How to optimize an application articles are usually deserving of the scrutiny they receive but this tip on making the Apple mail client faster really made quite a bit of difference for me. Mail actually feels responsive now and initially loads in a couple of seconds rather than the 20-30 second delay I’ve grown accustomed to.

Here is my net loss:

Before: 1 goneaway goneaway 110M Mar 2 04:30 /Users/goneaway/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

After: 1 goneaway goneaway 21M Mar 2 05:13 /Users/goneaway/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

This is just a note to let everyone know that I’ve managed to completely destroy most of my mail. I’ve still got archives for the more creaky and dusty past but if you mailed me in the last five days or so it is pretty unlikely that I received it. Ironically, I answered a whole bunch of mail right before everything went loopy so I’m sure of your replies got sucked into the phantom zone. If you’ve got copies in sent mail please ship ‘em out again. I’m not going to fuck with mail configuration for a long, long time. Unfortunately my new job is the antithesis of an environment where you can concentrate on a task for more than a couple of minutes. I’ve made a whole lot of mistakes recently. My apologies for wasting time that doesn’t belong to me.

I did some upgrades and license buying so I’m going to post a few notes. I’ll try to keep it simultaneously short and detailed as I feel like Team Murder has lapsed largely into the realm of installation and upgrade notes. I don’t relish being the tedious fuck so:

Just upgraded WordPress to the newest release and it was absolutely painless. Since, according to the release notes, it’s mainly a bug fixing release there isn’t much to see here so far. If folks who read and comment here could keep an eye out for problems I’d appreciate it.

Akismet has improved dramatically. I had problems with the initial versions as they didn’t actually display the contents of comments deigned spam beyond the first couple. When you walk away from weblogging for a couple days or a week this can lead to a fair amount of messing around just to make sure that you’re not deleting legitimate comments. The new version lists all of the comments that are currently in the spam quarantine and also added buttons at both the top and bottom of the screen for deleting all and clearing legitimate comments from the stigma of spamhood. I think that adding this functionality also lends more credibility to the master list of suspected spammers. Sometimes when it is late and I don’t feel like even brushing my teeth before sleep much less sorting through two dozen comments that are likely spam the comments held for moderation get sent back to the void from whence they came with a quick skim. Deleting, reloading, rinsing, and repeating doesn’t work well when your brain is broken by fatigue and apathy. I’ve probably deleted a whole bunch of legitimate comments while using the earlier version of the plugin. That shouldn’t happen now that the tool actually works the way it should instead of being almost as time consuming as sorting moderated comments manually.

Also, don’t make the same mistake I did and buy a Parallels license if you intend to use their software on Apple hardware. There is a beta version but they key you’re given won’t work with the pre-release so like everyone else who downloaded the trial version you have to generate new trial license keys on a monthly basis. I’m not sure exactly what I threw money down for other than a price break on the actual license which is appropriate as it does nothing under the assumption I’ll eventually have a copy of something I don’t have to continually mess with. That’s usually why I buy software so I don’t have to mess around with fifteen different tools to get the same result. I will not make this mistake again and will instead hoist the Jolly Roger and get cracked versions.

I just got some erectile disfunction spam from Bob Arctor. In the context of the novel (I can’t. My thing disappeared) it’s some great unintentional humor. Thank you random spam bot for that brief moment of respite from all the other crap I’m thinking about at the moment.

That reminds me: I need to actually do backups more often instead of miserably thinking that nearly four years of this crap has been flushed semi-permanently down the bit toilet. It wouldn’t be the end of the world or anything but I hate it when things break for reasons that I don’t understand. I guess that, in a nutshell, is why shared/virtual web hosting is always going to be painful.

I’m puttering away with the zombie game which largely means cleaning up the test scripts that I used to make sure that everything was playing nicely with all of the other components. Much to the dismay of other folks who seem to need to disparage PHP in order to lavish more beta++ praise on the current flavor of the month, I’m actually pretty organized when working with PHP. Yes, I begin with a hojillion files that separate out each stage of form-script-form-etc before compressing them into functions contained in each actual PHP page but everything is tested a half dozen different ways before it becomes a function. Usually this means writing a couple of test functions that are required in order to run the test script. Granted, I’m not using some gigantic IDE or anything so I’m able to skip some of the more tedious steps that many go through when doing initial testing and I’ve been working off and on with this lump of code for over a year (I think) so I need to do a batch of comment reading and running test scripts before I really remember where exactly I left off. The combination of a rigid naming scheme and the strategic placement of comments makes this a whole lot painful than it could be.

