A: When a Google employee calls it a label.

So, Google has tweaked Gmail’s labels such that you can now drag and drop a message onto a label in the sidebar, which will apply that label to the message (or messages … you can select several and drag all of them at once). The motivation for this comes down to users not using labels very much, evidently because they don’t really know what they’re for.

As Michael Leggett explains in his blog entry on the new UI:

Making the interface mimic things you interact with outside the computer can sometimes improve ease of use.

Right. When you drag a message from the inbox into a “label,” it disappears from the inbox and appears under that label. If you click on a sidebar label to look at all of its messages, any messages with a single label act the same way: If I’m in the “work” label and drag a message over to the “writers” label on the sidebar, the message leaves the “work” label and joins the “writers” label.

I wonder if I can think of anything I interact with outside the computer that these actions mimic?

Folders, perhaps?

No! Wrong! Because if a message has two labels (e.g. “writer” and “work”, then dragging it from its list to a third label (e.g. “NitpickingBlogEntries”) means it remains in “writer” and “work” and gains “NitpickingBlogEntries.”

Whatever else folders do in real life, they do not retain things within them that have been moved outside of them.

So here’s the mental map I’ve created to help me understand labeling in Gmail:

1. If it has no label and I drag it into another label, then labels are folders.
2. If it has only one label and I drag it into another label, then labels are folders.
3. If it has more than one label and I drag it into another label, then labels are labels.

With the exception of getting to cling to the “label” nomenclature, I’m not sure how this is less conceptually cluttery than having “folders” and “tags.”

Leggett’s blog entry says label uptake has increased mightily with the interface changes, but that seems like only half the story:

By making it more evident that you can do something with a message, you may get people to do that thing, but I wonder what happens next, when people who’ve been treating labels like folders (because that’s how they act initially) run into the behavior where labels act more like folders that insist on retaining a copy of their contents. Especially when dragging a double-labeled message from within a label into the Trash “label” in a desperate attempt to get it out of that label deletes it from every label.

One thing that’s sort of nice about Gmail’s labels, in a way, is that they enforce a disciplined approach to message organization. It takes effort to create one, and you can’t just create them on the fly. So a year from now you’ve got a better chance of having a single label, e.g. “work” vs. having a bunch: “work”, “Work”, “Jupitermedia”, “JUPM”, “job”, etc.

That’s why I’m not in a great hurry to say Google should just pare down the number of states a label introduces to a message to one and start calling them “folders,” then introduce free-style tagging. Friction, in this case, is probably good for those of us who aren’t really organized.

A CMS I deal with has tagging for articles, and it has a level of friction where tagging is concerned that I was uncomfortable with until people started talking about the pain normalization was going to create. Now I wish it had a bit more friction, too.

(There’s an update at the bottom of this entry)

I used to be a faithful user of TextSoap, a Mac app that’s wildly, wildly useful when you’re dealing with content produced by a number of unpleasant tools (like Microsoft Word).

With TextSoap, you get a suite of text filters that do all sorts of stuff to text: Straighten smartquotes, convert things like smartquotes to text or numeric HTML entities, increase or decrease the quote level in a mail message, smarten quotes, perform conversions to typographical conventions (like “–” to em dash), and on and on. If TextSoap doesn’t have a pre-built filter to perform an operation, you can write your own. It even supports regular expressions.

You can use TextSoap like a steroidal text editing program, similar to Text Edit or Notepad or whatever, but it also integrates into the Mac as a service and as contextual items, so it’s always easy to use without having to launch a different app. It also provides an AppleScript scripting addition.

I got away from using TextSoap while I was carrying around an eeePC and replaced it instead with some very simple Ruby that ran through a hash of typical conversion tasks on STDIN. It was o.k., but it’s one of those things where you always turn up a new edge case every few months and that makes it unsatisfactory as a “just works” solution.

Now I don’t have the eeePC, and I’ve been through the unpleasant ordeal of seeing what it would be like to be a Windows dude, so I don’t mind augmenting plain old Ruby with some appscript now and then.

