I just ate some of the Cojack cheese I picked up at the grocery yesterday. Pretty good, actually. It’s a blended cheese, half Colby and half Monterey Jack. But mainly I bought it because I thought the name sounded cool, even though it turns out it isn’t spelled the same.

Has the bare look and minimal functionality of the comments in your Movable Type weblog been getting you down? Have your readers been clamoring for cool new features like threading? Been considering buying a LiveJournal account so your comments can have subject lines? No longer! Now, you can get all these features and more with MTThreadedComments, new from Alexei Kosut.

How much would you pay for this amazing plugin? $100? Too much! $50? Too much! 27¢? Too much! What would you say if I told you it was free? That’s right. Absolutely free!

MTThreadedComments enhances your weblog’s comments with subject lines and threading, letting your readers reply not only to your entry, but to other comments as well, displaying the comments in an easy-to-read nested format. It even makes julienne fries! And if you act now, we’ll throw in, at no extra cost: absolutely nothing! That’s right folks. You can’t get a better deal than that.

So pick up that phone and download today.

As an (out-of-work) computer professional, I’ve found that revealing my profession in a conversation is a recipe for disaster. I imagine it’s much the same way for doctors and lawyers. What other jobs get this sort of attention? Do people sidle up to civil engineers and ask them for help building bridges?

It’s not that I mind random questions about computers. Not at all; I’m usually perfectly happy to talk about general computing and technology issues—although I sometimes suffer from the inability to reduce my knowledge to a basic enough level to actually have a conversation—but the assumption that I not only am I interested in being free technical support, but that I will somehow be able to help fix the problem with no access to the computer, and armed only with a few barely-remembered details (“it doesn’t work”), annoys me. Stop it!

For that matter, I’m a software developer, and the skill set isn’t necessarily applicable. In my case, I happen to have a good deal of experience with personal computer support, but I know plenty of very good programmers who wouldn’t know a hard drive from a power cable. It’s like conversationally asking a criminal lawyer for help with your divorce. He just isn’t going to be all that helpful.

I recently purchased (and will have, if Amazon ever gets around to shipping) a USB memory card reader, to make it easier to get pictures from my digital camera into my iMac.

What I found amusing, though, was the designation given to these multi-slot card readers. Fact: these things have slots for four different types of memory cards. CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, and MMC/SD. Some of them have four separate slots, some have two (one for CF, one for the others). But none read more than these four different types of cards.

These devices are, however, referred to as “6-in-1,” “7-in-1” or even “8-in-1” card readers. Why the distinction? Well, there’s CompactFlash Type I and Type II, which are sometimes counted separately. There’s the “Microdrive”, which used to be an IBM product, but now seems to refer generically to a miniature hard drive in a CompactFlash Type II enclosure. But (and this is important) there’s absolutely no difference, from the card reader’s point of view, between a CompactFlash Type II memory card and a “Microdrive.” That doesn’t stop marketeers from counting them twice. MMC and SD are sometimes separated, even though the two are physically and electrically identical. And I once even saw Memory Stick MagicGate counted separately. MagicGate is a content protection mechanism, so this is roughly akin to a DVD player advertising that it plays two different types of video discs: DVDs and DVDs with Macrovision!

There are some “7-in-1” readers and a few “8-in-1” devices, but most are “6-in-1.” Even though they are all exactly the same, functionality-wise, there seems little consensus on which six “different” memory cards are counted. Some treat CompactFlash types I and II as different, some the same. Some count the Microdrive separately, some ignore it. Some treat MMC and SD as separate card types, some just list MMC/SD. It would seem, though, that in marketingland, four is never less than six.

I’ve upgraded my weblog to Movable Type 2.6. I’ve got a fairly permissive set of HTML tags allowed in comments, but I may have missed one or two people might want to use. So preview your comments carefully, and let me know if it strips out something you expected to see. I also switched the character set to UTF-8, mainly because I got tired of Safari not posting …, – and — to ISO-8859-1 forms in a useful way (But see! I typed them in Safari this time, and they worked! Unicode rocks.)

I also installed Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plugin, which merges comments and Trackbacks into a single list. And I fixed the comment posting script so that the back button in your browser won’t cause you to post comments twice anymore. Sorry about that.

Update (4:19 PM): I hacked MT to add subjects to comments. I’ll reimplement all of LiveJournal yet!

Someone please tell me this was not the easiest way to get “Just Another American Folk Song” (from last week’s American Dreams) into iTunes:

1. NBC ⇒ KSDK, digital via satellite
2. KSDK ⇒ Charter, analog NTSC over-the-air broadcast
3. Charter ⇒ TiVo, encoded using MPEG-2 and stored on disk
4. TiVo ⇒ digital camcorder, decoding the MPEG-2, transferring via an analog cable, and re-encoding to DV and storing on tape
5. Digital camcorder ⇒ iMovie
6. iMovie ⇒ iTunes, converting from DV audio to MP3

For those counting at home, that’s six different audio formats (not counting anything that took place before it left NBC), including four conversions between digital and analog. The result sounds that way, too…

(Yes, I realize I could have compressed steps 4–6 if I’d just recorded to the computer directly from the TiVo, but (a) the iMac is in a different room and (b) I don’t have a cable that long. I tried recording directly to my laptop, but I couldn’t figure out a way to connect a line-level signal to the mic jack without severe distortion.)

SuperDriveiMaciLifeQuickTimeiCaliPhoto
Even though the sound of it
Is something quite atrocious
If you say it loud enough
You’ll always sound precocious
SafariDotMacFinalCutExpressMacWorldExpo

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
Continue reading →

I was re-reading The Design and Evolution of C++, and was struck by a new thought in the C++ vs. Objective-C discussion that rages through my mind from time to time. I like and use both languages, but they’re similar enough in goal and function that it seems a shame that one language can’t suffice¹. Usually, I compare the two languages in terms of differences like their (very different) object models and their (very different) syntax. But today I had a new idea:

I’ve noticed a commonality in motion pictures that are based on novels. In the novel, you will often find a scene that goes something like this: “The obvious thing to do here is X. But because of A, B and C, we have to do Y instead, which will take an extra 150 pages.” In the movie version, they usually just do X in the first place, with no mention made of A, B, C or Y. It’s a convenient way of cutting the plot down to size.

In sections 3.9 and 10.2 of D&E, Stroustrup explains that he wanted C++ to allow “separate specification of allocation and initialization.” But he didn’t want to actually separate allocation and initialization, because he wanted the new operator to ensure that objects were always properly constructed. He also wanted per-class allocation, but assignment to this was considered too ugly. So C++ has operator new(). Actually, it has several different operators new().

How does this work in Objective-C²? Well, allocation (alloc) and initialization (init) are separate, and you do per-class allocation by assigning to self. And The Objective-C Programming Language is 800 pages shorter than the The C++ Programming Language. Movie-sized.

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…

1. …posts too much
2. …doesn’t post enough
4. …is just right

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., T_EX), 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.