump while I was transcoding that DVD. Other than the spinning of the optical drive (which was quite noticeable even on my Powerbook), there was no increase in noise.
If I had any criticism at all after five or so hours of usage, it involves the keyboard. I’m not a fan of the flat keyboard because key action just doesn’t work for me. Now I’ll admit right from the outset that I’m a notoriously cranky person when it comes to keyboards. I want my keyboard to have an oh-so-perfect delicate balance between easy to press the keys and a definite tactile response. After a couple of hours, I had shifted back over to my Apple wireless keyboard and Logitech Bluetooth mouse.
Unfortunately (and this is no reflection at all on my new computer), my Powerbook really resented being booted into Firewire target disk mode, constantly locking up and generally rendering the Setup Assistant incapable of moving my files directly over. In the end, I skipped that part of the process and then ran the stand-alone Migration Assistant using my Time Machine backups, a solution which worked quickly and flawlessly.
How thrilled am I with the new computer? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m really effing happy. I can’t wait to get home from work again so that I can play some games on it.
My new Mac Pro arrived here at work during my lunch break. The box is now sitting here at my desk tempting me for the next four-and-a-half hours. I don’t know how I will survive the experience.
I’m going to have to bring the car around to the front of the Florida Gym because this sucker is heavy.
For the past year or so, Allyson and I have been in a mad rush toward home-ownership. We’ve been throwing every spare dime into our savings account, and then donning the proverbial sackcloth every time an unexpected expense came in. You see, we really, really hate our current apartment. People steal our plants. Our neighbors are loud, obnoxious, drunken assholes. I’m increasingly too lazy to actually take things up and down the stairs. Our collective focus, our total awareness, was squarely centered on escaping this apartment into a small piece of the world that we could truly call ours.
We were optimistic. We had some money saved up. I got a surprise raise recently. In short, things looked good. I played with some online calculators, checked my credit score, and determined that the banks would almost certainly loan us more money than I actually wanted them to. I ran some further numbers on housing insurance and local property taxes just to figure out the exact point at which we could no longer afford a given house in the MLS listings. We contacted friends about realtors, got some promising names, and generally got pretty damn excited about the future.
Then we called the bank.
On the day before we called, new regulations went into effect in Alachua County, requiring more of a down payment because our housing market is depressed. The fellow at the credit union was super helpful with all this. He gave Allyson some exact figures for what we would need in order to start our home-buying process. Unfortunately, the final number was, for us, an unattainable figure. Screeching halt. Emergency stop. Plans on hold until further notice.
So yeah, upsetting news. It was clearly time to renegotiate our deal with ourself since our Katie-bar-the-doors savings strategy wasn’t sustainable in the long-term. We had put off nearly all big purchases in order to maximize our liquid assets for closing costs, down payments, etc. We were shell-shocked from the sheer effort involved. After some time off to mourn the loss of the house we never actually had, we sat down with our spreadsheets and Quicken accounts to figure out where to go from here. Allyson needed some clothes for job interviews. I needed a new computer about six months ago. We had dental bills staring us in the face so hard it made our molars throb. We reworked our savings strategy to be a lot more reasonable, made a kick ass savings plan that has us ready to buy a house two years from now (unless we need to move to a different county to find a teaching job for Allyson), and even figured out how to buy me a new computer without killing us in the long-term. Responsible adulthood, here we come!
The truly awesome news that comes out of this is that I’m buying a new computer for the first time in four years. The ol’ Powerbook has been showing its age of late, choking on all the background services I have it performing. When my Powerbook was having trouble running a freaking NES emulator, I knew that the time for a replacement wasn’t too far down the road. All of this led to last night, when I placed my order for a brand new Eight-core dual-2.8 GHz Mac Pro. After shamelessly paying $44 for two-day shipping, my new baby should be here by Wednesday or Thursday — just in time for Allyson’s trip out of town this weekend. That should leave me with plenty of time to get settled into my new digital digs without feeling like a bad husband for systematically ignoring my wife in favor of machinery.
Now all we need is the new version of Photoshop for this baby…
I’ve been getting hit with a flood of comment spam. Now, you, my ever faithful reader, have been blissfully unaware of this prior to this moment because my Wordpress blog has comment moderation turned on. Every comment that comes in must be approved by me before heading out onto the web. This morning, the amount of spam increased several times over, and I frankly reached boiling point. I got tired of getting interrupted all day by emails full of spam for me to harvest. Because of this, I have installed reCAPTCHA, an ingenious hack that uses those little funny pictures with letters and numbers to help digitize old books. Confused about how this works? Here’s a bit more info from reCAPTCHA’s “What is reCAPTCHA” page:
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
So, in addition to foiling spammers, we’re also helping the preservation of human knowledge. This alone should encourage you to leave more comments.