Since you have to use TextSoap as a scripting addition to automate it, the syntax is a little different when using it with rb-appscript: (See the update below)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "appscript"
require "osax"
include OSAX

ts = OSAX::ScriptingAddition.new("TextSoapSA")
text = STDIN.read
puts ts.tsCleanText(text, :with => "InternetFriendly")

You can chain TextSoap filters by adding extra “:with => ‘foo’” parameters. It processes them first to last when it’s filtering the text.

I dropped that into TextMate as a command snippet and tied it to “cmd-shift-s” (for “scrub”) and it flattens text out. HTML entities and smartquotes become their flattest ASCII equivalents, so you can think of the “InternetFriendly” filter in TextSoap like a ginormous endumbening ray.

Which brings me to why I’m using the endumbening ray at all when I’d prefer to just convert smartquotes and the like to legal HTML entities: The CMS at work has taken to escaping entities when it renders a story, so all my carefully deployed right and left double quotes, em dashes and others render as literal text: rdquo, ldquo, emdash, etc.

It all has something to do with the chaos induced by a WYSIWYG editor in use. I wouldn’t know anything about that because it won’t run on the Mac version of any browser I’ve got: I experience the CMS as a collection of plain text areas and don’t consider that a loss.

I’d be more crabby about the whole thing, but I’ve been living with stuff like this for the nine years I’ve been in Web publishing and it seems I might as well take a cue from the medium I work in: route around the damage. (Quick aside on that link: at least look at the screenshot I provided at the time: How did we not claw our eyes out?

One other note: Putting a script like that in TextMate instead of deploying it from the Services menu, as Apple intended for things like TextSoap, is a little awkward. The Services menu, however, is a minor usability nightmare. Since I’ve got the “Edit in Textmate” plugin installed for all my Cocoa apps, and “It’s All Text” installed in Firefox, it’s easier to just worth from within TextMate. As a side benefit, all my command snippets are easily exported and used in another text editor, should I ever switch.

Update: Thanks to Patrick and Mark in the comments, who point out that TextSoap now ships with a scripting agent (textsoapAgent). It’s similar to the scripting addition but the syntax is a hair cleaner and you don’t have to include appscript’s OSAX support. Here’s the example above using the scripting agent instead of the scripting addition:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "appscript"

ts = app("textsoapAgent")
text = STDIN.read
puts ts.cleanText(text, :with => "InternetFriendly")

If you’re not sure which cleaners are available or what to call them, the agent includes a few methods to make figuring that out easier:

app(”textsoapAgent”).groupNames will return the cleaner groups. In my case:

["Library", ":Standard", ":Email", ":Typographical", ":Case Conversions", ":Text Quoting", ":Markdown", ":HTML", ":Plist", ":Custom", "MyList", "Mail", "BBEdit", "Jupitermedia"]

and

app(”textsoapAgent).groupItems(:from => “group name“) will return the cleaners with a particular group. In this instance, “MyList,” which is a user-defined selection of filters:

["Markdown Text", "InternetFriendly", "Remove Forwarding (>) Characters", "Convert pseudo-heads", "Capitalize Title", "double to single quotes", "Remove All Tabs", "Remove Extra Spaces", "Remove Extra Returns", "Blog Preparation", "Markdown", "Remove Extra Spaces"]

Tmail is handy if you’d like something that can parse an e-mail message and do something with it, in this case handing it off to OmniFocus:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'tmail'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript

of = app('OmniFocus')
message = STDIN.read
mail = TMail::Mail.parse(message)
tasks = of.documents[1].get
tasks.make(:new => :inbox_task, :with_properties =>\  
  {:name => mail.subject, :note => mail.body})

“But OmniFocus already has the Clip-o-Tron 3000! I don’t need to pipe a message into some Ruby script to get it into OmniFocus,” you might reasonably be expected to say.

That’s true!

Might be handy in mutt, though.

Actually, I’m not even using mutt right now. But Mail.app just did one of its infuriating “I’m going to sit here pretending to check your mail but not really do it, ‘kay? Force-quit me when you’ve had enough!” things that it does now and then and I thought “Were I to just go be a savage for a week, what thing would I most miss about Mail?”

Getting things into OmniFocus was lower on the list than “instant Spotlight searches of all my messages,” “smart mailboxes,” and “being able to quick-look attachments right there in the client,” but I’ve already bashed my head against virtual folders and search in mutt and found it painful, and I’ve written something that let me quick-look attachments in mutt should I ever care to go dust it off and assign it to a hotkey. So “get this message into OmniFocus” was the one thing I could think of to actually try.

