Although I'm unsure why anyone should pay any special attention to what Michael Crichton says, his recent speech to the Commonwealth Club has generated a lot of interest. It's always interesting when yet another non-scientist takes on the whole field of environmental science. This thread as well as this one on the Straight Dope Message Boards seeks to determine the veracity of Crichton's statements.
My personal view is that Crichton doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. But wait a second, that's not a view, that's reality. He doesn't pretend to be an expert on any of these subjects he pontificates about, yet people take him seriously for some reason.
I perhaps have uncovered the reason that my Mac was freezing so much. Evidently, it is known that a service I had installed, CocoAspell is known to crash Mac OS X 10.3. I've uninstalled it. This product was supposed to provide system-wide spellchecking. Curiously enough, I still see the same spellchecking I always did, even after the uninstall. Either the uninstall was not successfull, or I've never been using cocoAspell and there has been some other system-wide spellchecker perhaps included by default. Very odd. I think today I'll go check out my coworkers Mac and see if they have this spellchecking feature as well.
More Mac woes. I just want to have my iPhoto library shared. Should be possible. People act as if it's possible - even the book iPhoto: the Missing Manual (which I leafed through at a bookstore once) says that it's possible. Unfortunately, I've tried it. It's just not possible in any elegant way. The good people at macosxhints.com have a hint about this, which is also incorrect in stating that it's possible to get this to work. As the comments already pointed out, it's not possible.
Besides the reasons mentioned in that hint page, iPhoto's AlbumData.xml file keeps getting it's owning group modified, which is a problem for me, since I'd like to have every file be a group containing me and my wife. Strangely enough, it gets set to the "wheel" group. This is odd, since I don't think that the iPhoto process is running as that group, and the parent directory of AlbumData.xml has the group permission I'm aiming for.
So I ended up doing what someone else had already had to resort to - just running a scheduled service to modify all the permissions to the way I like them. It's ugly. But it will hopefully work.
My Mac has been freezing lately. It usually happens when I login and launch a few apps. It doesn't totally freeze, I can still move the mouse, which takes the form of an eternally spinning rainbow-wheel, like out some myth told by ancient Greek hippies.
Perhaps things would right themselves eventually. But after a long time of nothing happening, no disk activity, and not even the ssh server responding, I switch it off and reboot. Sometimes it comes back up correctly, sometimes I'm again greeted by the eternally spinning rainbow wheel. A further reboot seems to fix the problem.
This seems to have only happened when I upgraded to Panther, and furthermore, when I turned off journaling on the disk drive. I turned back on journaling, and hopefully it will fix the problem.
As mentioned in my friend Ben's blog, he visited town last weekend and he bought me one of those huge bottles of beer I often see selling. I've always been curious about these beers, but the $7-$10 price tag per beer always made me unwilling to buy it. But Ben is into these things, and when he saw my local high-end supermarket's selection of these things, he was very impressed. He bought many beers for himself, and he gave me one of them called Maresdous.
When I drank the Maresdous beer, it surprised me. It was very flavorful, much richer than other beers I have tried. The bottle contained around two pints, and it left me feeling pleasantly buzzed. It was a perfect amount.
With the acquisition of my employer Intraspect by Vignette, we have moved to Vignette's San Francisco offices, at the One Market building. It's really great, not only do we have a great view of the bay, and the Bay Bridge, but we also are right in the city. So far I'm having fun exploring the places around the office.
I've found a good way to spend a lunch hour. I walk up California St. to Chinatown, which is a rigorous 18 minute walk (to get to Stockton St.). I then go to one of those dim sum counters and get some cheap dim sum. The prices is really cheap - I can get a good meal for 3 to 4 dollars. I walk back, and have gotten both exercise, and a cheap and good meal. Wonderful!
I use emacs a lot. Emacs is not antialiased (although I've previously discussed a patch on this). But how to get it to look nice on Linux, without using antialiased fonts? I really had no idea, even though I used emacs every day on Linux for a long time. Today I stumbled upon this Usenet thread, which talks about fonts on Linux. I learned the following things from this thread: (1) the default font rasterizer on XFree86 sucks. (2) The freetype one for truetype fonts is better, but almost all truetype fonts aren't made for the screen, and so don't have any good font hinting. (3) Basically only a few Microsoft fonts on TrueType are truly readable. I selected one of these "Monotype - Times New Roman" for my emacs default, and it is actually much more readable than before. So if you use emacs or any other non-antialiased program, use this font. Grab it off your Windows machine. It used to be a free download from Microsoft, but not anymore.
On the trip to Los Angeles, I finished reading The Club Dumas. I read it basically because I was totally amazed by Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. Many people disagree with me on that point. To me, the movie was great - it was completely engrossing, filled with great European scenery, interesting characters, a puzzling mystery, moments of hilarious campiness, and moments of bizarre creepiness, and a wonderful original score. And it really had a love of old books.
The book was very good itself, and reading it I understood how the movie brilliantly adapted it, fusing two storylines into one, with the best elements from each. Well, except for the book's character of Flavio, who was hilarious. The other plotline in the book was about a handwritten chapter of Dumas' The Three Musketeers.
The plot was very clever, and certain elements felt like they were from the pen of Stanislaw Lem (my favorite author). If there was a flaw to this book, it was that some of the expositions about Dumas felt a bit extraneous.