I'm really lucky to have friends who encourage me to think about creativity as a matter of chopping water and carrying wood, not dazzling epiphanies and grand slams.

Last time I said:

None of it is particularly dramatic, and isn't meant that way. But if I'm anything, it's a dabbler. I get ideas in my head about things that would be cool to try, and I start doing them, then I get bored, then I quit doing them, and they sit around undone and unfinished and they make me feel cramped and weighted down. So the best thing to do is set them aside for a while, see what seems like it's really worth doing, and gradually disappear the rest.

I'm hoping to work on a few things while I'm not thinking about the blog (and a few other almost-projects) this time, including one-on-one correspondence and more structured reading. I started taking notes on a book on economics I recently picked up, and was chagrined and amazed to realize that, well, my memory for details within ideas isn't what it used to be.

So, as with last time, you'll probably be able to find me:

• posting a few things here and there to flickr
• on AIM and Jabber/gtalk (pdxmph)
• whatever bookmarks I commit to del.icio.us
• On NintendoDS. Grab my friend codes and mail me yours so I can add you to my list. Currently TetrisDS is the big time-sink, but I'll do MarioKartDS and Metroid Prime Hunters if you promise not to headshoot me into a weeping puddle.
• e-mail: pdxmph (at) gmail dot com

Somewhere, the corpse of Frank Herbert bestirs itself and says "Get your paws off me, you damn dirty stinking zealot!"

Pros: Tags look cool, interface is a little nicer, sidebar management has matured, RSS feeds for the status logs (which is super nice)

Cons: Bunches of broken plugins (not SixApart's fault, but still a con ... it's the 'waiting for a universal binary version' of the blogging world when a new MT comes out).

Also: Remember all that agonizing I did about paying just over two years ago? A little dishonesty on my part would have netted me two years of guilty conscience then a big feeling of relief as 6A said "Eh ... freebies for everyone but the all-important enterprise audience, which will pay." So "Meh."

On the bright side, my paid license earned me the right to file a trouble ticket when I ran into trouble last night.

In the open source world, a trouble ticket is called a "bug report," but it carries with it an onus to report an actual bug ... not thoughtfully written documentation of your own stupidity. So I filed a trouble ticket, went out and figured out the problem on my own, then woke up to a response offering some help. The turnaround was very quick, and I appreciated that.

At the same time, you know ... 6A has gone ahead and completed the transformation. There's not a lot of carrying on about it, because they figured out that just giving the product away for free will handle 95% of any objections to anything "going corporate."

Free beer tastes super good.

So what else in this vein?

Oh ... I started a WordPress installation over on a super-secret location I won't reveal yet, except to note that it came about from a strange dream, the retelling of which will contain but a single hint.

I dreamed that I was dating Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She'd just gotten done finishing off The First, and all the Potentials had been ... potentiafied. We were hanging around the Buffy house, there was a D&D game going on in the background (hint hint) and Buffy was sort of coming down from winning and coming to grips with the fact that her specialness, only mildly undermined by Faith all these years, was sort of over. So she needed to get her head together and I was out because she didn't need the distraction.

Pretty melancholy tone to the whole thing, except that I woke up with the thought in my head that, shit, I'd actually dated Buffy ... so even if she ended up hooking up with some dick I'd still, you know ... get to say I dated Buffy.

No idea where that came from. Haven't watched any Buffy lately, haven't particularly had Buffy on my mind.

On the other hand, Al's been doing pretty well at work.

In the process of remembering that The First was called "The First," I stumbled on Wikipedia's entry on Caleb:

He is also argueably [sic] the most powerful villain in the Buffyverse, competing with Glory who killed over 20 swordsmen in less then [sic] a minute while holding on to Dawn and Jasmine who almost effortlessly bench pressed a car [sic sic siccity fucking sic].

Old Media trembles before the might of the Hive Mind, which has no use for your foolish Earth grammar.

Hey, mouse potato. Don't forget to google the new big box in town. But skip the empty suit from the slurbs and hang with the technopreneur.

