danielbeck.net: Blog feed

In which I learn new things

Unlike all other developers who have ever touched a mac, I’ve been trying to learn how to write software for the iPhone.

Because right now would be a very, very good time to be in that business. What would’ve been a better time would be back when the App store launched — that boat’s well and truly sailed, of course, but the quality of the apps in there right now still leaves me confident that I could carve out a reasonably profitable niche for myself if I don’t put it off too long.

What I’ve learned so far is, A) I’ve successfully taught myself a lot of new languages over the years, because that’s part of what being a software developer is, but B) they’ve nearly all been conceptually similar languages to something I already knew pretty well, and they all fit into a framework that I was intimately familar with, i.e. The IntarWeb, so the parts that are new to me are self-contained, and C) transitioning from mostly web-based scripting languages for which I have easy access to zillions of open examples to learn from, to a compiled C-based language with a complicated set of APIs that I have to learn from scratch and which everyone’s still prevented from discussing due to the developer NDA is… hard.

I mean, I’m mostly getting it. I already had a reasonably good handle on object-oriented code, I know the difference between a variable and a pointer and why it matters, and I can usually sort out what the API docs are trying to tell me if I squint at them long enough… I’m not totally at sea, is what I’m saying.

But I’m constantly getting hung up for hours on what I know are trivial syntax issues which I just don’t have a quick way to resolve. That’s normal, if irritating.

Worse, I’m often second-guessing myself and backtracking, wondering if I’m doing things the Wrong Way, or if there’s some underlying concept that I’m just completely failing to grasp. Back when I was learning my first real coding language, I got past this stage mostly by being young and stupid enough to not care if I was doing it Wrong, as long as it worked (and by doing it in perl, which makes something of a fetish out of there being no wrong way to do anything anyway.) This time around, either because I’m older and wiser, or older and more timid, I’m having a harder time getting past that.

The biggest hurdle for me, honestly, is all the timesaving shortcuts the language offers. Instead of having to write a lot of repetitive getter and setter functions, you can just drag a few connections around in the Interface Builder, or use stuff like Core Data which magically deals with all the gruntwork of manipulating and structuring data in standard ways — so the only code you actually have to write is the bits and pieces that don’t work in standard ways. This is awesome, if you already know what you’re doing. But it’s an incredible pain in the ass if you’re trying to learn, because even if you have a functional example to look at, you can’t necessarily figure out how it works by looking at the code, because a lot of what makes it work isn’t code, it’s invisible magic.

So it’s slow going, you could say.

I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, but it’s been a long time since the distance between where I am and where I want to be has seemed so far.

Compare and Contrast

Webcomics are so popular, even heartland politicians are starting to make them!

Brent Rinehart for Oklahoma County Commissioner

Sean Tevis for Kansas State Representative

Guess which one I donated money to? (Hint: he’s also a metafilter user.)

Tomorrow will be better

Today I:

Spent four hours on hold, waiting for technical support.
Absorbed every nuance of a Bollywood cover of Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita”, complete with sitar solo. But only one verse and chorus, because that’s all that was on the loop for those four hours.
Learned that telling a voice-recognition system “Oh, for fuck’s sake” at an appropriate volume and level of vocal stress will elicit the response “I think you said, ‘Please let me speak to a customer service representative.’ If that is correct, say ‘yes’ or press 1. If not…” etc.
Discovered that the support email contact form was coded to use a GET instead of a POST, so if describing the issue you’re experiencing requires more characters than will fit in a URL, you’re out of luck.
Found that the Live Web Chat support connects you with a customer service representative who is clearly forced to have at least five simultaneous chat sessions active at any one time, and who is allowed to communicate with you only using macros which alternately apologize for the issues you are experiencing, and repeat the phone number of the customer service line you spent four hours waiting for earlier in the day.
Ascertained that calling the sales line to bitch about a support issue will get you absolutely nowhere, even if it’s the only other contact information available.
Went outside, took a very deep breath, spent half an hour watching a songbird watch me watch the distant contrail of a 747 slowly dissipate into the sky, and took another very deep breath.
Dropped a butcher’s knife on my foot while cooking dinner, by chance blunt end first.
Will maintain a constant input of ambient and experimental music to prevent any recurrence of Madonna, and of chianti to prevent recurrence of anything else at all.

The fireflies are out in force

The forest outside looks like dizziness just before a faint, all flecks of light, insect signals wheeling around the yard.

