cave success

Yesterday I'd started to feel like I don't have superpowers -- for a week now I've been working on documentation for ChemPad, not writing any code. So I devoted the afternoon to therapeutic programming on Screen: programming that makes me feel good. I had a fantastic day in the Cave: I made text swarm around the user's head, in a path determined by a bunch of sine waves with different frequencies and amplitudes... I could last about ten seconds in VR with words swimming around me before I started to feel very dizzy. That's actually a good thing, in this case, because the point is to overwhelm the user with text. At Josh's suggestion, I tried it out with extruded polygonal text instead of texture-mapped, antialiased, alpha-blended text. Damn, it looks good. Poor Josh brought it up like, "This is just blue-sky stuff, idea off the top of my head, I know it would probably be really hard to do, but it would be cool if the text had some depth." Aha! That's just an option in FTGL. I only had 15 minutes or so to get it to work before we had to go meet friends for Battlestar Galactica, and I couldn't find the depth control. I came back to the cave later that night, after three or four episodes of BG:TNG, and got extruded text to work very quickly. I turned on the hardware-supported full-screen-antialiasing, and now it looks better than the texture-mapped alpha blended text, and I don't have to do z-sorting.

Yesterday's coding demonstrated that the toolkit I'd spent my weekends in January constructing actually does enable rapid design and implementation of spatial text applications for virtual reality. Yeah!!!

fantastic restore-from-backup -- i love you, .mac!

In august, when my mac first started having trouble, I backed up all of the data on my mac using Backup 2. I tried unsuccessfully several times to back up to .Mac, but I just had too much stuff. I wanted one coherent backup, in one file, on one disk, so I plugged in my 5 gb firefly (firewire hard drive, not joss whedon series) and created a 4.96 gb backup of all of my iLife: purchased music from iTunes and all my iPhoto's, most importantly. I also put my most precious stuff -- my writing -- on my ipod, and on a cd, and on a remote fileserver... I had forgotten that I had backed up my iTunes purchased music, though. I thought, there's just too much of it, I couldn't have burned it all to a single cd, and I don't have a dvd burner, so it must be just lost and gone forever... like my Guster album. (Sidenote: Audible.com lets me download purchased materials as many times as I'd like, which is far more convenient than the iTunes music store policy of "one dollar, one download," since I have three machines from which I'd like to listen to audiobooks.)
So, here's the beauty of .mac:
I copied my giant 8-14-04.backup file from my firefly to my desktop, and double-clicked it. Backup launched, all set up to "restore checked files." It didn't have any of the files checked, so I checked the ones I cared about, which was almost everything. It said, some of these items need to be backed up to a folder, so I created ~/Restored/ for that stuff. Spin, spin, spin, then all my data was back!
I "add to library"'d from iTunes, pointed it at ~/Restored/Music/iTunes Library, and <em>all of my purchased music was back</em>. Aah... And I pointed iPhoto at my restored iPhoto library, and it was <em>all there</em>. This has been the most painless restore <em>ever</em>.
To cap off this fantastic experience, I started on a redesign of my home page, using iWork's Pages. It's not much, but ye gods it's better than what used to be there.
My mac is the oldest and slowest machine I own, the only machine with just 802.11b wireless, no bluetooth, no smart-card readers built in, and the battery only lasts about ten minutes... Still, it's my favorite system, by far: the first one I reach for in the morning, the one who sings me to sleep at night, the one on which I do as much work as possible, the one I resent having to put down. It just works the way it's supposed to.
<em>*sighs contentedly, them puts down the mac to go tweak C# on my tablet pc*</em>

podcasting: technology and content exactly when I needed it!

For the last few days I've been looking for free online spoken-word news and commentary. Sure, I can get lots of This American Life and All Things Considered as windows media or real audio, but it's a pain to start and stop, to move from one machine to another, and I can't burn to cd from streaming media. audible.com charges significant fees for downloadable versions of radio programs, like $2.95 for one episode of All Things Considered, and even that isn't released until many many hours after the news is tired. TellTallWeekly has micro-fees for audio content, but, ahem, most of it is either unknown or dead authors. I want to listen to news and commentary while I'm falling asleep, or driving, or, notably, driving in between major radio markets.

