Benjy at Linkstew did me a huuuuuge favor, translating an HTML page full of weblog entries into SQL for me, effectively doing what my web server does in reverse.

65 posts from mid-June to mid-August have now been recovered and re-incorporated into the site! Sure, you probably don't go back and read what I wrote back in July just for the fun of it, but as my categorization by topic nears completion, I know these posts wil get read more often, especially as their content starts to get indexed. More to the point, it's a weight of my mind that eight weeks worth of blogwork have now been 'un-lost'.

For the 99% of you who weren't reading back then, the story was I wanted to back up my SQL database, because I'm a firm believer in backing up stuff before you lose it. The problem was threefold: that I wasn't as handy with tar as I should have been, that I didn't specify unique, date-identifying names to my tar archives, and I didn't actually copy my backups off of the host computer. Basically, I mismatched the source and destination arguments in the tar command so instead of backing up the database to an archive, I overwrote the database with the previously saved archive, wiping out all the blog entries since that archive I'd made two months before.

After ripping of hair, checking of archives, and frantic calls to friends, I managed to find all the posts in html form within the thousands of files in my own Netscape cache from viewing my site (gooood netscape cache. never will I doubt thee again).

Formatted nicely into HTML I saw it as a huge chore to input it back into the database, and shelved it. Benjy, being such a whiz with emacs, and feeling a little freer now that his midterms are over, helped me out with it, and now we're back up and running!

Cool!

With a dash of human distributed processing and a pinch of humor, Google is sponsoring a community effort to let users translate its site (not all the sites on the web, just all pages with google-specific content) into as many languages as possible.

Several languages, including French, Hungarian, Welsh, Estonian, and Greek are already complete. Other interesting languages 100% completed are Esperanto, Latin, Pig Latin, and BorkBorkBork!

But it's not over yet! Sign up as a volunteer translator and you can help finish the translation to Hacker (30% complete), Elmer Fudd (14% complete), and Klingon (1% complete)!

This could get interesting...

This'll pick-up your day. From Brainbuzz comes a great song/video, "Every OS Sucks" I want to be able to tell stories this well.

Remember: It's funny because it's true...

No other object of extra-terrestrial attention has been linked to so much failure as Mars.

We look at the last two probes to Mars and think how poorly we're doing, but in the seventeen years (1975-1992) between US Mars probes we've forgotten that Mars missions have always been plagued with failure.

My personal favorite, aside from the numerous Soviet missions that blew up on launch, and missions on both sides that mysteriously stopped working midway to Mars (or seconds after landing) is Cosmos 419, launched in 1971, which failed because the timer to start the Earth-deorbit burn shortly after launch was supposed to be set for 1.5 hours but was mistakenly set for 1.5 years.

Suddenly a metric mismatch doesn't seem as bad...

If I had time, I'd love to put together a list of small errors with big consequences, like the hyphen that caused a Venus probe to self-destruct on launch. Wacky stuff...

What's George up to this week? Check out Madeleine Kane's Dubya's Dayly Diary to see what goes on in the mind of curious George.

Along the same line, I'm keeping tabs on the progress of the Bush Administration at the Bush Administration Progress Bar. Hey, at least it's moving faster than the Distributed.net RC-5 challenge project which has been chugging for 3.5 years already.

You know those days when nothing goes right, where bad thing after bad thing happens until you feel like you're dying the death of a thousand cuts?

Today wasn't like that at all, but it was worse anyhow.

You know, (and you do know, if you've been reading this weblog for a while) I could go on and on on almost any topic, the more personal, the more verbose, but this one's going to be short, because there's just no way I could convey it.

The day started great. I got to have brunch at Hobee's with Liz, Josh, Ammy, Rick, and Emily, down in Fremont. I got back from brunch around 1:00, and it started as feeling sleepy with a gentle throbbing...

Twenty minutes later I was almost staggering in pain. Pop a few Advil, drink a liter of water and another liter of juice, and try to rest. (my headaches tend to be caused by dehydration). I try to lie down but I can't get comfortable. The pillow under my head feels like it's constricting bloodflow to my brain. Resting on my hands only makes it worse, no matter where I put them.

I'm trying to get comfortable, while the headache gets worse, in spite of the Advil.

Then the drumming starts.

Now those of you who haven't been to my home probably think I'm speaking figuratively, drumming in my head, and all that.

Not quite.

Street vendors on Telegraph Ave, just outside my window and a few stories down, selling bongo drums, starting a drum circle showing how loud they can get between two tall buildings.

I break out the earplugs.

They let me hear the rushing in my head, and they ease the drumming, but not a lot.

I try to sleep, waking up a few hours later feeling ickier than before.

The drumming continues...

More advil, more water, I try to drown out the drums with music of my own but, while this sometimes works when it's just the drums that bother me, trying it with the headache is like trying to smother a fire with gasoline.

I went down to talk with them, very understanding, willing to compromise, using only half the drums they were using before.