Having considered it and shared it with you, I’ve cooled down enough to relaunch Mail and live with it for another month.

My apologies for the improvised iPhone pano above. It was the only way to capture the man who drove his van up into Glenwood Park, across the street from our house, along with the van itself. I had two shots of the incident on the iPhone, taken from two slightly different vantage points. As a result, the van has a certain swept-back look I’m not going to take the time to correct.

The incident happened on Tuesday night as we were getting ready to go to the Lents Neighborhood Association meeting, where a vote was held to formalize the neighborhood’s rejection of Merritt Paulson’s proposed Lents Park baseball stadium.

We heard a crash outside and ran to the window just in time to spot the van (pictured above) swerving up over the curb and into the park. The driver backed out of the park and began to slowly roll down the street. A group of young men ran the van down and I thought the driver might get pulled through the window. He stopped, though, and the young men backed away to stand there eyeing the van while the driver rummaged around inside.

I went into the front yard and saw a lot of neighbors gathered around eyeing both the van and the other vehicle it had struck before careening into the park. I went across the street and asked the young men if the driver was o.k. and they said he claimed he’d fallen asleep, and that he was “acting weird.” The front driver-side wheel was bent at a strange angle, so it seemed the driver wouldn’t be going anywhere too quickly no matter what his intent.

The van door opened up and a small dog jumped out.

“Well … the dog’s o.k.” I said to the young men. I walked toward the van. The driver clamored out so I called over to him to ask if he needed medical attention. He told me he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. He called someone on his phone.

I retreated back across the street to watch, not feeling the need to call 911 because there were plenty of people standing around who were busy repeating the particulars of the incident into their phones.

The driver eventually hobbled over to the owner of the vehicle he’d struck with his van and began to ask that they not report the incident because he had no license and no insurance. The victim demurred and the driver became more and more agitated, waving his arms around as his voice got louder. I decided to call the police and report that development so any squad cars en route might decide to get to the scene sooner than a routine fender-bender might dictate.

The police arrived and dealt with the matter with what appeared to be good humor. A police observer in a blue vest stood around watching the proceedings. We walked to the neighborhood association meeting.

It was probably a good thing we witnessed the accident and the ensuing small levels of excitement it brought to our block, because the atmosphere at the neighborhood association meeting was charged and people were agitated there, as well. I felt somewhat inoculated against low animal tension. Fortunately, I’ve got a stint as a small-town reporter in my past, so it was easy to slip into that mode and take the meeting for what it was: a meaningless formality allowed to move forward for its cathartic value.

I don’t have much more to say about the meeting except that it played out in such a way that caused me to indefinitely defer writing up the combined 14 pages of notes I’ve had from two ballpark-related meetings in the past week, and to harden my resolve to regularly attend neighborhood association meetings for a long time to come: People clearly understand the forms and trappings of democracy, but the meeting itself was a travesty of democratic process and behavior. We’re new to Lents, so it has been best to sit out these past few rounds of ball park meetings in any participatory sense. If we’re to be positively involved in our neighborhood in the future, we’ll have to deal with a lot of the people who participated in those meetings on both sides of the issue. Some of them did not cover themselves in glory.

To end on a positive note: http://cityrepair.org/

They sent someone to the meeting to talk about launching some projects in Lents and I’m eager to see what comes of that.

I told Al after the meeting that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone from Iowa greeted with the kind of mistrust people used to reserve for perfumed dandies just off the stage coach from New York City, but like I said: the crowd was tense. Most of them won’t be back next month anyhow.

Something useful I just now learned Mail Act-On has: A “reply to message” action with custom text:

You can stack rules in Mail Act-On, too, so with a quick `a, I can send an acknowledgement mail, color the message so it stands out and assign it a MailTags keyword.

That makes it a lot easier for me to stay in the habit of acknowledging incoming content from writers I work with, which means we all rest easier where the company’s occasionally overzealous spam filters are concerned.

From the Star Trek Online FAQ:

Q: Will there be an economy?