Podcasting is exactly what I've been looking for. A few NPR shows and a few BBC shows have started podcasting -- this is just the same sort of content that I'd be willing to pay, and have in fact paid for. I just find the feeds I want, add them to my iPodder subscriptions, then poof! The latest episode will appear in iTunes, and from there, on my iPod.

So, I'm a late early adopter on this one. Still definitely an early adopter as related to the world at large, but my big brother was doing this six months ago. I'm finding the technology just when I want it, just when I want more free downloadable current spoken word audio content.

Can anyone explain why I'm awake at six am? Perhaps listening to a BBC podcast entitled "the Cambrian Explosion" will help me sleep.

how?

How am I going to get out of bed, when in bed I have a purring cat and access to my email and the BBC World Service? Plus there's six or seven inches of snow out there. Days like this I wish I had a coffeemaker...

The reason for getting out of bed, though, is Zebediah. Getting out of bed means I can do my job, which means I can do my job well, which means I can leave this job with great accomplishments behind me, which means I can get a new job somewhere closer to Zebediah.

Getting out of bed is much easier when Zebbie appears next to me, in person, and says, "Wake up, Sascha! Time to put on daytime clothes!"

fantastic, super, great

I've come across several fantastic things in the last few days:
O2 Optix: I'd been seeing advertisements for these new contact lenses, and simultaneously having increasing trouble with my contacts. I'd been using 1-Day Acuvue off and on for a few years now. I started using daily disposables when I was more affluent than I am now, and I got used to the convenience: I put them in if I want to wear them on a particular day, and at the end of the day, I just pop them out -- a maneuver I often perform in bed. Since coming to New England, though, the comfort of my contacts has declined to the point where I would only where them when I was going to be working in the Cave, where cumbersome LCD shutter glasses are required. Even then, I'd have to bring eyedrops and my glasses everywhere, because the lenses would dry out and quickly become intolerable after as few as six hours. I visited my eye doctor yestereday, and he gave me samples of these fantastic new lenses, O2 Optix. He explained that they don't contain as much water, and so they're less susceptible to drying out. When he first put them in, I blinked and exclaimed, "Wow! Those feel great!" The doctor laughed -- "That's probably because of the anesthetic I put in your eyes five minutes ago." Even after the anesthetic wore off, I'm still loving these contacts. No dryness! I do blink a bit more then when I'm wearing glasses, but the blinking isn't accompanied by discomfort, so I'm super happy.

Pages: Brown bought iWork '05 for me; I requested it because I was facing some technical writing and I just couldn't face writing another document in goddamn Microsoft Word. The simple documentation I need to write doesn't need all the power of Dreamweaver, but I'm not good enough with html to make things look just the way I want with just BBEdit. So, I've started using Pages -- so far for one of the few writing tasks less pleasant than documentation: a letter appealing a denial of health insurance benefits. I found the program simple, small, and pleasant. The table editor was just... easy to use. Painless.

I suppose the other fantastic thing is that I just cleaned my bathroom, tip to toe, fore and aft, everywhere. Tomorrow is supposed to be the kitchen... or maybe today. Now I get to choose between tech writing, cleaning the kitchen, and watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. Tech writing and dvd's simultaneously? Hmm.

I'm also trying to decide on a to-do list system. I started reading Getting Things Done, and even started doing it, over winter break... but the in box is an overwhelming pile. I probably do need a physical solution; I switch computers and OS's too frequently (minutes or hours) to use a single application, and a pure-web solution is subject to someone else's control. Any suggestions? There's got to be a perfect mac product out there... Oh yes, and the Palm etc -- nope, no new hardware purchases for me, especially since I've owned two or three palms and always stop using them after a few weeks or a month.

dealing with odd newsletter mailings without pissing off the entire world

I got this delightful message in my email today, along with several related "wtf?" messages:


-----Original Message-----
From: **REDACTED**
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:50 PM
To: **REDACTED**; newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com
Subject: Re: did you send this?

