Got Maskirovka?

Some time ago, PETA sued the California Milk Advisory Board, alleging that the "Happy Cows" series of ads were false advertsing.

My mother and I were driving north on US-101 to Santa Rosa when she noted some cows by the roadside. They looked happy to her, she said.

I thought for a moment and said, "Those are just Potemkin cows."

Web pages should not steal focus

Here's what happens to me today:

1) Go to page full of links. Open two of them in separate tabs.

2) Click on first tab.

3) Read page in first tab.

4) Click on link to newspaper story from first tab.

5) Before newspaper story loads, click on second tab.

6) Read headline in second tab and realize you don't want to read the whole thing.

7) Hit command-W to close tab.

That all works fine, except that I didn't know about step 6a)

6a) Newspaper story loads in first tab, and demands focus, so first tab magically comes to the front.

Which means, of course, that my command-W ended up closing the first tab and not the second one.

Argh. Whoever invented the thing that allows web pages to say "me! I'm supposed to be the top window! me! me!" should be forced to program nothing but embedded processors for thermostats the rest of his/her life. The "blink" tag had nothing on this.

Open source implementation of Mac OS X APIs

I wonder if someday there will be an open-source implementation of the Mac OS X APIs (other than GNUstep).

I hope that if so, it will be called "Cider."

When the rain falls...

You know the smell of the first rain after a dry spell? It has a name. It's called petrichor.

Sorry about the outage

I'm not sure for how long the blog was down. It turns out that one of the library files on the server was truncated somehow, so every time the blog program tried to run, it gave a syntax error. I have no idea how something like this could happen to the server's Perl installation. Very odd.

If I were a carpenter

Just one verse so far.

If I were a carpenter, and you were a walrus
Would you lure the oysters away, would you share the mollusks?
If a hatter were my trade, would you come to tea?
Would you draw from the treacle-well, and take the dishes behind me?

Peace, order and good government

Just a thought, really.

Dates and departments in flux

I don't think there have been many visitors so far -- my expectations of readership for this blog should be made clear by the name -- but if anybody's out there, you will find that some of the dates and departments have been shuffled around a bit. That will probably cause the RSS feeds to feed a lot of old stuff as if it were new. Sorry.

The good news is that I have now gone through everything and changed the dates, so there should be no more jumping around of those. The bad news is that I haven't decided what to do about departments yet, so those might change in the future.

About the dates in this blog

As should be obvious, many of the dates given for these entries are not really the dates they were posted to the blog. One thing I wanted to do when I started the blog was move certain files from my old home page to the blog, in order to take advantage of comments and to clean up the web page a bit. Of course, the blog requires that I give each entry a date and time. I suppose the right thing to do might be to give the date that these were added to the original web site, but in general I no longer have that information.
What I do have in many cases is a date and time when the entry was originated, because they originated as email or forum posts, or I simply still have the original files copied from disk to disk. For example, the first entry (What, Definitions? What's a Definition?) really was finished and saved to disk on November 10, 1986.
The alternative, it seems to me, is to give all the files the date when the blog was started (May 16, 2005). But there's nothing really special about that date, and I don't want to mush so many years of my life into one lump, from high school through my thirties.
So, although it may seem anachronistic, I think it makes the most sense to put entry dates back in the 1980s into the blog, and then put a link to this explanation above the dates on the sidebar.
This only works now, when the blog is just starting. In the future, I wouldn't want people to have to dig through the archives regularly to see if I decided to post any of my college-age materials. So if I should do that, I'll give it the date it is being posted, not the original authorship date.

Firewire! Give my creation firewire!

I had a minor success today. A few weeks ago I accidentally closed the outer case of my old dual firewire enclosure on the power wire. This unfortunately blew the power supply. I couldn't figure out how to open the damn thing to see if the fuse could be replaced, so I just ended up buying a dual SCSI case listed on Craigslist. It's a a CI Design 3520 2 bay 3.5" drive enclosure. (I can't find a company that lists the price in dollars, but apparently a company in England wants £145 for it. Pretty good for $10.)

This case unfortunately doesn't have holes in the normal locations to fit other drives; it uses some kind of weird drive rails, or something, that fit little tabs in the side of this case. (you can see these in the brochure).

I'd like to say that I made the decision to just drill holes in the side of the rail assembly after searching the web and finding out the difficulty of buying these rails -- none of CI Design's listed retailers seem to carry the kit -- but in fact I found the manufacturer label only after buying the rather longer than usual screws, drilling the holes, and installing the drives. Oh well. The point is, the thing works. Yay! And I didn't have to use lighting from my castle to reanimate it. I did have to install the drives upside down, but I remember reading that this is usually OK (and Seagate's manuals specifically say "any orientation" so I'm going to take their word for it).

I now have two 120 GB drives in it, one Maxtor and one Seagate. The bridgeboard from my old case is an ATA-5 bridgeboard with the 137 GB limitation, so this pretty much maxes out the capacity. (They don't actually make 137 GB drives, for some reason; you can either use 120 GB drives or waste space using 160 GB drives. I here use 1GB = 1 billion bytes, not 2³⁰ bytes.)

I thought this was such a good idea that I bought a bridgeboard and dual 5.25" case from eBay -- I'm going to put a 160 GB hard drive and a DVD-RW drive in it and give it to my brother and his family for their iMac. I hope the case gets here soon.

The only problem is the thing sounds like a wind tunnel. I haven't decided whether to replace the fan, but I'm thinking about it. This case is quite big and there's plenty of space between the drives, so I suspect maybe it doesn't need a fan at all, but I'm not sure I want to take chances, even though this is intended to be used just for backups and occasional use when I need a lot of scratch space.