A: Many of the details are still in the works, but yes, there will be an economy that makes sense in the Star Trek universe. Since the Federation has explicitly done away with money, expect bartering and trading of goods to be an important part of the economy. Less tangible forms of economics such as Reputation are also not out of the question.

I always thought Picard’s TNG season 1 soliloquy about the Federation being wrapped up in something other than the pursuit of profit was less about people being completely over currency and more about people being completely over property-based measures of value.

How many units of rigellian slugbat vomit is a kilo of Vulcan black market tribble gizzards worth in an economy with replicators? And why would an economy that presumably still needed to parcel out its energy expenditures in order to make the replicators produce equitably distributed goods and materials do away with some abstract, portable measure of individual resource allocation, like dollars or credits or steganographically etched Ceti Eel shells?

Maybe the barter and trade will be centered around non-replicatable goods (like dilithium?) and fascinating works of art produced by people who use their replicator allotments to produce towering sculptures, like Anzaz of Silonius IV and his epic “Quivering Ecstasy of the Cat-buzzards.”

Don’t know why I care. Probably won’t even be a Mac client.

Al graduated from PSU’s MSW program today.

Awesome.

So, I pride myself on being able to consider lots of computing alternatives. Before I was a regular Mac user, I lived in a multi-platform world. I didn’t like Windows, but I could use it. I considered Unix and Linux home.

Lately, I’ve been bumping my head against a simple problem: To run the software I want to run at the speed I want to run it, the way I want to run it, I need a little more machine than last summer’s MacBook (the white, plastic, pre-Nvidia graphics kind).

The iMacs are at a pretty comfortable spec, but I don’t quite have the money on hand to buy one of those. So I figured “well, buy something that just pumps out the cycles.” And so I found myself standing in a Best Buy looking at a number of machines that straddle the line between what Best Buy considers an “entertainment” machine and a “gaming” machine.

Near as I can tell:

Entertainment machines have quad-core processors, 6-8 GB of DDR2 RAM, low-end accelerated video, hard drives with 512GB or more of storage, and some little extras in the way of integrated SD/CF slots, t.v. tuners, etc. They tend to ship with Vista Home something or ‘nother: Premium as often as not.

Gaming machines have similar specs, but the RAM tends to be DDR3, the video cards are more impressive, and there are some trade-offs on hard drive space. They might not have a t.v. tuner or integrated card slot.

In the end, I opted for a Gateway LX6810-01. With a Core 2 quad processor, 8GB of RAM, a string of decent reviews from around the ‘net and a lot of hard drive space, it seemed like a good bet.

I brought it home, plugged it into my stuff and turned it on. I got a prompt about configuring RAID, which puzzled me greatly since there’s only one hard drive in there and no mention was made of RAID anywhere on the box. It passed, though, and the machine settled into a state of utter stillness, showing nothing but a blinking cursor. I let it stay like that a while. In addition to my willingness to explore computing alternatives, I pride myself on my patience.

Eventually I realized it wasn’t going to do anything, so my diagnostic thinking engaged. I realized that I had casually hung a seven-port USB hub off of it, so I powered the machine down, unplugged the hub and plugged in the Gateway-issued keyboard and mouse (which are atrocious, and which use the old PS/2 connectors).

Sure enough, it must have hated something on the hub and once I got past the invitation to configure the non-existent RAID array it began to boot into Vista.

I’ll admit to a little curiosity … excitement even. Vista has been reviled in a way I’ve found hard to credit. When I’ve talked to Michael Burton about it, I’ve mostly picked up feelings of indifference. It’s an indifference I’ve come to recognize from people who are comfortable with Windows and unwilling to let anything it does upset them too badly. Macs don’t interest them; Linux doesn’t run software they need, are used to or just happen to like more than the Free Software alternatives, so they run Windows and get on with their lives. I get that. I am that way about gas stations, with the exception of a period in the ’80s when I shunned Shell for political reasons.

Anyhow … I was curious. I’ve only seen Vista in brief glimpses here and there. I wanted to try it for myself. As much as it entertains me that people have lost whole years of their lives to being angry and defiant about Vista, I couldn’t believe it was that bad.

I sat for a very long time while assorted lo-res screens paraded across my monitor telling me Windows was preparing itself for my use. My patience came in handy, and it was occasionally rewarded with the slightest flicker or jitter in the display, which told me something was happening in there.