If you need a translation, grab the soon-to-be-released 2006 edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary ...

... and brain the witless wire service hacks who keep cranking out this swill between doodling outlines for even more witless "kids talk a crazy lingo!" articles.

How cool is that?

"If MarioKart lets you snake, then what's the problem with snakers?"

I don't think it's so much that they snake ... it's that their snaking is indicative of a deeper moral rot that smells up the place. Consider two scenarios from the last 24 hours of MarioKart play:

Scenario One: I sit around waiting to get into a game. I get three other players. One has a bad record (3 wins, 23 losses), but he's new, so o.k. Another has a mediocre record numbering in the hundreds of wins and losses. So he's probably a pretty honest (read: non-snaking) player. He'll probably be around until the last race, even if he's getting stomped. The last has around 1,200 wins and 10 losses. Hm.

So the first race starts. Newbie gets stomped, but stays in the game. Mediocre guy is competing with me. Snaker takes off and cleans all our clocks. Second race, about the same. Third race, I get lucky and drop a few blue bombs on the snaker in the home stretch ... I'm about to win and deepledeep the snaker cuts off his machine to avoid taking the loss.

So our snaker, in this case, is a moral retard who just can't stand the thought of losing, even when he's cheated as best he can.

Scenario Two: I sit around waiting for a game. I get three other players. The records of the contestants are revealed. I can't give an accurate tally, except to note that one of them has over 800 wins and no losses, one's clearly a newb, and one looks about average. Can't tell you his record exactly, because the second he realizes he's stuck in a match with a snaking, quitting low-life, he drops out.

You can tell who's picking which courses, too: The newb goes random because a track pops up instantly in the vote and it's a lame one with lots of curves. Snakers hate curvy courses. The snaker picks Figure 8 because it has a lot of straightaways, so he can snake himself blind. I pick Wario Stadium, which is curvy, bumpy and hard to snake, but it's a challenge. I win the vote. We start racing. The newb blows up at the starting line and our snaker instantly starts his wriggling around, except he's no good at snaking curvy courses, flops into the mud, bounces off a wall, and suddenly he's way far behind. Ten seconds into the race, he quits, perfect record preserved, because why risk losing with most of three laps to go? I stomp the newbie, who sees he's going to be looking at three more head-to-head races against someone more experienced, and he quits.

See ... the issue isn't so much snaking as it is the kind of personality that needs to snake. It can't stand losing, so it snakes, and if it looks like its snaking isn't going to pay off, it just drops out to maintain its record.

Nintendo, of course, plays the whole thing down by saying snaking is a design element it intended to add to the game. I don't buy that because it clearly messes things up: Some people won't even race against snakers, and snakers seem to be the type who'll drop out of races as soon as the writing's on the wall. I think Nintendo's saying "Snaking's fine," because the alternative would be saying "Yeah ... our online games are overrun with lamers who'll use funny little tricks to win every time, then quit after you've waited around to get a race together."

Snakers suck.

At least Nintendo did something about the quitters, who are just as morally retarded if not quite as obnoxious about it.

I installed Dapper Drake a few weeks ago, but started playing with it in earnest yesterday. I hadn't bothered until some rogue app or another rendered my iMac unable to boot a few weeks ago. I eventually sorted out the problem, but I was glad the problem popped up on a Saturday afternoon during Ben's nap, and not in the middle of a workday. So I got it into my head I oughta get a backup machine back up and running, just in case.

I've got X11 running on my iMac, and the Dapper box is running in the closet behind me with a cable snaked out to the switch under the desk. It keeps the noise of the Dapper box, an Athlon 2400XP with a pretty big power supply, under control. If the iMac does kick the bucket, I'll have to haul the Athlon out of the closet and plug it into the monitor, but in the mean time I can do all the configuration and fiddling stuff over X. Plus it's making a swell Squid box.