It’s weird because I read many of the Ruby versus Python versus Java offspring are infinitely better than PHP rants and other ugly my language can beat up your language arguments started by Tim Bray’s eloquent rant against PHP and had nothing concrete to contribute to the distributed conversation. I’m manually refactoring all of my code and I enjoy the process of working out kinks and refining the clarity of this pile of crap I’m hacking on. Maybe there is some degree of masochism involved in my enjoyment of the power and flexibility of the language. I like the amount of thinking I need to do in order to make my own code better and the idea of an IDE ripping the steering wheel out of my hands is one that alarms more than comforts me.

Speaking of, has anyone seen any web games successfully implemented in either Python or Rails? I’m really curious because my tentative stabs in either direction were disappointing to say the very least. I really like both but haven’t been able to get much done on the web side that didn’t involve a ton of pain and tedium or considering the creation of my own damned framework.

While I wholeheartedly support the argument in this article that government funded and obtained information should be accessible to the tax payers that funded it the comparison the author makes to the information available in the United States isn’t correct. A couple years back I started working on a system that included the use of geographical coordinates in conjunction with zip codes and quickly found that it is nearly impossible as a private individual to get your filthy paws on any of this information collected within the last five years. I searched again on the USPS site and couldn’t find the page this time around but the basic answer that I got to all of my inquiries was to purchase the database from a private company. Apparently you can get this information but only if you intend to sell it back to tax payers. That isn’t free.

If anyone has different information or a source that I’ve overlooked I’d love to hear otherwise but I think that most people are stuck when it comes to obtaining collected data and statistics from their government and that is not unique to the United Kingdom.

I hacked on getting Symantec/Norton Anti Virus working on the OS X machines yesterday and it was an exercise in utter frustration for a couple of different reasons. One, the filesystem of OS X is a goddamned mess being splintered between userland names for directories that include spaces and camel-casing and the traditional Unix directory structure that is really, really quick and simple to navigate once you’re accustomed to it. The eventual goal was to enable the client machines to grab definitions and other updates from a local server instead of the Symantec/Norton servers as they’re usually ass slow and prone to dropping connections and the like. After checking all of the configuration files, which are spread out over the tree like fly shit, and editing them appropriately we’re able to fetch the updates but can’t get any further than that as NAV issues a typically cryptic error made worse by the alleged friendliness of OS X: NAV has encountered an error. Wonderful. I’m pretty sure that it has something to do with permissions since updates are indeed yanked into the tmp directory but the application dies before it can unpack them or before a log can be written. The lack of log is what makes me think that permissions might be an issue. The lack of log is also what keeps me from figuring out what is crashing the application. I spent roughly forty minutes dinking around with this with a handsome majority wasted searching around for folks who’d encountered the same problem as I was wallowing in. The problem with trying to find help is that most people set their Apple boxen up as single user environments so their instructions are often more careless with permissions than I can afford to be with machines intended for use in computer labs. What am I doing wrong here?

Side Note
I also had someone ask while I was fiddling why a college campus even needed malware/virus protection for the Apples. Man, when there really is a trojan more dangerous than proof of concept jaws are going to hit the floor. Don’t forget that the legacy Mac OS had plenty of problems with viruses in the past although it seemed people who used them were a little less reticent and arrogant about taking protective measures to protect themselves as opposed to now when you talk about security stuff and people start babbling about fucking iPod accessories. Seriously, if it wasn’t part of my job I could not spare a single fuck about PEBKAC problems like these.

