Truer Words - A Journal

Well and Weirdly Met

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 21 May 2007 01:14:39 GMT

RailsConf 2007 was good. I'm glad I went, and I believe I pulled from it — mainly from the other attendees — exactly what I wanted.

It's no surprise, of course, that the best part of the weekend was finally meeting and hanging out with Jim and Sean. Exactly as it was with Greg last year (who I missed this year (but not as much as Corinne and Lauren!) ... lousy timing on the pregnancy, Greg and Kt!), we hung out and chatted as if we've been doing exactly that for many years. Which we have, of course, but only virtually. This was our first meeting, and it was a good one.

The second weirdest experience of the weekend was meeting John Gruber's twin. He hasn't said anything publicly, but he confirms that he has seen it, some of his friends are calling the other guy, "Fake John Gruber," and John referred to it as Very Weird. Rich (who has known JG far longer than I have) agreed the similarity was eerie. They really were identical, in the sense of identical twins. Just as identical twins have little differences that help you tell them apart, these two are not identical in every little detail... but it was still weird.

However, the number one weirdest part of the weekend was that Sevin Sayers was here! (Ok, his name isn't really Sevin Sayers, but he's being very weird about this and wanted his name removed from the site. So it's something *like* Sevin Sayers. (Let's just say there's a reason I haven't seen ‘Sevin’ in years.)) He was completely out of context, as though my life's threads were suddenly exchanging objects or pointers in some way that surely indicated heap corruption and would result in an OS shutdown (kernel panic!) any second.

I first saw ‘Sevin’ on Friday morning, but never really thought it was him, just looked and sounded a bit like him. Then again that evening, but it was just after I met John's dopplegänger so I decided my brain was having a little more fun with me. When I saw him for the third time on Saturday, I stared at him for a few seconds trying to find the subtle differences that would make him not look like ‘Sevin’ anymore.

He finally looked back at me, and immediately looked very confused. "Seth?!? What are you doing here?"

"Right. Funny you should ask that."

Happy New Year, One and All

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:22:11 GMT

2006 was a good year for me and mine, in many ways.

To all of my family near and far, to my ecclesia here and worldwide, to all of my friends new and old, close or distant:

Happy
New Year!

Hoping 2007 will be even better, for all of us...

Again I Say: Log Out Once Per Day

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 17:03:08 GMT

My instructions to log out once per day were well received by some, but not by others and it's clear that I need to clarify a little.

Mainly, there are three points I need to address.

Firstly, my friend Flip pointed out that since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was released, the OS makes sure that your "cron tasks" run later, if they're not able to run at night because your computer is shut down or asleep. So, it's totally ok to put the machine to sleep at night. (I wasn't aware of this change.) However, that doesn't affect my other point about logging out and back in again.

Secondly, some people have been quite vehement -- even quite rude -- in disagreeing with me about logging out and back in again. Jim's main point seemed to be "don't do it becuase you shouldn't have to" (with "shouldn't" meaning software should work better than it often does). Jim moderated his tone a bit in his second post (thank you!). The other guy can't seem to tell the difference between logging out and rebooting.

(Hey Charles: logging out won't affect your uptime!)

There were some people who clearly agreed with me, like Michael Tsai (maker of some apps I use every day).

Finally, if you know the difference between a memory leak and a cron task, then my instructions weren't for you. ;-) Power users, programmers, and sys admins: go on about your business. Most of you probably already tell your users to log off occasionally anyway! I was talking to the regular user, or even the app-crazy user I described here.

Log Out! (Once Per Day)

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:54:24 GMT

By some odd coincidence, three times this week I've come across Mac OS X users who don't know the benefits of logging out. That is, they either leave the machine running at night (still logged into their user account), or they put the machine to sleep. They rarely -- if ever -- log out, and only reboot when "something is wrong" or after installing a system update.

My advice: log out once per day. You might just log out at night when you're done using the computer, leave the machine running, then log in again in the morning.

(It's ok to let the monitor/display/screen/whatever-you-call-it go to sleep.)

This accomplishes a couple of things, at least:

If you generally run the same software applications most of the time, it will clear out a lot of memory and give those apps a chance to "start over." This is a very good thing for nearly every modern program: most will run faster, and it will put a stop to some "weird behavior" (that's the technical term). This helps on Windows, too.
Leaving your Mac running (but logged off) at night allows the system (via a utility called cron that you'll never see) to run some system maintenance utilities: another minor performance boon, and it will save a little space on your hard drive. (I actually don't know if Windows does anything like this also.)

There may be other benefits I haven't thought of.

Update January 28, 2006: Please see this post for some clarification and more information.

What is "Unfrozen Caveman?"

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 19:49:06 GMT

Flip, Jim, Greg, Steve, and Brent (update: and Apollo, Daniel, and Terry) have each linked to the story about the Firefox book. I really appreciate it... this is a very big deal for me, as most of you know.

Brent said that my description of the SOAP hack made him feel like "Unfrozen Caveman." If anybody has a clue stick, I need a beating. (Did it make him feel a bit behind the times? Out of touch with the tech? Really old? Maybe it thickened his brow and made him a good shot with a spear?)

Toning it Down...

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 19:41:39 GMT

Jim Roepcke says the tone of my last comments about PMC fundraising was a bit too harsh. I apologize to anyone who was offended!

I truly do appreciate what people have done so far. As I said in my response, my frustration isn't directed at anyone in particular, but rather at life, the world, and everything having to be so difficult.

This is my place to vent, though, and I can't really expect everybody to like everything I say.

