Apple released iPhoto 2 and iMovie 3 for download today. So far, I’m extremely disappointed with iPhoto 2. I’ve only used it for a few minutes, but it looks like none of the improvements I was hoping for were included, and I think it’s actually slower on my iMac than iPhoto 1.0 was.
iMovie 3 looks nice, though. They finally made titles look somewhat respectable. Yay!
Lest anyone think I’m picking on Nick too much, I will now demonstrate my concern for his well-being by suggesting that he not ride his Segway on the sidewalk. He may or may not be likely to injure pedestrians, but I’m worried I’ll hit him with my car.
My car collided with a bicycle last night (I think it hit me, actually) when I was pulling out of our apartment building’s garage. Luckily, the biker wasn’t hurt, but she got thrown off her bike pretty good. If she’d been riding on the street instead of the sidewalk, I don’t think this would have happened: The sidewalk is very close to the building, which means that my visibility exiting the garage is poor. It’s plenty to see if there’s a pedestrian walking at three miles per hour, but a bike or Segway going 10–15 mph is too far away to notice before I pull right out into it!
So Nick, even if there aren’t any pedestrians around, please don’t speed your Segway down the sidewalk. Especially the one right outside my apartment.
In his weblog, Alexei…
Talk amongst yourselves.
I was following the directions in the ice cream maker’s booklet, but it was obvious that it was going to turn out white (with black specks), rather than green (with black specks) like the stuff at Baskin Robbins. Food coloring to the rescue!
Food coloring is cool. Also food processors, but that’s a story for another day.
I wrote too much, and as a result, I think my point was obscured.
Basically, it’s this: Since the typewriter keyboard was invented, people have been told to press the space bar twice between sentences. Now computers come along, and they (and their human slaves) insist that people only press it once. Generally, computers should be designed to work for people, not the other way around.
It should not be necessary to refrain from pressing space twice to accomplish the (desirable) goal of proper kerning. If people like to insert two spaces, let them. If people want to insert one space, let them save the effort–although usability experts will tell you that the time spent retraining and having to think about this every time you finish a sentence will far outweigh any benefit. The computer should always be capable of doing the right thing either way.
Computers can be smarter than this! Sometimes (e.g., TEX), they are. Sometimes (e.g., Microsoft Word), they aren’t.
Erik Barzeski asks why people still put two spaces after a sentence. Eric goaded Nick into insisting they shouldn’t. I think it shouldn’t have to matter. Fact: There should be more space following sentence-ending punctuation (period, exclamation point, colon, semicolon, question mark, what have you) than between words. Fact: Computers are smart enough to figure this out for you. In fact, this is the sort of thing they’re much better than humans at.
Commenters on Erik’s entry point out that style manuals still tell you to use two spaces, even though one is “all that’s required.” It’s worth mentioning that style manuals, for the most part, ignore desktop publishing. They’re still assuming that you’re either writing with a typewriter (where two spaces make things more readable) or that you will be professionally published (where the typesetter will add the correct amount of space for you.) Desktop publishing gives the ordinary computer user the ability to royally screw up their own documents. Unfortunately, they usually take full advantage of this.
Nick claims that type designers add extra space after periods to make a single “space” the right thing to use, but given what I know about how computer fonts work, I’m dubious that this works correctly. Somebody needs to explain to me how font software, which works in very limited context, can tell the difference between “I live in St. Louis,” (which needs a thin inter-word space after the first period and “John lives on Rose St. Louis doesn’t.” (which needs a thick sentence-separating space after the first period). Fonts come with glyphs and a complicated set of layout rules for assembling them based on character sequences. But really, it’s up to the text software as a whole–that would be your word processor or Web browser or email program or the OS routines that they make use of–to use the rules of English to figure out where your sentences are, and insert the appropriate amount of space, regardless of how many times you hit the space bar. Computers are good at tasks like this.
HTML is based on SGML, which was designed by Real Publishers back in the 1970’s. So it does the right thing (ignoring the amount of whitespace you used and inserting its own). TeX, which Donald Knuth wrote to help him typeset his books (also in the 1970’s), does the right thing too. Ironically, word processors like Microsoft Word were designed in the 1980’s for desktop computers too small and slow to do anything as complicated as insert whitespace–and you were going to be printing either on a daisywheel or a crappy-looking dot matrix printer, so why did it matter?–so they almost always do the wrong thing when it comes to how Real Documents should look.
(Actually, it’s possible recent word processors get this right too; I don’t know, I haven’t used one in years. I strongly suspect, though that in the name of “backwards compability” and “consistent interface,” they continue to make ordinary people care about stupid stuff like how much space there needs to be after a period to make things readable.)
What do I do personally? I always hit the space bar twice. I used to use one space. Laura said I should use two. She pointed out that two spaces make my text more readable in forums–like email and Usenet–that tend to display exactly what I typed, using a fixed-width type, just like a typewriter or a 1960’s-era teletype (which is what they’re pretending to be). It turns out she was right (and the style manuals agree with her). So now I always use two spaces, and the right thing always happens: When I send email or write news, the extra space helps readability for those who read it in a fixed-width font, and when I’m composing an HTML or LaTeX document, the amount of whitespace I use is ignored and the computer does the right thing automatically.
Why didn’t anyone tell me? I was wondering why no Frasier showed up on TiVo. I also wondered what happened to Ed and The West Wing last night, but that turns out to be the fault of some lame made-for-TV movie.