Ugh. I’ve been away from using Python for far too long. I wrote a little script this morning to chmod files in directories based on their file extensions (I know, I know) and couldn’t figure out why:

die("Hey, you're not the owner of this file")

was erroring out even though I purposefully excluded the semi-colons I’ve become so accustomed to ending every statement with. My namespace has been poisoned. Yikes. I guess I’d better carefully check the permissions of the files I’m running this script on to make sure I have not inadvertantly PHP’d my whole home directory. After this zombie game is finished I need to stop and possibly have the memory that stores PHP syntax forcibly removed.

The replacement PDA is finally here after months of random clashes with my el cheapo Zaurus and I really really like it. I bought a Palm TX (I’ll spare you the logo-included pipe between the ‘t’ and ‘x’ that PalmOne Palm seems to stubbornly use to pollute so many of their product names) and it is pretty damned close to the ideal machine for what it costs. The only complaint I have so far is the flimsiness of the tiny leather loincloth included in the package that is presumably intended as some kind of protective flap. Mine disintegrated on my second attempt to attach it. When forced to decide between the exclusion of an item like that or passing along a total piece of crap I really do wish that more people would opt for the negative as my experience with the crude little mud flap was more frustrating. I ordered one of the aluminum cases for it and until it arrives I’m stashing the little fucker in a sock. If I were a public relations drone for PalmOne Palm I would note that substitution with some degree of embarrassment.

Most of this stuff is probably old news to those with more disposable income than me but there were a couple of features that really impressed me. One, the widescreen-ness of the PDA inspires a little awe in me after dealing with the cramped confines of previous handhelds. The fact that you can orient the screen in either portrait or landscape format with a single button makes the screen size an asset instead of a feature you might learn to use at some point when you have time to read the manual instead of just looking at porn or speed dialing prank calls with a Bluetooth connection. As I said, these distinctions might be dusty for folks acquainted with more recent versions of the PalmOne Palm OS but they’re new to me as is the graffiti area that you can dismiss and actually use the entire screen. It’s good stuff although there is a noticeable lag with Graffiti2 that kind of annoyed me especially since I was really fast with the older version and I tend to double up characters under the assumption that the first strokes were missed. I read a few reviews before I kicked down the cash and the main complaint for most people seemed to be with the mail client. I had it working with two IMAP accounts in a couple of minutes so I’m not sure what issue others had with it. I would fucking love it if more mail applications shipped with the ability to import keys for signing and encryption but when it comes to commercial software I’m always mildly pleased when it works at all.

One thing that bothered me about setting up the new toy was setting up my laptop to synch with it. I learned far too much about udev and spent an equal amount of time directly editing files that told me they should not be directly edited to be happy about the experience. It works now but I had to do quite a bit of indirect tinkering to put it in working order. It sucks to be unable to chmod permissions on a file because it phases in and out of existence on the whim of hotplug. Those solutions always seem more broken to me than the problem they are supposed to remedy. Everything does work though and looking at that from the perspective of one who has installed Debian Potato manually only to find that his kernel didn’t feature USB support I’m pleased as hell to accomplish that in a couple of hours and learn something along the way.

You would think that I’d been out socializing and carousing during this vacation but I’ve actually spent the majority of my time at home and parked in front of machines of one sort or another for most of the break. I decided to switch my laptop from Debian back to Gentoo since I’d managed to do two installs with the Gentoo Installer which is still very much experimental on two desktop machines. The installer has some bugginess that would suggest avoiding it in its current incarnation unless you know your way around the Gentoo system already. The pth ebuild included on the CD causes the installer to hang and after watching it happen on both of the other installs I decided to try a different tactic on my laptop. This had an effect exactly opposite from what I had intended: instead of saving time I ended up embarked on several reinstalls that took three times as long as either of the desktop installs did. Lesson learned: do not try to skip over KDE to save time if you want those packages later. The minimal compatibility libraries and whatnot really screwed up portage and eventually led to a completely fucked system. So, I did the full install of both KDE and Gnome because I really love applications from both DEs even if I use neither and just restarted the machine after the installer bombed out. After doing things the slightly less hard way you do need to configure X a bit if using a wheel mouse (ZAxisMapping, I hardly knew you) and make a few other tweaks here and there to get things into proper motion. Yes, it saved me some time but I’ve wrestled my way through several Gentoo installs which aren’t really installs but more akin to following the instructions and learning firsthand what tedium really is. As maligned as the Gentoo non-install may be it really is worth going through at least once as the knowledge I gained during those painful hours has been really useful over the past couple of weeks. The installer is definitely a fantastic project even in the state it is in now but isn’t ready for prime time quite yet. I’m excited about the possibilities of a less intimidated crop of users now that the hot rod cachet that haunted the rest of us in the past has diminished. The weird thing about Gentoo is that I know parts of it are horribly broken and often maddeningly so but using the framework is so damned much fun that I’m willing to put up with a whole lot. Compared with the often glacial pace of even the unstable branch of Debian it’s a whole lot more engrossing and without the frustrations that dpkg messing with things often causes me.