Other Bactroid.net bloggers can turn on reCAPTCHA for their own blog at any time. Just log in and access the “Plugins” tab on your admin page. Activate reCAPTCHA from that screen and then follow the link to input your public and private keys. reCAPTCHA will even provide you with a convenient link to the signup page. Once you’ve entered your keys, give it a test by trying to leave a comment on your own blog. It should just work, but if you have any difficulties (or don’t feel comfortable setting it up on your blog), just send me an email.
Just yesterday, Allyson and I had a great discussion in the car on the way to dinner about the general lack of scientific understanding here in America. My contention after reading through this article on science journalism was that very few people in America have an understanding of the role statistics plays in science and the scientific method. Frankly, scientists don’t exactly prove anything. Instead, experiments are largely designed to assess the statistical likelihood that some combination of factors is correlated in some scientifically significant way. Each scientist must lay bare methodology and raw data in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Then that scientist’s peers are expected to challenge or confirm those results with new experiments to test the relationship of those factors using a different method. Science is a conversation, and statistics is the language in which that conversation takes place.
Coming out of our discussion yesterday, I did some digging online and found one of the best examples I’ve found of explaining the role that statistics plays in science. This quote from Gavin Schmidt comes from a recent public debate on whether or not climate change is a crisis.
I want to talk to you a little about the nature of this public debate. And I want to give you some background to what you’ve been hearing so far, and what you’ll hear a little bit later on. The issue of global warming and whether it’s a crisis or not, is in fact a scientific decision, it’s a scientific issue. It’s not a political one. On the other hand, deciding what to do about it is obviously political. Science can inform those decisions, but it can’t determine what decisions society makes. But we’re here to debate the existence of the problem and whether it is a crisis. That’s something that the scientists on this side are eminently suited to do. You’ve all seen or heard about the CSI police drama, where high tech forensic scientists try and work out who done it when they come across the scene of a crime. Well think of climate scientists as CSI planet Earth, we’re try-, we see a climate change and we try and work out what’s done it. Just like on CSI we have a range of high tech instruments to give us clues, satellites, ocean probes, radar, a worldwide network of weather stations and sophisticated computer programs to help us make sense of it all. The aim is to come to the most likely explanation of all the facts fully anticipating that in the real world there are always going to be anomalies, there are always going to be uncertainties. Conclusions will be preliminary and always open to revision in the light of new evidence. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same approach that doctors take when examining a patient. They don’t know everything about the human body, but they can still make a pretty accurate diagnosis of your illness. We end up then with a hierarchy of knowledge. Some things that are extremely likely, some things we’re pretty sure of, and some things that we think might be true, but really could go either way. There isn’t a division into things that are completely proven and things which are completely unknown. Instead, you have a sliding scale of increasing confidence. Let me give you a few examples. We’re highly confident that the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, it might not, it might go nova. But it’s likely that it will happen. It’s quite likely that you’ll be able to get a cab home from this event, unless it’s raining of course. [LAUGHTER] But, but those two things have different levels of certainty. You’re used to the idea that different kinds of knowledge come with different levels of certainty, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the impacts of climate change.
If more people understood this simple truth about science, I think that we would be in a much better position to have intelligent discussions about scientific topics in the media. If you’re a science educator at any level, I implore you to stress this point before all others. Hypotheses aren’t proven. Science is an on-going conversation.
Technorati Tags: Education, Science, Statistics, Gavin Schmidt
For the past week or so, I’ve returned to an old habit. I’ve spurned OS X Mail in favor of text-based mutt. I used mutt as my exclusive email client for years after graduating from college, and Mail is the only GUI mail client that I didn’t absolutely hate. Sadly, I’ve been building up a slow frustration for a number of months that finally led to my seemingly drastic decision.
Simply put, Mail is too slow. This was never a problem before Tiger, so I wildly speculate that Mail’s shift to storing emails as individual files rather than monolithic mbox files has led to extreme unhappiness with my mail load. I have over 13,000 messages in my Archive folder and a further 12,000 sent messages. I’m unwilling to delete any of these. They are my records that help me answer infrequent but important questions. Think of my old emails as an answer cache that saves me the bother of solving the same infrequent problems over and over. Mail has started taking between fifteen and thirty seconds to even display my messages. Synchronizing with the server happens on a time scale that can only be called “glacial”. In contrast, with header caching turned on, mutt can draw up an initial display of my mail folders in 1-2 seconds with absolutely no subsequent delay in operating on that folder.