Then Windows gave me a pretty screen and told me it was analyzing my computer’s performance. That took another very long time, but it was easier because there was a progress bar. I entertained myself with a few engagements in Star Trek: Tactical Assault on the DS.

The analysis phase ended, then it was time to answer questions, let Windows sort itself out some more, “prepare my desktop” and generally thump around. I can’t really offer any coherent narrative on that phase. I was feeling a little grumpy, because I kept thinking “Gateway built the goddamn machine and presumably has a licensing agreement with Windows to sprinkle assorted bits of promotional crap and ‘helpful’ software around in the default installation: Why couldn’t it image these machines with a Vista install that acted like it knew which hardware it was already installed on?”

Then I thought, “You’re just being an effete Mac person. It’s less a sign of Gateway’s carelessness than it is Apple’s precious, prissy and ostentatious focus on experience that you’re bothered right now. Some operating systems just need to thrash around and interrogate their new home like an anxious pothead who cannot believe he can really eat whatever he wants at a Las Vegas buffet before they can begin their work. That’s o.k.”

So began my experience with Vista.

One thing I was very curious about was how my new computer rated on the Vista Experience Index, which is Microsoft’s attempt to quantify how poorly your computer will perform and probably why manufacturers were so happy users got it in their heads Vista sucked anyhow. According to what Vista was telling me, my new computer scored a 5.3 out of 5.9. It got the 5.3 because in one area, the RAM, the machine was considered underpowered. Not because there wasn’t enough RAM, but because it was DDR2 instead of DDR3. It scored 5.9 on everything else. There is, according to Vista, no score higher than 5.9. I like that the same way I like the tendency liars and federal officials have to use odd numbers when they’re throwing around statistics they’ve made up. It also implies that Microsoft, in recognition of God’s greatness, has allowed a single tenth of a point to remain on the table in honor of that PC somewhere in the world that could really, really WHOMP on Vista. Microsoft’s researchers have not found that machine yet, but when they do it’ll score a perfect 6. Mos def.

Fine.

Subjectively, Vista was very nimble on that machine, even with all the 3d swooping and zooming and misty window borders and assorted stuff slithering around the UI. I installed my usual suite of stuff I install on a Windows machine: Cygwin, Pidgin, the GIMP, Ruby, Firefox, Thunderbird, cygPutty, etc. etc. etc. You could even say I was starting to get into it.

Then things began to bother me:

1. Windows makes my wrists hurt. It’s the keystrokes. Also, there may be ways to reduce mouse usage, but I don’t know what they are, so I spend a lot more time mousing.

2. I need the Cisco VPN client for work. Cisco is refusing to provide a 64-bit Vista client. There are dark mutterings about Cisco trying to force mass hardware upgrades or something. I don’t know anything about that. I just know that you can’t use the Cisco VPN client on 64-bit Windows. There are two alternatives: You can do something insane with building vpnc under Cygwin then getting drivers from OpenVPN and then running perl scripts and assorted other lunacy, or you can pay some company in Germany $140 for a VPN client. Not surprisingly, a quick consult with BitTorrent and some file scans established that all the, uh, “evaluation copies” were infested with Trojans.

3. Experimentation showed me that trying to power up the machine with any kind of USB hub or storage device attached to it would cause it to not boot. So much for my backup drives or my favorite keyboard (it has two USB ports).

4. Vista periodically proclaimed that my new storage device was ready to be formatted for RAID use. There was no new storage device. I’ve looked this up: People in the know go to some panel somewhere and tell some piece of software to quit nagging them about the fucking RAID. To my way of thinking, that would be like Alison coming home one day complaining that the Overbeings had infected her eyes with nano-bots that were slowly adjusting her perception to make her amenable to The Great Sharing and me considering the problem handled by gagging her and putting her in the garage so I couldn’t hear her becoming ever more frantic about all the little machines crawling around on her face.

5. After a few minutes of reasonable performance, the sound started to stutter and pop. The driver update to correct this problem was 170MB long. It was another “wtf is this machine doing leaving the factory like this?” moment.

6. Vista’s Start menu is stupid and cramped.

I boxed the machine back up about 18 hours after getting it home.