CNET is reporting that AOL Time Warner announced a net loss of $98.7 billion for 2002. Ouch. That’s more than the GNP of most countries. It’s more money than I make in a year, certainly.
Steve Case and Ted Turner are both leaving the company, which reinforces my long-held belief that those mergers were probably a bad idea. Turner has probably regretted selling out to Time Warner for years. Certainly since he first heard the phrase “AOL Time Warner.”
That’s a shame, since it means that the aim: links that are scattered around the Web won’t work with iChat. A bit of poking around does reveal that iChat responds to the iChat: URL scheme, but I couldn’t make it do anything useful for Web links; iChat:compose?card=«uid» will open a chat with the person with UID «uid» in your Mac OS X address book, but that’s Not Helpful.
I did figure out how to crash iChat from the Web browser, though. Whee.
/* mod_speling.c - by Alexei Kosut <akosut@organic.com> June, 1996
Let’s see. It’s 2003 now. 2003 minus 1996 (let me get the calculator) is 7. Seven years. Seven years? That was seven years ago? Holy cow. Sure, sure, in the meantime I’ve received three diplomas, called eleven different bedrooms home, and learned how to make tuna noodle casserole. But still… seven years!
Of course, I still think of Back to the Future as having taken place just yesterday. I probably don’t want to know how long ago 1985 was, or that right now we’re actually closer to 2015. Please don’t tell me.
In their article on 802.11g, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman write that “Companies pay a separate fee for each [FCC] certification–which may account for part of why the cheaper AirPort Extreme Base Station doesn’t have an external antenna jack.” I had wondered about that—it seems to me that those who would be interested in the external antenna jack are most likely to be purchasers who have absolutely no interest in the built-in modem (and vice versa).
Also: “the FCC mandates that any wireless networking equipment that can take an antenna must feature a hard-to-find connector.” I find this amusing. I’m not sure why; I think it’s the idea of having to find a “hard-to-find” connector. Of course, I imagine they came up with their own connector, thus making it hard to find by virtue of its proprietariness. Also, if it sells well, doesn’t it suddenly become easy to find? Will they have to change connectors every six months? And if “devices can’t use [the USB] Mini-A receptacle”, why did they go to the trouble of creating such a detailed specification for one?
When completely changing the nature of the parameters to a function in a C-like language, make sure to change the signature. If you don’t change the signature, at least change the name. That way, the compiler will let you know if there’s code that calls your function that you forgot to change.
I appear to be in some sort of programming craze this week. Today’s entry: NCIDpop.
Back when we moved to St. Louis, our phone line came with Caller ID, basically for free with SBC DSL. But since we don’t own any Caller ID hardware, we couldn’t use it. Eventually, I realized that the modem in the ancient FreeBSD box I use as a router supported Caller ID, and I found John Chmielewski’s Network Caller-ID package, which let software running on the FreeBSD machine (with modem) notify my other computers when there was an incoming call.
I’ve never been 100% happy with the ncid client, though. It’s written in Tcl/Tk, which means that it’s nicely cross-platform, but since its only mode is a window with a listing of recent calls, it took up window space, and a Dock/task bar slot, and I spent far more time dealing with the window than the volume of calls I receive warrants. To add insult to annoyance, when there actually was a call, I usually couldn’t find the window quick enough to check it before I needed to answer the phone.
So I wrote my own client. NCIDpop makes use of the native facilities in Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP (the three OSes I run most of the time) to stay out of my way unless there’s a call, in which case it does its best to get in my face. So I can always keep it running and never worry about having to hunt for the Caller ID info.
It was fun writing a small cross-platform network app. I got to brush up on my UDP sockets and Win32 programming skills, and I finally found an excuse to write code to emulate (badly) Address Book‘s “Large Type” feature, which I’ve always thought was cool.
It turns out that even though XML was not designed to be human-writable, humans write it anyway. Humans like me. In my weblog. And it seems like two out of three times I validate my XHTML, it doesn’t. Sometimes because I didn’t close a <li> tag, or because I keep forgetting that <blockquote> doesn’t nest inside <p>, but I also keep trying to embed links (usually to LiveJournal) without escaping & first.
There are probably lower-tech solutions to these problems, but mine was to take the source code to the W3C MarkUp Validation Service and hack it into a Movable Type plugin, so my entries can be automatically validated before I post them, and I can fix any parsing errors before they get published. You can download MTValidate along with my other MT plugins.
The Opposite of Sex
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Election
Tadpole
Rebel Without a Cause
Stagecoach
Citizen Kane
Road Trip
About a Boy
Malcolm X
Flashdance
Happy Times
Sunshine State
The Good Girl
Midnight Cowboy
Persuasion
The Slums of Beverly Hills
Lawrence of Arabia
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
All About My Mother
Three to Tango
Gandhi
The Man Who Wasn’t There
School Ties
Last Orders
The Amazing Panda Adventure
O
Footloose
Crush
Apollo 13
Strictly Ballroom
Cool Runnings
The Powerpuff Girls Movie
The Truman Show
The Right Stuff
The Importance of Being Earnest
Italian for Beginners
Monsoon Wedding
Legend
Days of Thunder
In the Bedroom
Boiler Room
Y Tu Mamá También
The Color of Money
Bandits
Iris
I have come to the conclusion that Netflix is evil. Truly evil. I can’t recommend them highly enough.