Have you gotten up really close to a firefly yet? They don’t have just one light; they’re this cluster of seperate little bubbles which don’t all light up in synch, more sort of ripple in and out gradually. (Some don’t follow the main pattern at all, just blink randomly like a stuck pixel showing static.)

I’d never seen that before.

[Later:] I tried to show this to Emily the next night, and it turns out I must’ve been looking at a very fancy or very mutated firefly, because the one we looked at together was just a single undifferentiated light.

Lessons

1: Never cook bacon while wearing a new shirt.

2: If you happen to notice that you are wearing a new shirt while cooking bacon, the correct solution is not “take off your shirt.”

Conversations my wife and I have had

Me: [unwraps new 4/e Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, points to cover of Player’s Handbook] Look, there’s breasts.

Emily: I think they’re kind of compensatory breasts.

Me: [turns around in chair, blogs]

Department of mixed feelings

Warning: politics ahead, and a touchy subject.

So, this news story. Major ISPs agree to block access to USENET groups and websites that carry child porn.

On the one hand, yay for protecting the children. Child porn boo.

On the other hand, is it really a good idea to give ISPs (or, more accurately, the NCMEC) carte blanche to censor the internet?

On the other other hand, the censorship won’t work anyway, since most of the stuff is on newsgroups, which can be accessed through third-party providers who won’t be following this blacklist. And even if you eliminated newsgroups altogether, there are a zillion other ways to pass around data in ways that can’t easily be tracked from outside. Yay for the internet, routing around censorship like always.

On the other other other hand, this agreement reinforces the idea that ISPs aren’t common carriers, so are allowed to control what you do on their wires. And therefore things like tiered access are acceptable; goodbye net neutrality. Which strikes me as a very good reason why the ISPs would have agreed to this deal (and even to pay for it), because they’d like that sort of control very much, and that battle is going to be played out, one way or the other, within the next couple of years at most: everyone’s just waiting to see who jumps first.

And on the other other other other hand, this time around they censor child porn. Who gets to control what sites go on that blacklist next year? Where’s the oversight? Will it be like those antiterrorism laws which oh of course will never be applied to anyone who isn’t a terrorist, except a couple years later when it turns out well, actually, they have been and still are?

So. That.

I hope nobody reads this as me approving of child pornography. I don’t, of course. It just seems like an awfully convenient bogeyman, is all.

Update

Apparently Verizon’s first step as part of this agreement was to stop hosting the entire alt.* section of USENET, and Time Warner is dropping their news server altogether.

USENET is different from the web. A website sits on one machine, anybody who wants to look at it is reading the file from that machine. USENET newsgroups are copied to every news provider, so everyone who carries a particular newsgroup is hosting a copy of all the files from that newsgroup on their server. Because of this, there’s a long tradition of providers selectively hosting some parts of USENET and not others, so the news that Verizon and TW are doing so is far less a big deal than the website blocking. But the fact that it’s tied to this agreement, and that Verizon is dumping 100,000 newsgroups because of the 88 of them that contained child porn gives a taste of how subtle that website blocking might turn out to be as well.

Update 2

Turns out this was a big bowl of nothing. Dropping the newsgroup feeds is real: that must be disappointing for any Verizon or TW customers who were using those feeds, but it’s not the End Of The Internet. But the “blocking of websites” is not real: Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communications just posted on Metafilter to clarify that it’s not the scary IP blacklist the Times makes it sound like; it’s just the individual companies removing child porn websites which are hosted on their own servers (which they have every right to do, as those sites are presumably in violation of the ISPs’ terms of service). So, again, not the End Of the Internet, just business as usual.

Oh well. At least I learned that TWC’s director of communications wastes time on MetaFilter, just like me.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I just spent a couple hours wrestling with a piece of electronics, trying to get it to stop beeping.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Pulled the whole thing out of its case and checked all the circuit boards for one of those piezo speakers, which

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

should have a contact switch wired in somewhere there that I should be

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

able to slip a bit of cardboard into or something, to break the connection

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

and stop the beeping, except that I’ve been over the whole thing and

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

can’t find a switch anywhere, or a speaker either; I can’t even figure out

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

where it might be drawing power — and then I notice that the

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

beeping is actually coming from my testmeter, which has a little warning

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

light flashing to tell me that the toolbox temperature doesn’t match its

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

reference temperature, it’s off by about half a degree. So I adjust the reference temperature until

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

it matches but it still keeps beeping at me anyway.