One other bizarre thing that happened while I was finishing up this final install was the apparent destruction of all Mozilla/Gecko based browsers on the machine after installing Crossover Office and the usual host of plugins. I tried manually removing each of the plugins as part of a larger strategy to figure out exactly what was causing the mozilla-launcher to segfault each time I tried to launch one of the ‘Zillas. Later I completely uninstalled Crossover and all of the browsers suddenly worked again. I ran the Cxoffice install script again and installed the same stuff as I had earlier and everything is mysteriously working again. I’d love to report a bug but it would make me look like an insane idiot. I’m happy with everything working. Maybe the next time I drag myself through an install I’ll try to track down which application is truly at fault a little more precisely.

Wlassistant is my new best friend especially after wasting too much of my time fiddling with the somewhat broken network-admin tool that comes with Gnome. Wow. Profiles. Storing of keys instead of pasting them in from text files? That is sooooo this year, man. Wifi Radar is also a nice package but it is masked in Gentoo and uses PyGtk2 which I’m a little anxious about installing despite the fact that I haven’t written anything substantial in Python for over a year. Still, it looks very similar in terms of functionality and doesn’t limit itself to the most brain dead options that no one wants or needs like most Gnome applications.

It’s also looking like the spammers are trying very hard to poison the Akismet database as I’ve had a few dozen spammy comments left today with links to things that are otherwise legitimate if irrelevant. There is something about the secret sauciness of Akismet that worries me. I’m guessing that this will be rectified in the future. Akismet is being developed by a group of people way too smart to depend on secrecy for the success of their service so my confidence is high no matter what the invisible man standing on my shoulder blade keeps shouting into my ear.

If you’re not reading Russell Banks then you really should be. I hauled ass through The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction over the past week and I’ve been enthralled with his writing the entire time. It is difficult to write so simply and powerfully without sounding condescending but he pulls it off and probably without a supreme exertion to do so. He is also working on the script for a movie adaptation of On The Road and I imagine that transforming that into something coherent is going to be some challenging work. Those giant loops of paper that Kerouac used so famously? Around here we call those toilet paper.

It’s pretty obvious that I changed the theme of the site from that old and tedious stylesheet to the new and tedious theme. I had to do a fair amount of hacking on the theme to get it to work the way I wanted it to and I think I’ve found most of the obvious problems. If you’re reading on a Windows or Macintosh machine could you let me know if there are any problems with the way you’re rendering it? I haven’t worked much with the new-ish theme structure in WordPress 1.5 so it’s likely that I’ve made a couple of mistakes that won’t show up when I look at it in Firefox.

Update:
Finally remembered where my brain was keeping Browser Cam, set up a trial account, and took a whole bunch of shots. Looks like, as Bad Penny was kind enough to point out, Team Murder is pretty broken in older Windows versions of Internet Explorer. Actually, CSS rendering is pretty broken in IE. I’m not sure that this is different from the last layout. Everything else (including the Macintosh version of IE 5.5) seems to work fine or at least degrade fairly gracefully. I can live with that.

The site may disappear a few times over the next hour or so. I’m trying to solve this WordPress nightmare that is apparently messing with other folks as well like Bob, for example. I’m going to try a clean reinstall after backing up everything on the server which given the embarrassingly slow adsl upstream might take a little longer than I’d anticipated. I will post results immediately after but that assumes that anything here will function. Into the black hoooooolllllllleeeeeee…