Because I'm kind of a completionist, I wanted sound for my remote GNOME sessions. Especially once I fired up gAIM and couldn't tell when I got a new message if I was flipped into the Mac desktop. So I got esd for the Mac and set it up to pipe sound over the net to the iMac:

On your OS X box, you install esound via DarwinPorts or Fink, and you run it with this:

esd -tcp -public

That makes esd listen. You can tell it's running because it makes a series of distinctive test tones.

On the Linux box, you pop open a shell and tell it:

export ESPEAKER=x.x.x.x:5001

where x.x.x.x is the IP of the Mac that's listening.

And that's it.

More elaborate sounds take a few jiffs to traverse the network and make the speakers do something, but otherwise it just works. And it gives me an appreciation for esd I didn't have before when it was just that pesky network transparent thing that wouldn't even work right on localhost. Nifty.

A few other Ubuntu things to come to grips with:

The keybindings war is over and Emacs lost, I guess. When I was still a regular GNOME user, you could choose a keybinding flavor from a menu, but that got pared away in the name of protecting the users from themselves. So you have to fire up the gconf-editor and set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtkkeytheme to "Emacs". Otherwise, you're doomed to suffer in a limbo of Windowsesque keybindings. Horrible fate.

I was going to put a note in about how to fix the filled window moves with Metacity, but the magic didn't work to do that.

It's kind of funny, because I remember getting all bent out of shape about the whole "Metacity takes away all the nice things about GNOME window management" hooplah, but something has changed since then. Some things, I guess:

Apple does this crap all the time. Worse, a lot of the time it seems to be doing that stuff and not even following its own rules. A whole generation of bent-out-of-shape OS 9 fanatics continue to crab about OS X because of Apple's seemingly whimsical approach to UI design of late.

I've come to realize that the allegedly meritocratic nature of Linux/open source development sort of democratizes your reaction to changes. I remember reading Havoc Pennington defending some of the sweeping changes in GNOME 2 and thinking "Who the fuck is Havoc Pennington?" because he'd just sort of arrived and scaled the GNOME bureaucracy and now he was changing crap. I had a name, I had his kind of arrogant, terse writing on his own decisions, and I was subscribed to mailing lists where it was right and proper to say things like "Who the fuck are you, you arrogant sod?"

I can do that on Apple bulletin boards, I suppose, but yelling on an Apple bulletin board is about like yelling at a wall of shiny white plastic. It does not respond. No one cares. Apple's been busy blowing off people who have memorized pieces of its own human interface guidelines for half a decade now. It doesn't care what someone who usually buys refurbed Macs thinks.

Sometimes I think the only way Apple will lose the customers it does care about is if it starts packing bits of limburger and putrid hamburger into the fan vents of every machine it ships. And be ready for Gruber to defend that, too.

Anyhow ...

It's been four years since I was a regular Linux user. I've had Linux machines in the house almost the whole time since, but it's been four years since I sat down in front of one and thought to myself "If I don't get work done on this, I am not going to get any work done at all today."

Having had some time to dink around on this Ubuntu box, I kind of understand the micro-trend of nerds fleeing their Macs and calling Ubuntu home. Things about the Linux desktop are better. They're not so "better" that if, as I did six or seven years ago, a friend asked I'd say "Yeah ... sure ... try it out" because I know a lot more computer users than I did back then. There are more of them, and they have deeper expectations than they did, and I've learned that on the spectrum of people willing to do fiddly stuff to a computer, I'm pretty far over to the "fiddly" side. So ... no ... wouldn't give it to Aunt Tilly.

On the other hand, things have improved to the point that I don't feel like I'm overfiddling to get a good result I can live with. That's a pretty good point for it to be at as far as I'm concerned.

This is one of those days when it doesn't seem so fair.

Snakers suck.

A while back I set up some macros for auto-filing mail in mutt using output from the date command to generate a date-stamped folder, but they were using the ".xx" format of command you see around a lot of muttrcs.