Then I wake up.

Except I can still hear the beeping noise. That really wakes me up; I sit bolt upright in bed trying to hear what in my house has been beeping all this time, loudly enough to infiltrate my dreams. Did an alarm go off in some other room? Is it the smoke detectors?

It’s a bird, outside. Emily left the window open a crack last night, and it’s dawn, and I’m hearing a birdcall. Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet. It’s just like the first morning of our honeymoon, when jetlagged me tried to answer the phone which turned out to be a gecko. It sounded very digital.

So does this stupid bird.

I’m going to try to go back to sleep, now.

Our household, in a nutshell

Frank: pitiful whine at the door

Me: Aww, who let the dog out?
Emily: Me!
Me: Who left him outside until he got all pitiful and whiny?
Emily: That was you.
Frank: wag wag wag wag wag wag

People with too much time on their hands

This is just too obsessive and awesome not to share: CSS Homer Simpson.

In case it isn’t clear what’s going on: that’s not an image; it’s a bunch of colored overlapping letters in Verdana. If you strip out all the formatting, you’re left with this:

oooo(OOOL(OOOOOL(O||||((8ooo((8oooo))boOoooooo)boOooooooooo///•••••_•••CCO(-

I don’t know if I’m more impressed that a) anyone would bother to do this in the first place, or b) that they’d bother to make it cross-browser compatible.

Bioshock: How to spoil immersion, in eleven easy steps

Or: Alert the media! Nerd has opinion about videogame!

(Note: this will contain spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing.)

Create a gorgeous, visually compelling, detail-oriented setting for the player to move around in, with a brilliantly art-directed, distinctive visual style, populated with new graphical surprises around every corner. (My personal favorite detail is the way that whenever you get wet, a few droplets of water cling to the surface of your monitor until they dry off.) Add a narrative that’s at least as good as its source material (Ryan’s climactic “A man chooses. A slave obeys!” scene is no more ridiculous than Howard Roark raping whatsername was, and has a more memorable catchphrase to boot). Toss in reasonably good combat AI, and a varied series of player tasks that are narratively justified enough to not feel like the series of “fetch me a cookie!” quests they really are.

(That’s the immersion part. The other steps are what ruin it.)
Whenever players get a new weapon or unlocks a new research achievement, introduce it by playing a short training video done in a completely different visual style (1950s bowling alley kitsch) from the rest of the game (1920s steampunk art deco).

2a. For bonus points, make sure the training videos impart no actual information of any kind. “The ‘incinerate’ plasmid! Use it to set things on fire!”
Make it painfully obvious early on that the guy on the radio who’s guiding the player through each step of the narrative is going to turn out to be Not What He Seems. Give the player no way at all to act on this information. (Though, to be fair, Bioshock does justify this when they reveal that the player is literally supposed to be a mind-controlled drone under the power of the guy on the radio.) (I did mention there would be spoilers, didn’t I?)
Make it impossible for the player to know what he’s supposed to do next without listening carefully to what the guy on the radio tells him. Maintain realism by making the radio nearly inaudible compared to the shouts and shrieks and explosions of combat. Set up the map timing in such a way that the player is always in the middle of combat whenever the guy on the radio says anything important.
Scatter the landscape with dozens more barely-audible “radio diaries”, which contain the innermost thoughts and secrets of the game world’s inhabitants — who then left them lying around in hallways, public spaces, and, occasionally, beehives. For some reason.

5a. For the first two-thirds of the game, train the player to ignore the radio diaries by ensuring that they have no effect on the gameplay at all (other than occasionally allowing access to a “secret” area which is clearly marked on the map, and which the player can usually get access to by some other method, and which rarely contains anything particularly useful or interesting in the first place). Then, without warning, make it impossible to proceed further until the player finds and listens to a single radio diary hidden inside a large, four-story, mutant-infested apartment complex.

5b. Have your voice actors record half of the diaries in thick Russian accents, for no apparent reason. (Seriously, I don’t get this. Everyone you encounter in Rapture seems to be either an Irish mobster, a posh (if somewhat mutated) upper-class 1920s stereotype, a Randian superman, or all three; where did these downtrodden-peasant types come from? Is there some underwater shtetl adjacent to Rapture whose diaries were accidentally smuggled in in place of a vodka shipment, or something?)
Disguise the run-on-rails aspect of the narrative by giving the player some choices to make along the way. Well, one choice, anyway. Keep it interesting by making it a complex moral decision, with no clear right answer. Something like “Should I, or should I not, eviscerate the cute little girls?” should do the trick.

