Zzot!

Whoever sold this ad is a marketing genius. I mean honestly — if you were selling cookbooks, would you have realized you need to get on SourceForge? No, you wouldn’t have. You know why? I’ll tell you — you’re an idiot. Meddling amateurs like you or me would have been wasting our advertising budget on Food Network spots. Luckily, for all humanity, we have proper Madison Avenue types to save us from ourselves.

Click the image for the large version:

Rants, Raves | Tagged Ad-Spotting, IANMTU | Permalink | No Comments

There aren’t a lot of items in Raves that I would classify as haunting and terrifying, but this is an exception.¹ I only knew one of my grandmothers, and only after she was slipping into dementia,² so this has something of a personal connection to me.

The painting on the right is William Utermohlen’s 1967 self-portrait from a series of self-portraits chronicling his descent into dementia. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1996, so this is the first in the series.

• Wired: The Alzheimer’s Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen
• NY Times: Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s
• NY Times: Slideshow of Utermohlen’s Self-Portraits

1. It actually got mentioned in one of the Wired feeds a while back, so it might not even be anything new to most of my audience (i.e., Erwin). [↩]
2. Not necessarily from Alzheimer’s, but dementia none the less. [↩]

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I like to think I don’t have many of them, but this is one of them; you just don’t get the same thing from those places where the biggest thing on the sign out front is a dollar sign. Oh, look — it’s the “The 1$ Car Wash”. Does $1 buy me more detergent or dirt from the car in front of me? Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me coming out, but if I’m going to take time out of my life to have paid professionals clean my car, I want it to come out…uh…clean. I mean honestly — one of the managers came out while the guy was scrubbing my mats and said there was a film on it, so he was going to run it through again. I think the exterior was probably cleaner the first time than it would have been if it spent the whole day in one of those places down the street.

Honestly, I like my car’s exterior clean as much as the next guy, but I go to Jax for the job they do on the part of the car I see the most of; the interior. The coupon I had described one part of the service as “extra vacuuming”; two guys crawl into the thing with vacuum hoses when you drop it at the start of the car wash proper. The extra part was blowing dust, crumbs, and whatever out of folds and crevices in the seats, floor, vents, etc. and then vacuuming the car a second time with a crevice tool. Then he went at my mats that he’d already pulled out. I’d just gotten the mat scrub add-on before, so I’d seen them with the air-powered brush and the spray bottle; what I hadn’t seen was the guy getting rid of the blower attachment he’d just used on my interior, grabbing the brush, and then putting it down again because it was the wrong carpet brush. The wrong one.

I drove away trying to remember the last time my car was that clean. The last time I spent an afternoon shampooing my interior (different car, admittedly), it wasn’t this clean when I finished. And I didn’t get the carpet shampooing, just the mat scrub that comes with the package named on my coupon (maybe if we’d had a rougher winter I’d have chosen differently). Even if I had, they’d have finished faster (this is no appointment needed detailing).

Sometimes, you just have to pay a professional to do something right. Damn.¹

1. By the way, the first item on the carpet shampoo checklist is “All Non-Permanent Stains Removed.” [↩]

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I know there are periods where I change my favorite text editor as often as most people change their underwear, but still. I like their take on tabbed editing (including what happens when you give their command-line script a list of files). There are a gazillion language-specific packages available (scripts, syntax, etc.), and you can slurp up a whole mess of them from a single svn repository. Block (i.e., rectangular) editing that’s easy to use and doesn’t require a mouse. Folding; enough said.

I was convinced I needed to find this editor and try it out simply by watching the Ruby on Rails 15-minute intro, so you might watch that to see TextMate in action.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I just spent some time reading and purging the vast assortment of news items I’d stacked up in NetNewsWire tabs. This included a bunch of MacCentral items on CS2 and FCP5 et al, but in general was just a lot of miscellaneous…everything.