I did not send this.

----- Original Message -----
From: **REDACTED**
To:
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 5:44 PM
Subject: FW: did you send this?


I"m trying to track down this problem.
aw
----------
From: "Automatic Email Delivery Software"
MAILER-DAEMON@belldandy.booksite.com
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:39:15 -0500
To: newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com
Subject: hello

The message was undeliverable due to the following reason(s):

Your message could not be delivered because the destination computer was
not reachable within the allowed queue period. The amount of time
a message is queued before it is returned depends on local configura-
tion parameters.

Most likely there is a network problem that prevented delivery, but
it is also possible that the computer is turned off, or does not
have a mail system running right now.

Your message could not be delivered within 2 days:
Host 125.187.47.159 is not responding.

The following recipients did not receive this message:
newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com

Please reply to postmaster@belldandy.booksite.com
if you feel this message to be in error.




As a public service, and because I am a bit of a... I don't even know what... I replied to the "wtf?" messages (the individuals who sent them, not the list) with this:





When each of you replied to the message, the "to:" field was
"newsletter-bots-list@belldandy.booksite.com"
That means that your reply went not to the *sender* of the email, but to the entire list. Which is why I got it, and Kate, and Warren Licht, and probably dozens/hundreds/thousands of other people. So, you're an inadvertent spammer. Happens all the time, so I'm writing you as anti-spam community service.

At the end of the messsage that you got, it tells you what to do:

Please reply to postmaster@belldandy.booksite.com
if you feel this message to be in error.


Another good thing to do would be to try to find the source of the message via the web, without generating more email traffic.
The first step is to visit http://belldandy.booksite.com, which in this case isn't informative. So the next step is google: a google search for "belldandy booksite"
http://www.google.com/search?q=belldandy+booksite&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

That takes you to
http://belldandy.booksite.com/nonesuchbooks/book_link.html

Reading that page gives clues that the originating site is a bookstore in Portland, Maine.
The yellow pages on a9.com gives this:
http://a9.com/nonesuch%20books?ypLoc=Portland,%20ME

...which in turn gives you an address and phone number for a bookstore:

Nonesuch Books & Cards Mill Creek Store
50 Market St, South Portland, ME 04106
(207) 799-2659

On A9.com's yellow pages, you can actually call that business for free -- it's pretty neat. So you call them, and you ask them if they have an email list, and if they meant to send this mailing. Probably they didn't.

What probably happened is that a spammer is just pretending to be belldandy / nonesuch books, in which case, there's nothing you can do about it.

mac status report

My mac is hanging in there! Hooray! It's been a week since I got it back from service, and it's still basically working. A few minor problems:

• When I unplug it, even if the battery is fully charged, it sometimes immediately shuts down, and won't restart until I plug it in again.
• It seems to have trouble reading from cd's, but not dvd's.
• I can't complete the 10.3 install from the install disks. I had to install X11 explicitly, and I don't have iPhoto at all.

In other news, ChemPad has hit 1.0, and we're now adding features for version 1.1. I'm working on a tutorial, but ye gods writing documentation is stultifying. Also finding bugs in code generated by a mechanical language port is stultifying.

quicksilver

If you use a mac, you need Quicksilver. Follow this tutorial and your jaw will be hanging open with amazement. You knew the mac was cool, but quicksilver makes you so powerful. Superpowers. You know those unix masters who write scripts for everything and get their keyboard commands to do everything... this will make you like that, but more powerful, and with a nice aqua interface. This just about makes me want to get a development environment set up here... but that would be approximately decades of work. It's so amazing.
Now I need a milky way dark.

more mac weirdness

Last night, I watched a dvd on my mac... it worked. Also playing RealAudio. This is good.

Today I unplugged the mac in my bedroom and went out to the living room. I ejected the dvd and then... the screen went black. I hit the spacebar, nothing. I moved the display for no particular reason, and I heard the beginnings of the happy-mac chime... but it was cut off. Then it restarts again -- or did I hit the button? No, I don't think I hit the restart button... and it boots okay, except that the date has been reset to 1969.