6a. If for some reason the player attempts to move on to the next section of the game without having eviscerated (or not) enough little girls, throw up a big honking warning to tell them they need to turn back and hunt up some little girls to eviscerate (or not). The player should be made to feel that if he doesn’t kill literally everything that moves, he’s doing it wrong.
Frequently pause the action and run the player through a refreshing round of a shareware game from nineteen years ago. Because, get it? Pipes? Underwater city? Awesome. Pun-based gameplay is the wave of the future. (Get it? Wave? Awesome.) Make sure any bad guys will stop what they’re doing — even if that happens to be leaping down at the player from the ceiling brandishing giant bloody hooks, while on fire — and wait while the player moseys through this moment of innovative gameplay circa 1989.
Let the player carry around fourteen different weapons at once, half of which have three different types of ammunition to choose from, and make sure that good combat strategy frequently involves using three different weapons in order on each opponent. Realize late in development how completely unmanageable this is for the player, so add a key that pauses the game while the player chooses which weapon to use next. This makes combat, which should automatically be the most immersive, visceral part of the game, instead feel like a series of tiny stuttering moments between pauses.
Make one of those weapons the “research camera,” which on use pauses the action to let the player take a leisurely look at the soft sepia-tone snapshot he just took of the angry mutant who’s currently leaping at him from the ceiling brandishing giant bloody hooks while on fire. The mutant hangs there frozen and motionless while the player receives his letter grade from the Bioshock Correspondence School Of Mid-Combat Research Photography, ponders the results of his research and its ensuing combat bonuses, files the snapshot lovingly away in his official Bioshock Research Photo Picture Album, carefully puts the lens cap back on and rummages through his bag for a shotgun. Then he blows the mutant’s head off.
Make sure the player has to use the research camera at least thirty times on each type of enemy to get the full benefit of the damage bonuses it awards. That won’t feel repetitive at all.
After all that, make the consequences of player death absolutely nil until the very end of the game (at which point it becomes irrevocable). (The easiest way to defeat the Big Daddies — the most powerful enemy in the game, except for the traditional big Boss Fight at the end — is to walk up behind one while he placidly ignores you, and shoot a grenade at his head… which understandably angers him and causes him to kill you more or less instantly. Then you get resurrected about ten feet away, walk back up to him while he placidly fails to recognize you as the guy who just lobbed a grenade at his head, and lob another grenade at his head. Repeat as necessary.) If the player is developing strategies such as “let yourself get gunned down when you set off an alarm, because dying is easier and faster than walking over to the alarm shutdown panel and pulling the lever” then you know you’ve succeeded.

Dad Talk: Breastfeeding Your Baby

I’m going to try not to turn this site into all baby all the time (for that matter I’m hoping not to turn my life into all baby all the time). That said, here’s a post about babies.

So the doctors have started loading Emily up with all sorts of brochures and pamphlets about pregnancy, screening tests, birthing classes, all that fun stuff. In the latest batch there was a pamphlet just for me! It’s titled “Dad Talk: Breastfeeding your baby” and has a nice little photo of a very macho-looking tattooed guy holding a newborn. Which at first I thought was a great idea — all the pregnancy books are (understandably) aimed exclusively at the mom; I haven’t really seen anything yet that approached things from the future dad’s point of view (excepting the cartoon above, one of a very entertaining set of instructions my brother-in-law sent.)

So here are some of the tips in Dad Talk, Breastfeeding your baby:

Breastfeeding mothers lose their pregnancy weight quicker
Breastfeeding saves money
Expect a shift in who is doing what in the house — you may do more than your share at first
Support lower expectations for meals and a clean house
Dad is the first one to teach that love does not have to come with food attached

Which is to say, dad is a shallow appearance-driven skinflint who expects his wife to still cook and clean for him. Hm.

I was similarly thrown off by this, which in going through the pros and cons of various types of diaper keeps referring to specific types as “great for daddies!” Which I didn’t understand at all, until I got to one of the later entries which dropped the other shoe: one particular brand “can be hard for some to learn/use (daddies, daycare, grandparents).”

Which is to say in addition to being a shallow skinflint, dad doesn’t help with the diapers much either. Or else he has poor hand-eye coordination. Maybe both.