All that being said, I’m proud to be able to say that the little “more tabs” chevron in my NNW is currently a stand-in for one — count it, one — tab. One! Maybe I should start going through these things before I’ve so completely forgotten why I put it there that I have to follow links in the article to figure out what it’s even about. Hrmf.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

More and more, I’m seeing the Ki, Mi, etc. set of unit prefixes used, but with little mention of any sort of uniform interpretation of them.

The question, if you don’t know, is about what these prefixes mean. In the computer world, the prefixes traditionally represented the sequence of values for (2¹⁰)ⁿ, where n is greater than zero, so 1 kB was (2¹⁰)¹ → 1,024 bytes, 1 MB was (20¹⁰)² → 1,048,576 bytes, and so on. This is a problem because the SI defines those prefixes as the sequence of values for (10³)ⁿ, so 1 kg is (10³)¹ → 1,024 grams and 1 Mg → 1,000 kg → 1,000,000 grams.

So, how do Ki, Mi, etc. fit into all of this? IEEE-SA approved proposal P1541 as a trial-use standard for the duration of two years. Sure, the end of that two year period is in a couple of weeks, but if the convention is catching on, likely something more will come of it. You can order 1541-2002 IEEE Standard for Prefixes for Binary Multiples from IEEE, and there’s a bunch of other links to who else is formally adopting it here

So, when someone talks about MiB or GiB of storage, they aren’t just totally making up terms.¹ Now, to remember that the correct capitalization of 1,024 bytes is 1 KiB, even though 1000 bytes is 1 kB.

1. although they might be a standards wonk [↩]

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I just wanted to say that Erwin is a fine, upstanding person, in spite of any claims I might have made to the contrary. Or might continue to make. On an ongoing basis. In IMs I send directly to him.

No, really.

Raves | Permalink | 1 Comment

One of my (few) rants about the new Firefox, now that I’ve switched back, involved horizontal scrolling. Specifically, they bound it to something silly — history forward and history back. What can I say; install an alternate trackpad driver and you actually use horizontal scroll-wheel events to…uh…scroll.

So, naturally I checked about:config for the relevant prefs, and quickly found them…sort of. The default value for “mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action” is “2”. It didn’t occur to me immediately to use LXR to find out what the numbers mean (like it should have), but it did when I stumbled across a hint on the subject. Rock on (by setting that preference to “0”).

Don’t get me wrong — I like when I can set things how I want using the regular prefs dialog, but at least finding an obscure setting in about:config is an awful lot easier than doing the same in regedit.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I haven’t checked, but this might be the first “Rave”. I wonder if I ever said I want to be a curmudgeon when I grow up. Oh, nevermind — I’m sure I did. Probably in the last couple of years. Anyway.

I pulled down Firefox 1.0PR and installed on all my machines. I was amazed at two specific features, each of which seems so tiny, that I got so worked up over.

First, the find bar. Progressive find features rock. Gecko-based browsers have had them in one form or another forever. But the GUI they added for it is great. Simple, understated, and gives feedback on what the feature is doing without you even really having to look down there and examine it very closely.

Second, minimize. I’ve been using Safari as my primary browser for a while, only recently having switched back to Firefox. When I last used Firefox, Cmd-M minimized the window you were looking at. Now, it opens a new, totally empty message in Mail. What’s with that? I mean, it’s just minimize, and fixing OS X issues like this one is right on the roadmap, so it’ll get fixed soon, but still…it drives me nuts.

So, for the one Mac-using friend of mine who has listened enough to my rambling about Firefox to try it out, and want to see the next cool release, that might be the next one. That being said, I’m running it quite happily on three different platforms.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I don’t know what it is. Child-like faith? Some twisted form of optimism rooted in minor failure? Whatever it is, I always get this feeling that there’s still hope for the world when someone makes an announcement and vastly underestimates the amount of bandwidth it will consume. movabletype.org, sixapart.com, typekey.com, and presumably the rest of their sites were bordering on unreachable for much of the day yesterday.

Raves | Permalink | 1 Comment