This is a mac with hardware trouble.

consistent failure

The mac gets through importing five or six or seven songs, then hangs on the next song.
For the record, this is iTunes 4.71 and mac os x 10.3.7, and I've had the same behavior on too many cd's. Only two (both of which were Yo-Yo Ma albums) were imported completely and successfully.

MY MAC IS NOT FIXED.

say it ain't so

Remember about my mac being fixed? You know, this morning?
It's hosed again, hosed as in, gets stuck importing perfectly normal cd's, and can't be stopped, and won't eject the cd until I force-quit a few times and maybe restart a few times.
Here's what I've done since I got it back:

• switched out the battery with the replacement battery


• updated to 10.3 using the 10.3 retail install disks


• ran software update


• restarted, ran software update some more, restarted again


• installed firefox & some other software mentioned above


• plugged in my ipod, ran podworks, discovered that podworks didn't see the ipod, resigned myself to re-importing the few albums already on the ipod

With that all done, I said to myself, great, it's time to start importing music. I take a cd I burned from my pc a few weeks ago, my favorite Yo-Yo Ma concerto and American Idiot. I set the mac to import to 128 bps mp3's, because my ears can't tell the difference. It importants the concerto, and the title track of American Idiot, then... no more -- iTunes hangs, I can't eject the CD, I can't even force-quit iTunes. I think after ten minutes of trying I get iTunes to shut down and eject the cd... I import Yo-Yo Ma Plays Bach succesfully, then go for The Thrills, So Much for the City. It gets up to the fifth song, "Say it Ain't So," and then just seems to get stuck on that song. It stays on importing that song for many minutes, although it still makes cd-accessing-sounds. I force quit iTunes, then run it again, and re-start the import at "Say It Ain't So." Same deal -- just seems to get stuck importing.
I notice, meanwhile, that the machine is getting hot. Somewhere around 120-140 -- not hot enough to boil water, but hotter than you'd want bathwater. The repair depot replaced "everything related to the heat sink" yesterday so I don't understand what's going on.
The whole time I've been writing this entry, it's still been trying to import that one song.
I think my mac is past the point of no return -- it's been repaird by apple twice in the last month, and has never really recovered from whatever originally went wrong this summer. I think I'm screwed.
Please, Apple, say it ain't so.

my mac is back!

My mac came back and it works now!
I installed 10.3, upgraded to 10.3.7, and now I'm installing all the sweetness:
fire
ecto
Cocoalicious
PodWorks
and generally raiding joi ito's list of favorites. I've never met joi, don't know joi's gender or age or anything, but somehow I've learned that if joi likes software, I probably will too.
now, what shall I use for an RSS reader? I think I bought a license to StickyBrain a while ago. And NetNewsWire.
My god, this two year old mac is so much more fantastic than my brand new tablet pc.
**rejoices**

Cavewriting and del.icio.us

I finally wrote some documentation for the cavewriting software I’ve been working on, for Noah ’s Cavewriting class. I’ve also started using del.icio.us for bookmarks I can access anywhere. I’m also trying out basecamp, to manage projects; it provides a shared, prioritized, web-based todo list. Basecamp’s little brother is tada lists, which is just plain lists, but simple and clean.

As for the mac saga: Apple has my computer and lists the status as “in repair.” Hooray!

I want my mac back. So much.

I'm sitting here with my tablet pc and my giant superpowered dell laptop, and I'm yearning for my Mac. It's come to my attention over the last few days that I've been dropping tasks, forgetting to do things that I should do, losing track of appointments... so I want iCal, and StickyBrain. Alas, my mac is currently in a box waiting for DHL to pick it up to send it back to Apple to be repaired, again.

And I'm really tired of not having the perfect html authoring tool. I just want to make something that looks decent and maybe has a few images. Dreamweaver is total overkill. Emacs is a little bit less WYSIWYG than I'd like. I've been using TopStyle which is also overkill; it's a CSS/XHTML/HTML editor, but it gives good previews and decent text editing. I'm very excited to use iWork... but I need my mac. Sigh.