[sidebar: when I was complaining about this to Emily, I said “They don’t mean ‘daddies,’ they mean ‘assholes!’” To which she replied, “Well, they are talking about diapers after all.”]

Do guys like this still exist? Seriously, what is this, 1954? I mean, obviously there isn’t much I can do to help with the actual pregnancy part, other than by carrying things to Emily when she’s too exhausted to stand up anymore, which is often — but after that point it’s pretty much a team effort, isn’t it?

I know I’m going to pay for this attitude later on, but honestly the “baby” part of having a baby doesn’t worry me at all. Sleep deprivation? I’m not exactly a stranger to that. Diapers? Doesn’t sound like party time, but I’m pretty sure I can cope. Kid won’t stop screaming? Well that’s why they invented the ball gag, isn’t it?

Kidding, kidding.

But still. All that stuff seems about as difficult as training a new puppy; it’ll be messy and noisy and occasionally gross and there will be tooth marks all over everything, but it’s all temporary, and from here looks pretty manageable. (You may want to bookmark this page now, so you’ll be able to mock me with it next October.)

The stuff that really worries me all won’t start until about five or six years from now. What if the Savoy school really sucks? What if we’re too isolated for the kid to make any friends? How’s he going to learn to ride a bike? Not on our steep dirt driveway, not on route 116; are we going to have to drive him everywhere? How’s he going to get any independence if we have to drive him everywhere? What if the American economy collapses and global warming causes widespread famine and the government turns totalitarian and should we try to give birth in Canada or somewhere else to give the kid a dual-citizenship escape route? Would that even work? What if he gets eaten by bears? (In our backyard, not in Canada. Though I guess in Canada too.)

That’s the sort of thing I’m spending my time worrying about. Diapers, breastfeeding, meh. No big deal by comparison.

Ice Storm

I just slid most of the way down our road on my back. It was actually kind of fun.

A more complete version of the story would begin with sliding most of the way down the road in the Jeep while ferrying Jen to her car (which we’d wisely decided to leave at the bottom of the hill earlier), then rather less wisely trying to drive the Jeep back up to the house, getting just past the really steep part before sliding all the way down again backwards (which somehow feels much faster than sliding down facing forwards), so parking at the bottom of the hill, walking most of the way back up by stomping hard enough to break through the crust of ice on the snowbank, only realizing too late that I chose the wrong snowbank, so then crossing to the house side of the road by carefully stepping to a dark patch of sand that had eroded through the ice, which promptly turned out to be less a dark patch of sand and more a dark patch of even more ice, so not so much “crossing” the road as “sliding all the way back down to the bottom of it, on my back.”

A verbatim summary of my thought process on the way down:

“wheeeee!”

Spidertron

Well, the travel gods conspired to prevent me attending the Spidertron premiere, but at least I still got to help them build a spiffy new website.

Carter (the director) says he’s going to mail me a DVD… I’m very curious to see the finished film. All I’ve really looked at are the handful of scenes I edited or did special effects for — which, according to what I suppose I have to call my first film review, look “cheap as heck.” I couldn’t possibly be more proud.

No, really. I kind of am.

STOP THE SWOOSHING

THANK YOU APPLE

My computer just got a whole lot better:

defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO killall Dock

Beats me why they didn’t make it visible in the preferences, and it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the release notes — but I’ll settle for a hidden commandline setting if it means I never have to experience this again.

I’m posting this here only so when I inevitably lose this setting by reinstalling something, I’ll be able to find it again.

[edited to add: if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, this pair of commands stops Spaces from constantly switching you at random from one virtual desktop to another. Which is good.]

Good morning!

I said good MORNING!

It’s all my fault

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, though.

Back when the dotcom bubble was in full swing, and money was falling out of the sky, I turned the last of my Tripod stock options into an E*Trade account and spent some time daytrading.

I was spectacularly bad at it. Showed a real penchant for buying a stock days or hours before it fell out of the sky, hit the ground with a sickening thump, maybe gave a little dead-cat bounce and then just lay there twitching for good. Finally I’d had enough, dumped most of what I had left into a NASDAQ index fund and just left it alone. Not long after that, the long-predicted crash of the tech stock market finally happened.

All you nerds who lost your jobs back in 2000: sorry about that. I should’ve gone for the DJIA. Except then we’d have hit peak oil early, or something. So maybe it was for the best.