These lines give me Mail Act-On's `-x keys, and do the same thing:

#file in work, personal or receipts
macro index \`w "<save-message>=work_`date +%m%y`<return>"
macro pager \`w "<save-message>=work_`date +%m%y`<return>"
macro index \`p "<save-message>=personal_`date +%m%y`<return>"
macro pager \`p "<save-message>=personal_`date +%m%y`<return>"
macro index \`r "<save-message>=receipts_etc<return>"
macro pager \`r "<save-message>=receipts_etc<return>"
macro index \`t "<save-message>=todo<return>"
macro pager \`t "<save-message>=todo<return>"
macro index \`a "<save-message>=toanswer<return>"
macro pager \`a "<save-message>=toanswer<return>"

It's been kind of interesting using mutt, Emacs and Firefox more under OS X. I was initially sort of dismayed at the prospect of losing a lot of the functionality I'd built for myself with AppleScript, since none of those apps are particularly scriptable that way. But a few things have become apparent:

1. Automator encourages thinking of workflows in terms of piping stuff around. At least, if it isn't encouraging it, it rewards thinking in classically Unixy terms about automating stuff. "This goes here and comes out like this and gets fed into here."

2. If you've been writing pipes all along for whatever reason, it's usually pretty easy to rip out one piece of the pipeline that's dependent on a scriptable app and replace it with a bit of shell script that does the same thing.

3. Good programmers in the Mac space show a lot of care for making sure your stuff is retrievable, and not locked up in some useless format. VoodooPad's an exemplar in this regard. I've thought about replacing it now and then with some Emacs stuff, but I never really see the need: It's very functional and rich in its native file format, but Gus made sure to make it pretty easy to get stuff out of a VoodooPad document in a variety of more or less universal formats. He's even kind of nice to the Word people, who I've always assumed are the last to worry about lock-in of any sort.

I got to thinking about a lot of this stuff in the wake of the Pilgrim/Gruber exchange, amply linked by Ed, not so much because I'm in a blind panic about "Apple's proprietary file formats," but more because I realized that when I come across a problem I can't solve with Applescript, I've probably started typing a line like do shell script before I even realize it.

Someday, if I don't have a Mac in the house anymore, I probably won't be able to pop open Emacs and reflexively type do applescript to make some bit of bash scripting tick. So rather than becoming dependent on a workflow that's heavily flavored by a single platform, I'd rather spend my time figuring out workflows I'm more likely to carry off on several platforms.

So I've spent some time this week refactoring scripts I've written so that the Apple-dependent part is the kind of stuff that makes sense in the current context: How do I launch this particular script? How do I get this thing in the clipboard into the pipe? Do I trust this app enough to keep using it, or is it pretty dispensable and is there a more universal option available?

In the end, I'm looking for an A-to-D pipe where A & D are perhaps OS-dependent (what goes in, where it comes out) but B&C -- the parts that are more properly thought of as the logic and processing bits -- are anchored in what I think of as a more universal environment I can take anywhere. And the pre-made tools I want to use are the same: Things I know I can find or build on just about any platform, and where the all-important configuration files can be zipped up and plopped down elsewhere and expected to just work.

All that said, just dropping Macs seems too drastic. The thing I think is really wonderful about OS X (even if Gruber calls people who adopted Macs after its advent 'carpetbaggers') is its ability to create tools in a classically interoperable mode. It's not as awkward or graceless as it is in Windows to get a Unix toolset going, but the polish at levels above that basic toolset is more pronounced than it is in Linux or the other BSDs.

Via MeFi (where there are more shenanigans).

I hate this kind of change because I'll spend a week wondering if I'm just hallucinating it the same way my G3 iBooks seemed so much more ... responsive with each OS bump after Jaguar.

Fortunately, I also dig Spark, so it was pretty easy to write a quick AppleScript that grabs the URL and name of the frontmost Firefox window, prompts for some tags, then makes a new webnote, then use Spark to tie that Applescript to shift-⌘-d, which the WebNoteHappy people thoughtfully fixed so the keystroke's unreserved for apps that don't talk to it natively.

Prettified script after the jump.