Then I thought “You know, maybe it’d be an o.k. Linux box.” The point being, remember, that I’d decided raw horsepower might trump user experience on this purchase.

So I drug it back out and popped in a (known good) Ubuntu install disc. It wouldn’t get past the splash screen or boot to the Live CD. So I put it back in the box. It will be going back tomorrow. I’m going to set aside the refund and save for a while longer until I can afford a Mac with specs about as good as that machine had. The burning question is whether to go with a high-end iMac or a low-end Mac Pro. Near as I can tell, either of the top two iMacs are pretty sweet machines in their own right. Mac Pros have the advantage of being slightly more upgradable in the medium term, which means I could make one of those last a while longer. Plus, goddamn: a Mac Pro.

One other thing I learned: I’ve never given the reviews at Best Buy much credit, but I should have this time. The “pro” reviewers glowing about this machine were doing exactly what Gateway would hope: Plugging the machine in exactly as instructed, taking a few benchmarks, regurgitating the specs and filing their copy. The people who tried to do stuff like connect USB drives to the machine before booting it had it right: It’s a rickety machine.

Updated below

I upgraded my MacBook’s hard drive from the stock 160GB/5400RPM Hitachi to a 320GB/7200RPM Western Digital Scorpion. The extra space is welcome, but right now it’s in the middle or re-indexing Spotlight so it’s impossible to say whether the snappy will manifest. It was a pretty inexpensive upgrade that ought to help in the short term while I decide what to do about the longer term.

I used MacInstruct’s guide on replacing a hard drive, and the instructions were fine. Some notes on those:

• There’s an emphasis on FireWire drives for backup and booting from backup, but I’ve got a USB Western Digital MyBook that worked fine. Without looking to confirm this, I think that PowerPC-era Macs couldn’t boot from USB drives.

• Note that you need a Torx 8 screwdriver. The bracket that protects the drive and RAM slots comes off with a small Philips, but you need the Torx for the pegs of the drive sleeve. Easily found in an inexpensive microdriver kit from Radio Shack, where I got mine when I disassembled the iBook last summer.

• Inserted properly back into its slot, the drive should offer next to no resistance most of the way back. If you get any resistance, that probably means it’s upside down. Be careful not to push too hard or you risk bunching up the rubber guides on the sides of the drive slot. Seriously: The guide says “push,” but doesn’t hint at how hard. The answer is “not at all.” If you stand the machine on its side and tilt it a little, the drive should slide most of the way from its own weight.

• Be ready for a long wait when you restore from SuperDuper to the new volume. It took just short of 2.5 hours to move ~90GB worth of backup from the USB drive to the new hard drive. It’s possible, of course, to work on the MacBook while it’s booted from a USB drive, but everything takes forever (especially context menus and folders with lots of stuff in them, even /Applications).

• I haven’t ever used Carbon Copy Cloner because I got a license to SuperDuper a long time ago. SuperDuper already handles my nightly backups, so preparing for this operation took about five minutes to do one last Smart Backup (SuperDuper’s term for an incremental backup). The only time SuperDuper ever spooked me came between the release of Leopard and the developer catching SuperDuper up to it. No exception this time: It works reliably and well. Like the best apps in its class, it just does its thing mostly out of sight then “just works” with no need to go clawing for a manual when you need it to restore from backup.

So, long and short: Pretty painless process. I’m even a little shocked at how easy it was. If someone told me, “just remove the battery and unscrew the l-bracket, and make sure you have a Torx 8,” there wouldn’t have been any surprises. No harder than doing the same procedure with a desktop machine, anyhow, and my desktop machine usually figures out a way to draw blood.

Update: About the snappy manifesting: Yes … launch times seem to be faster. Some “first-time-after-reboot” things seem to be faster, like the first “open with” contextual menu after reboot. Booting up and getting a usable desktop after login seems to go faster. That’s just physics. But the x factor in the whole deal is that the process of backing up to an external drive then restoring from that backup to the new drive effectively defragments everything. So what feels like a big gain is probably subject to gradual deterioration. I thought to check for fragmentation before performing the operation yesterday, and there was some. I don’t know if it was “bad,” or what would even constitute “bad,” but there was some.