Point being, of course, that today’s headlines (“Dow Slides Again After Europe Sell-Off,” “Worries that the Good Times Were Mostly A Mirage,” “Anxiety Crashes The Party At Davos,” “Fed’s Ritual Slaughter Of Interest Rate Fails To Revive Market”) are all because a month or so ago, I forgot about my vast power to wreck international marketplaces and made a tiny cautious little investment in Apple. Which was doing great, right up until it wasn’t.

So, I’d like to apologize in advance for the coming recession. I really didn’t mean any trouble; I just thought the iPhone was nifty.

Sea Change

For the first time, I’ve today got a job from a large(ish) company for which Internet Explorer 6 support is not a requirement.

Not for some oddball research project, either; it’s their core product. Great news, and I think it’s the right call: it’ll take half the time to do the job, and the code will be much simpler to test and maintain without all the stupid CSS hacks IE6 requires.

More relevantly, if their usership stats continue on their current trend, IE6 usage will be negligible by the launch date anyway, so it makes sense even when not considered from the point of view of my personal convenience. Still, they’re the first major company I’ve seen ready to pull the trigger on that. I hope more follow that trend soon; the more people start letting their websites break in IE6, the sooner users will upgrade to a “real” browser.

It’s funny how that ping-pongs back and forth: I remember when the buggy problem child you still had to support was Netscape 4, with its crappy, crashy javascript extensions; for years you wished everyone would wise up and switch to the shiny new IE5 already. But before that, Netscape 4 was the exciting new bleeding-edge toy (DHTML! Woo! And look at these cool new javascript extensions!); best thing since, well, Netscape 2. (Background colors! Aligned images! Yeehaw!)

(Come to think of it, I have no recollection of Netscape 3. Did they skip a digit?)

The Joys of Home Ownership

Or, “The drip that keeps on dripping”

Today, the new sunroom, which we replaced because the old one had a leaky roof, is officially and finally completed — Norm came over and puttied over the last couple of nail holes, we swept out the dust and moved in the rest of the furniture. It looks great; I’m really pleased with how it came out.

Yesterday, we discovered a substantial roof leak over on the other side of the house. Emily was sitting in her office, I walked in to talk to her, she looked up, and I noticed that instead of looking at me she was kind of looking past me. “Is that ceiling lamp full of… water?” she asked.

Indeed it was. So was the one in the next room over. And the windowframes in both rooms are seeping little rivulets. Also all of the insulation in the attic space above is soaked through, because as it turns out pretty much that entire section of roof is one big ice dam, base to peak.

This is the roof we replaced about five years ago, if you’re keeping score. And there’s probably not much we can do about it until spring, so we’ll be keeping buckets on the floor and lots of towels on the windowsills for the next few months, and hoping no major mold problems develop while we wait.

(It leaves me in the awkward position of hoping it stays really really cold for the rest of the winter, no more of these nice thaws — because those are what cause most of the dripping. As long as it stays cold, or doesn’t snow (ha ha ha), we’re in good shape.)

Someday I would like there to be a, let’s say a three-year period of time during which we have no carpenters in the house. Two years, even, would be nice; I don’t want to be greedy.

Cold medicine

The thing about cold medicine is, once you start taking it, it’s impossible to know when to stop.

I usually avoid taking decongestants as long as possible, because once I start taking them I can’t tell when the cold is over anymore. When I’m on the pill, am I clear because I’ve gotten well, or just because the pill is working? And after the pill wears off, when I start getting stuffy again, is that because I’m still sick, or just because my sinuses are overcompensating after the medication?

Also, head cold + moustache = situation to be avoided. And there’s an image you’ll have stuck in your head for the rest of the day. Mua ha ha ha.

I’m pretty much done with this one, I think. Still blowing my nose constantly, but at least I no longer sound like Tom Waits with a hangover. Just in time, too, since Emily has caught it now.

Steve’s Helicopter

Not one, but two products from ThinkGeek in this video.

The helicopter turned out to be rather fragile — one of the rotors shattered after only a few crash landings — but entertaining all the same.

What’s been going on

The trouble with not posting for a while is that you wind up with a long list of stuff you want to post, which makes it that much more onerous to actually do it, which makes you put it off even longer, which etc.