Compiling mutt was a piece of cake thanks to the Unix underneath OS X. I just grabbed the source and went throught the configure/make/make install trinity. IMAP support and SSL were handled seamlessly after the install.
The beauty of this situation is that, since I use IMAP, I can use other clients with mutt. Thunderbird is downright snappy if I need a graphical client, and a daily download from Mail ensures that Spotlight continues to work for me. The IMAP protocol removes any penalty for switching email clients.
I have this vague notion that I’m slowly returning to console-only applications, one app at a time. I’ve already started running a persistent screen with multiple named shells. It’s only a matter of time before I do something drastic like writing a series of Perl scrips to simulate Quicksilver and Spotlight.
Since becoming a Mac user, I’ve become accustomed to things just working. Back when I used Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD as my desktop machines I was used to researching for long hours before buying anything just to make sure that it was possible to use with my particular OS of choice. When I got the new toy home, I knew that it would be at least half a day before I could actually play with it since I would inevitably have to grab some updated driver, compile something, fix the Registry, or something equally ridiculous. Every device that I have plugged into the Mac has just worked. Printers magically install themselves and set themselves up for network sharing just by plugging in a USB cable and checking a box in the appropiately named Sharing area of System Preferences. New peripherals just spring to live without any secret incantations to the driver gods.
What happens when the damn thing doesn’t just work?
I got my iPod yesterday when I got home from work. They delivered it five days earlier than Apple originally predicted and two days earlier than FedEx themselves predicted. Considering that this little machine came from China, I was suitably impressed. When I got home, I put dinner on to cook and then plugged my new iPod in and expected it to work. It started downloading the music immediately but gave me a warning that my iPod software wasn’t up-to-date enough to play all of my music. This seemed reasonable to me. I remembered an iPod update from January that I obviously had to install.
I opened the iPod Updater application, and it showed me a picture of the wrong iPod and demanded that I plug my iPod in via Firewire if I wanted to restore it. The kink in this plan is that my iPod doesn’t do firewire. A bit of digging revealed that I had been bitten by this bug. Apple’s solution for my dilemma as a 10.4 user? Install the latest OS updates—which I had—or if you’re already running the most current version, reinstall OS X using the Archive and Install option. Now call me crazy, but I think that reinstalling the OS to make a digital music player work is a bit extreme. I tinkered with the damn thing nearly all night. I reinstalled the latest OS updates. I used Pacifist to reinstall portions of the OS and iTunes. Nothing effing worked. In a last ditch attempt to try something before biting the bullet and reinstalling OS X, I decided to install the OS X 10.4.5 combined update—even though I had theoretically reinstalled all of the pieces in comprised—and after that, my iPod started syncing with no further issues.
Let me stress that the issue was clearly with my Powerbook and not with my new iPod. The new iPod worked just fine with Allyson’s Mac Mini. I checked. Twice.
The new iPod is magnificent though and certainly worth all the trouble. I watched one of my French videos on it, and the picture quality was surprising to me. The screen is large enough that my eyes didn’t feel strained at all. The color screen is beautiful and brightly lit. The size and weight is very pleasing. The difference in controls will take some getting used to coming from my third-generation iPod, but I already think that I like them much better.
Technorati Tags: Bugs, OS X, iPod, iPod Updater
Allyson decided to help me pay for my new iPod with some of the spending money she had saved up, so I’ll be getting my new iPod with video playback capability sooner than I figured. I ordered the 60 GB model in black, and Allyson will inherit my third-generation 40 GB iPod. In a very real sense, everyone wins.
Why did I want a new iPod when mine works just fine? First and foremost, I wanted Allyson to be able to have an iPod that can hold all of our music, and given my lust for all things expensive and digital it just made more sense to buy a new iPod for myself in order to accomplish this. In addition, the video playback functionality does exactly what I wanted a PSP for. I’ll be able to watch my instructional French videos easily on my lunch break at work, and if there’s a show I can’t live without watching out of the house, I can download it with questionable legality on the Internet’s many proverbial Mos Eisley cantinas until the content producers finally get their heads out of each other’s asses long enough to create a new distribution model(1). The battery life claims on the new iPods also intrigue the hell out of me.
I got my iPod custom engraved for free because why the hell not really. The back of my iPod will read:
No attachment to dust.
Je est un autre.
The first line is a quote from Zen master Zengetsu, and the second line is a quote en français from Arthur Rimbaud.
Alright. Back to converting video for my soon-to-arrive iPod.
Technorati Tags: Commerce, iPod, Television
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