jason thurber's blog

Several months ago I started looking into the feasibility of building an Outlook to iCal bridge. That project soon fell off the TODO stack, because it seemed a) uninteresting b) like something that would be released by someone else within a few months. I was right on both counts.
I’m now using GroupCal by Snerdware. It’s good stuff! Allows you to subscribe to your Exchange calendar as an iCal Calendar. I’m not sure if it requires Outlook Web Access to be configured for exchange (but I suspect it does). Anyway, if this is something you’ve been looking for, it’s out in Beta version right now…

Drove out to Las Vegas for ApacheCon with Scott and Amanda on Friday evening. That’s a long drive from the Bay Area. I feel like I’ve learned a few new things about traveling in general, and Vegas in particular, over the few days we’ve been here so far:

Coolest inventions of 2003 (Time.com)

An article by Bush Sr. entitled Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam that was yanked from Time’s website for some reason or other…

An interesting “future-documentary”-style article entitled How China surpassed the United States (I’m sorry that I don’t remember where I saw the original link to this).

A pretty cool blog that Alex pointed me to. I can really relate to this comment on the Apple Store:

Problem is, now when I walk into the store, my cash spending reflexes kick in and I can’t get out of the store until I plunk some cash money at the register

While discussing the G5 benchmarks.

Real-world benchmarks
In iTunes on my dual-G5 I can stop the M.C. Hammer track, “U Can’t Touch This” in less than a 10th of second.

One of my friends send this to me:

White House Puts Limits on Queries From Democrats

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 7, 2003; Page A29

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

The decision — one that Democrats and scholars said is highly unusual — was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House committee Democrats had just asked for information about how much the White House spent making and installing the “Mission Accomplished” banner for President Bush’s May 1 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled “congressional questions” to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing “the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process,” he wrote: “Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee.”

He said this would limit “duplicate requests” and help answer questions “in a timely fashion.”

It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee chairmen.

“It’s saying we’re not going to allow the opposition party to ask questions about the way we use tax money,” said R. Scott Lilly, Democratic staff director for the House committee. “As far as I know, this is without modern precedent.”

Norman Ornstein, a congressional specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed. “I have not heard of anything like that happening before,” he said. “This is obviously an excuse to avoid providing information about some of the things the Democrats are asking for.”

Campen’s e-mail wording suggests the policy may extend to other inquiries about the functioning of the Executive Office of the President, but the immediate targets were the spending committees. For years, those panels had a strong bipartisan tradition in which the majority party generally joined the minority in tough oversight of the administration.

Brookings Institution government scholar Thomas Mann said the Democrats have little ability to challenge the decision. “This is just one of many instances where Republicans have a legal basis for what they’re doing, but it violates long-standing norms,” he said. All the Democrats can do, he said, “is carp.”

The White House said it is in discussions to reach an amicable compromise. “There have been staff-level discussions about ways to better coordinate requests from Congress,” said spokeswoman Ashley Snee. “It was not the intent to suggest minority members should not ask questions without the consent of the majority.”

Seriously, you should read this.

So, now I’ve got this “Un-Rated” playlist on my iPod (as detailed in an earlier post). Now I feel this compulsion to listen to all of my unrated songs and assign them ratings.

This is a bad thing because I have approximately 4000 unrated songs (excluding Audio Books) on my iPod. However, this is also something of a good thing because I’m listening to my music collection a song at a time (instead of as general background noise) and running each song thru a simple, mental, rules-engine that looks something like?

Two somewhat interesting articles on the potential uses for an need of more powerful file-systems in Longhorn.

I can’t believe that I’ve never used the Smart Playlist feature of iTunes before today! I’ve been manually managing my iPod for a while (long story, but it starts with “So, I’ve got a 40gig laptop, 30gig iPod”… this was before the HD Upgrade) and have found some major advantages to manually managing the synch process (how do I put this delicately…. umm… when you’re manually managing the iPod you can connect your iPod to multiple computers and “synch” their music to the iPod without really registering the iPod…. yeah, that’s a fair way to put it). The downside is that I’ve ended up manually managing a lot of playlists on the iPod such as:

I had a whole workflow going. I’d rip a CD (that I owned, of course) to MP3 via iTunes and add it to an Unsynch’d playlist. Next time I had the iPod connected to the Powerbook I’d copy the contents of Unsynch’d to the iPod and into their appropriate playlist. Then I’d clean out the Unsynch’d playlist. That was the old was of doing things.

Now I’ve simply cleaned up the Genre tag of my music and created Smart Playlists directly on my iPod. Some examples:

These are all set to update automatically, so when I am listening my way thru the Un-Rated playlist and enjoy a song I can increase it’s rating and it moves into the Highest Rated list, in real-time, with no synch! Anyway, I thought this was super cool!

At some point I will need to move all my iPods contents to somewhere (relatively) safe. I currently have about 20gb of music, so I forsee a weekend of using some shareware iPod Manager to move the songs to disc, then burning them to DVD.