So here’s the executive summary. In the past few weeks I’ve:

hosted the worlds fastest and most violent virus (from feeling perfectly fine to shivering, bawling, emergency room visit, back to feeling pretty much okay again, all in the space of about six hours)
had the two easiest and hassle-free cross-continental flights since they invented the no-fly list (no weather delays in Chicago, even!)
walked on the beach, looked at butterflies, and flown a kite in late December
Spent good time (and eaten great meals) with families on both coasts
Had a house full of friends I don’t get to see often enough
Missed seeing some other friends I also don’t get to see often enough (you know who you are)
Helped make sausage out of venison, bacon, and aged gouda
Learned that that old parable about laws and sausages is, in fact, absolutely true (The grinding isn’t so bad, but the stuffing is, um, disturbing)
Helped make the most delicious chocolate ever, from scratch (ok, all I really did was shell a few of the cocoa beans, but boy was it tasty after everyone else did all the work)
Eaten haggis from a can, for the first (and last!) time
Improvised music with a punk rock drummer and a Fulbright scholar (among others)
Soaked in a hot tub, sweated in a sauna, and raked snow off the roof
Realized with some awe that we’ve been doing this New Years Tribecon thing for nine years
Spent lots of time in our new almost-completely-finished sunroom (He’s coming back to putty over the last few nail holes on Monday)
Passed on a head cold to (probably) many of those friends listed above. Sorry about that
Seen the entire population of my town standing together in the firehouse
Participated in small-town democracy, by seconding the motion to dispense with the reading of a proposed bylaw into the record
Voted on that bylaw by placing my ballot in the “ballot bucket”: one of those 25-gallon hardware store buckets that somebody had cut a slot into the top with a keyhole saw. (Diebold, eat our dust!)

That brings us pretty much up to date, I think.

Why I Hate Spaces

First in a series of upcoming rants about usability in OSX Leopard.

So Leopard has this virtual desktop feature built right in, called Spaces. There were a couple of different third-party programs that did this — the one I used to use was called “VirtueDesktops,” which I was pretty happy with. It doesn’t work in Leopard, and the developer has killed the project — how can you compete with something that’s built right into the OS, after all?

The problem is, Spaces is broken. Fundamentally wrong. I’ve given it a chance, I’ve been using it for weeks now hoping that my problems with it are just a matter of being habituated to a different tool, and that I’ll get used to the new paradigm — but I’m starting to realize that this isn’t a habit problem, it’s a design problem.

The idea of virtual desktops is that you can have separate workspaces for different tasks, so you can be running a bunch of applications at once without having a zillion windows cluttering up the same screen. I use one desktop for my calendar and email; another for ahem coffee breaks, so it’s got a newsreader, itunes, and a couple of web browser windows; two others for work: I’m usually working for more than one client, so I’ll have one desktop for each project (which usually means both of them will have a couple of finder windows, a web browser, a terminal window or two, and the set of project files that I’m working on open in BBEdit. That way when I’m done working on project A, I can just switch to desktop B and everything I need for project B will be right there.)

The thing to notice, there, is that I’ve got web browsers in at least three of those desktops, terminal windows in at least two, BBEdit in at least two. They’re all open to different things, depending on the task they’re related to, but they are the same application. This was no problem in VirtueDesktops. But Spaces doesn’t like it at all.

The thing about Spaces is, it’s designed on the assumption that you’re using your desktops for different applications, not for different tasks. If you’re in desktop A and switch to an application that happens to have a window open in desktop B, Spaces will automatically drag you to desktop B.

If that application happened to have windows open in desktop C, D, and E as well, then Spaces takes a guess at which one you wanted, and often as not collects all those windows into whichever space it just dragged you to, where you have to sort them out manually back into the desktops you wanted them in. Occasionally it’ll even jump you to a different space for no apparent reason at all — I’ve been in situations where I was in space A working on a file, and every time I hit “Save,” Spaces would jump me to space B (which was empty). So I’d switch back to space A, work a little more, hit save, and hello here I am in space B. And, my favorite: this was the result when I tried opening an excel spreadsheet the other night:

I’m not driving, it’s doing that all by itself. Kept going for three minutes or so before it finally decided which space it wanted to be in.

Okay, that’s obviously a bug, fine; so is the randomly-sometimes-collecting-all-your-windows-into-one-space thing; so is the fact that sometimes the file drawer attached to BBEdit windows gets stranded on a different space than the file window itself; so is the fact that sometimes windows just get lost in space; so are the numerous other issues I haven’t mentioned because this is already too long and ranty. Bugs can be fixed, and I assume Apple will get around to fixing these.