Math Problem, and Jim's Going for His CS Degree

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 08 May 2004 19:45:52 GMT

Jim is going back to school, to get his Computer Science degree. That's pretty cool, but the best part is his reason for doing it: he simply wants to be better at what he does.

He's a little worked up about the math side of it all, and is trying to brush up on it before his return.

Today he posted about a problem with quadratic inequalities. He thought the book he was reading had it wrong, but when he graphed his solution and the book's solution, they came out exactly the same. The answer was simple, though: they'd written the same thing, but the book had 'simplified' the inequality further than Jim did.

I solved the problem pretty quickly, and it was so much fun! I haven't done any math like that in a long time, and didn't even realize I missed it, but solving that problem gave me a rush.

For a couple of years now, Corinne and I have talked about the possibility of me going back to school for reasons similar to Jim's. While we both like the idea, I'm not ready to commit to it, and there's no way I could do it full time like Jim is doing.

On the other hand, if it means playing with quadratics and inequalities all the time, where do I sign up? (I'm sure Corinne wouldn't mind supporting us for four years... ;-)

Jim Clarifies

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 18:39:30 GMT

Jim has clarified his statements about the Asian governments writing their own Operating Systems. Most of what has been said in response to his original post is still valid, but it is no longer a rebuttal to what Jim said (most of the discussion had very little to do with what Jim said, anyway).

In other words, the points made in the discussion here on [tw], and on Jim's site, are still valid even though we're no longer disagreeing with or commenting on Jim's post.

I'm afraid a couple of us may have been -- or at least, I may have been -- a little hard on Jim because we misunderstood. It seemed that he was suggesting that Canada or the U.S. should be doing something similar to what Japan, S. Korea, and China are considering, because his original post said "we" and "us"... but that's not at all what he meant. (He was just putting himself in their shoes, saying they should be able to do it without Microsoft complaining. Still not sure I agree, but it's not something I feel strongly about.)

Email Virus: Why Don't People Switch Clients?

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 14:38:11 GMT

Jim Roepcke says:

IMHO, any technology-savvy person who has been paying attention to current events for the last few years, but continues to use Outlook Express for their email client, deserves to get hundreds of viruses in their mailbox every day.

Why do you think virus writers target email like this? Because there are so many nincompoops that beg for it by running software that has been known to be a virus sieve for years!

I'd like to agree with him. It would be wonderful to see a balanced market for commercial email clients. A dozen established applications with entirely different codebases (so none of them are vulnerable to the same attacks) that roughly split up the Windows market. They could compete with features, marketing, price, and synergistic deals with hardware vendors. They could even be bundled with Windows, as long as Microsoft had to bundle all of them, or at least more than one. MS could even bundle different groups of email clients with different types of Windows: some for business, some for schools, some for home, etc.

An open, free market sounds like a pretty normal idea for this country, doesn't it? Unfortunately, Outlook is free, and comes with Windows. There are lots of commercial email clients out there, but all of them added together don't have anywhere near the installed base of Outlook (and variants).

That's not the only problem.

When's the last time you heard/saw/read a major news organization do a balanced report on an email virus?

This afternoon I was sitting in a waiting room while the dealer changed my truck's oil. CNN was on the television. They reported on the virus... but they referred to it only as an "email virus."

They didn't mention that this is "email virus" is really an "Outlook virus," because it only affects Outlook users. They didn't mention that it only infects Outlook on Windows.

They didn't mention that there are alternatives to Outlook.

Most people don't read Jim's site. Or mine. Or any other site that talks about technology-related issues. If the major news organizations don't tell them why they should consider alternatives to Outlook, they'll never find out about it.

I know some very smart people who use computers all day, who (until I said something) didn't even know there was an alternative to Outlook. To them, Outlook equals email, and email equals Outlook. The viruses are just a way of life, like viruses in real life.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm being forced to think about the internet "layman" an awful lot right now as I right some documentation. It's surprising, even shocking, how little they know about something they use every day, but it's not just what they don't know, but what they know 'wrongly'. Just as most think a URL begins with "www" (or even starts after the www, now that nobody says "www dot ..." on tv or the radio any more), most people think email is "what you get in Outlook." Heck, a lot of people think the internet is "inside" their computer somehow.

Unfortunately, I can't even suggest a solution. We're never going to have a balanced market for email clients or web browsers, and the general public is never going to understand the first thing about computers or the internet. The best we can do is help one person at a time.

Note that I think the same is true about most things: the majority is usually wrong, or at least uninformed, about religion, politics, technology, etc., etc., etc. It's nobody's fault, it just seems to be the nature of life.

(Quote from Samuel Clemens about being on the side of the majority and needing to reform... withheld due to overkill. ;-)

Jim is Helping with the PMC

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 14:11:00 GMT

Jim Roepcke just posted some links about my need for sponsors in the PMC.

Thanks Jim, I appreciate the help.

Please, if you can help, do so. Whether that means making a donation of your own, or passing the word on with a link from your own site: either is fine, but obviously a donation is the better of the two, and doing both is best of all.

This help, this money... it isn't for me. I'll raise the minimum $2500 somehow, even if you decide not to help. It's not me that needs your help, it's the Jimmy Fund, the cancer patients and researchers.

If you question my sincerity about this (for any reason), then please search my site for the word cancer. I've lost numerous friends to it in the last couple years, have walked in (and raised money for) the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life three times, and now finally I'm doing this 190+ mile bike ride with 3999 other riders, this weekend. (Read more about my reasons.)