This article (from the Washington Post) is excellent. It disusses the Bush Stem Cell policy and why is not only is logically inconsistent, but a damning example of a general pattern in this Administration’s behavior.

As an aside, I have been listening to the Audible.com version of Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins, it is one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever listened to. I strongly recommend that everyone read/listen to it!

After installing Panther last night Emacs 21 (the non-Teminal one) stopped working. I tried to re-install it and managed to also hose my Terminal’s Emacs. A quick Googl’in later and I found instructions on how to build an OS X version of Emacs from CVS. I followed the directions exactly and it “just worked” (it also “just took” about 40 minutes, which seemed like a really long time at 2am).

An un-related aside: Scott is engaging in a little Real Estate style GoogleSpam. Figured I’d lend my linkal support to his experiment.

Well, I went to the Panther release event at the Palo Alto store. The line stretched around the block (compared to the iPod Gen III rollout which was much smaller). Bought Panther, narrowly avoided buying an iSight (I’m really compulsive in that store for some reason), and came home to install OS X 10.3 on the Powerbook 12.

As usual Apple provided a seamless install (All 4 discs of it, including XCode), but I couldn’t get some of the editable areas in Safari or Mail to work (i.e. they weren’t editable, and the applications hung). I remembered that I had both SIMBL (for SAFT) and Cocoa Gestures installed (I would provide links to these, but I’m not suggesting you install them). I deleted both those InputManagers (needed to reboot in the case of SIMBL) and Mail/Safari were all better.

Voted this morning. Got to experience the joy of the punch-card system that caused so many problems (e.g. President Bush) in Florida. What a horrible system.

The basic usability test of any product should consist of taking 100 random people and asking them to use it without asking questions (or spending an inordinate amount of time reading the detailed instructions) (rather like Joel’s Hallway Usability Test). By this standard the punch-card system fails miserably.

I had to spend approximately 30 seconds puzzling over the process to make sure that I 1) Insterted the ballot the correct direction (side up and which edge in) 2) Knew what would invalidate my ballot. Now, some readers are certainly saying to themselves “what an idiot, voting with punch-cards is easy”. To you I respond; see the usability test above? From all around me I heard people asking the same questions I had. Just because it may have made sense to some (and might even have made sense to the system’s creators) doesn’t validate the system. I’m looking forward to touch-screen voting next Presidential election (even if my vote may be hijacked by crackers, or the funders of the voting system for that matter).

Divs not scrollable in IE6, eh? You’re using overflow:auto? Try removing the DOCTYPE declaration from the top of your html…

It worked for me, but your mileage may vary (and this will certainly cause all sorts of other problems I don’t know/care about).

My thoughts on tomorrow’s recall –

The best thing that could happen: Governor Schwarzenegger
The worst thing that could (realistically) happen: Governor Bustamante
The worst thing that can’t happen: Governor Huffington
The wrong thing to happen (but no one (including me) would care): Governor Davis

Only one of these results would encourage me to ever vote again… can you guess which one?

Some interesting (and impressive) reading from the JoinArnold website:
Schwarzenegger Details Specifics of Environmental Action Plan… Some highlights:

Good Stuff!

Good news all around.

There is no discernible loss of battery-life when using the 7200rpm hard drive (based on a stopwatch test doing “light” work, e.g. Java development, running our server, reading email, browsing, playing iTunes). As an added bonus, I haven’t noticed any additional heat via the left palm-rest (or via TemperatureMonitor).

The fact that the faster drive performs on par (from a heat/load perspective) with the 4200rpm drive isn’t entirely unexpected. There was a working hypothesis that because of the better bearings and identical power consumption performing read/write (tho’ it does use more power during spinup) there wouldn’t be more heat or less battery-life. Thankfully that hypothesis has proven true for me…

I ordered one of these from Transintl.com yesterday. (In case you don’t want to follow the links it’s a 7200rpm notebook drive. Got it this morning, created a copy of my drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (an AWESOME program) and proceeded to rip apart my poor unsuspecting Powerbook 12.

The install went fairly smoothly (Apple could make these things a bit easier to work on) except for a bit of a sticking point removing the top of the latop. I followed the instructions here and would only suggest that when all the screws are out that you lift the top off the case from the front, not the back (thankfully aluminum is pretty forgiving).

Anyway, my laptop feels a TON faster! It’s also close to 40% faster according to XBench. I can run our server, Photoshop, iTunes, Mail, emacs and still switch between them (which causes paging, ’cause I don’t have enough ram… waiting for the 1gb dimms to get cheaper first) without the machine choking!

I would recommend this mod to anyone who wants to significantly improve the performance of their laptop…

I picked up Neal Stephenson’s new book “Quicksilver” yesterday. Only about 50 pages into it (how embarassing), but it reads like Cryptonomicon (perhaps my favorite book to date). Pick it up and support the franchise!

Two great comics from MacHall:

I really like the style of this comic… recommended by the fine “gentlemen” over at PA.