But the underlying problem — automatically switching spaces — isn’t a bug. It’s a design decision.

It seems pretty innocuous at first, even helpful — but it means that it becomes virtually impossible to separate your desktops by task, if you happen to need the same application for more than one task. You can prevent the automated jumping-around by locking each of your applications to a specific space — which makes it impossible to use the same app in two spaces. Or you can set certain applications to show up in all spaces — which negates the purpose of Spaces altogether, as it brings back the window clutter virtual desktops are designed to avoid in the first place, and still makes it impossible to separate your windows by task, since now the windows aren’t separated at all.

Effectively, Spaces is a glorified version of “Hide Other Applications”. As designed, it’s not a real desktop manager — and since this was the deliberate design, it might never be. And since it’s built directly into the OS, third-party developers are going to be less likely to step in to fix the problem.

Up next: Time Machine: I can’t see what I’m doing with all this candy in my eye! Or, possibly, Stacks: What the fuck were they thinking?!

Must be something in the water

Another possibility is that it was just a very selective case of amnesia.

So the other day I got an email confirming a conference call coming up later that afternoon. No big deal, that happens all the time, except that in this case I didn’t remember which client was supposed to call me, didn’t have anything marked in my calendar, and didn’t recognize the name of the sender (which also isn’t that uncommon: it’s surprising how often people will delegate tasks like this to their secretaries or assistants without informing anyone ahead of time who the assistant is; it’s like a fun guessing game sometimes trying to match up the emails with the projects.) Takes me a few minutes confusion this time before I figure out that, no, this actually wasn’t meant for me; in fact it’s not even addressed to me (it landed in my gmail account, which is daniel.beck@gmail — but it was actually sent to danielbeck@gmail.com; sans dot. Hm, weird, not sure how that wound up in my inbox, but it was obviously not meant for me; just to be polite I forward it back to the other Daniel Beck and go back to work.

A couple hours later a flurry of a dozen or so emails come in from the same person: I’ve registered the domain name, here’s the confirmation number; there’s some talk about the hosting plan, the site development, who’s going to write the content?, and incidentally thanks for joining the team, I’m really excited about working with you! — basically it looks exactly like email from any of dozens of small startup clients I’ve worked for over the years. Except I have no memory of signing up with any new clients recently. I mean, I know my sleep patterns have been kind of messed up lately, but have I been negotiating new jobs while unconscious? (Hey, now there’s an idea…)

It takes a couple exchanges of email before we get it sorted out — at first they think I’m their Daniel Beck, correcting my email address; it takes a while before they understand that I’m a completely different Daniel Beck who just happens to also be a web developer. All very amusing; they apologize, I wish them luck on their new venture, everybody’s happy. Just one of those things.

This morning, out of curiosity, I decide to google to see if I can figure out who this other Daniel Beck is who’s apparently in my same line of work. And holy cow, the landscape has changed since the last time I vanity-googled: The german guy with the model car collection has disappeared, and the “Imagine… WINNING!” personal injury lawyer Daniel Beck is long gone. They’ve been replaced by, well, this Daniel Beck, whose main topics are Java and Ruby; this Daniel Beck, who interned at Google last summer, and this Daniel Beck who is both a programmer and a graphic designer, and dabbles in photography. Which sounds, um, sorta kinda vaguely familiar. He even shares my middle initial. Spooky. None of these Daniel Becks appear to be the same Daniel Beck who was involved in the project that started this whole search in the first place.

Maybe we should all team up, start a web design firm together. That would rock.

You didn’t want that anyway

The following story is fairly representative of what’s been going on for me in general over the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re a web developer, who uses a mac for all your development work. Let’s also say that, to simplify deployment to your live server, which stores its web files in the /home/httpd/ directory, you’ve configured your mac to also use /home/httpd for all your web files. Finally, let’s round out this hypothetical by saying you want to upgrade your OS to Leopard.

What you’ll discover in this situation is that Leopard wants to use the /home directory for itself. It doesn’t seem to want to use it for anything; apparently it just likes to have it there, empty. So during the installation process it quietly erases everything you may have had sitting there.

Nifty, eh?

You’ll also discover that your latest backup isn’t quite as recent as you thought it was, because they never are.

I don’t mean to whine, but there’ve been a few situations recently that mirror that little story way too closely for comfort.