Hah.

Anyhow, now they're gone, which means I can actually start to think coherently again, and can write a simple account, but I have a paper that I tried to write today (take-home quiz) that I haven't got a hope of doing well. Headache's still here, being fought to a standstill by the aforementioned ibuprofen. Who even knows if it'll be gone tomorrow. I'm not sure if this one was triggered by sunlight, dehydration, or something else...

ouchouchouchouch.

Ever see Pi? It's like that bit at the end.

Does anyone else find it incredible that top US and Chinese officials are, at this moment, negotiating a letter of agreement on what happened in the mid-air collision of a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter?

Negotiating the release of the US crew I understand. Negotiating whether and how regrets, apologies, and/or remunerations (in either direction) should be handled, I understand. That's politics.

It's simply astounding to me that the certified factual account of what happened in the skies near China is being decided rather than determined.

When a plane crash happens in the US, the NTSB and in many cases the FBI spend between three months and three years gathering and examining the evidence, getting accounts from eyewitnesses, mechanics, crew, examining communications, flight recorders, and computer simulations in order to find the truth.

In this case the truth doesn't seem to matter. China puts a widow and a surviving pilot on the air and a country demands an apology. The US, on the other hand, only just today got to talk to the crew without Chinese present, they haven't been permitted anywhere near the plane, and the two words black box haven't been mentioned in any of the near hundred news reports I've seen and heard.

On one hand I'd like to see a little posturing, a little "we can't give an apology if we can't get the facts, and you won't let us get those facts, so how much weight would such an empty apology have?" On the other hand, I don't trust Bush's capabilities as a diplomat, and so I'm relieved that he's playing the safest road possible.

Maybe it's just media training, but I keep checking news sites for breaking information. If it were a terrorist attack or a commercial jet accident (think Flight 800 or the Concorde crash) there would be new information, new evidence, not just new political maneuverings.

The big thing though is how much this resembles Orwell's '1984'. There are three countries, and as one of them 'we' are either aligned with one or the other. Whenever that alliance changes, all the old newspapers are updated to make it seem like it was always so. Fact and Truth become tools of the politicos, and they change to match what's Prudent. Isn't that what's happening here?

I'm a big believer in peace, but is it worth it, when taken to the extreme, to have an international peace if it's brokered at the expense of truth by the whim of propaganda?

In short: aren't we caving to those governmental policies we find so reprehensible in the Chinese when we agree to broker truth based on need and not fact, no matter what 'brokered truth' emerges? At that point it doesn't matter whether the document says the Us was at fault or the Chinese, because the document's very existence determines that both are at fault of a crime far more grave than the collision of two aircraft.

So Emily, Ammy, Rick and I saw Spy Kids last night. I really enjoyed it. I'd recommend it to any adult in the mood for a cute joyride kids movie.

The funny thing is that even though it's pretty well rated on IMDB, the 18 and under target market actually didn't like it, even though adults rated it pretty well.

Anyhow, good fun all around.

I'm looking forward to all the great movies coming out this Summer and Fall (Atlantis, Final Fantasy, Shrek, Tomb Raider, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). After only seeking about 4 movies so far this year, I'm going to make up for it in spades.

Most of all though, I can't wait to see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, coming out on August 10th. Check out this cast list! Mark Hammil, Shannon Doherty, George Carlin, Alanis Morisette, Matt Damon & Ben Affleck, Chris Rock, and Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy:TVS) just to name a handful.

It's gonna be a good summer for movies...

I've got a linguistics midterm at 2, a review session for it at 12 (can we say 'cram session'?), and a 10am in-class review session for a Monday quiz in my Print. Literacy & Power class.

Looks like a fun, fun day! Somewhere in there (read: after 3) I intend to put the finishing polish on Fury 3.1 and get it out the door to all of you. Then I'll be able to put a littl emore work into Metacookie and other projecs on the low-burners.

Happy Friday everyone!

I've been spending a lot of time and thought into determining what I don't like about OS X. It's easy to tell what I do like: Increased stability, very pretty 'HollywoodOS-esque' graphics, BSD underpinnings, the Dock... It's harder to quantify those things I don't.

First and foremost, I don't like that Apple took moving to a new architecture as an opportunity to make sweeping changes in the user experience. Certainly there are a lot of behaviors that would have to change to accomodate the new framework of the OS, and it's understandable that when Apple had to rewrite the visualization layer (Aqua), they would put in all kinds of improvements like display-postscript, alpha channels, and all the rest. But that didn't mean they have to make the OS a showcase for all those bells and whistles, at the risk of alienating long-time users who have stuck with the mac because of its ease of use and, just as crucial, its consistancy.

Ten years ago, the swtich from System 6 to System 7 was a fundamental change in how people used their Macs. Gone was quitting one application before you could start another. Options like collapsing windows to their title bar or even having a system clock were brought to the system, by taking the most successful shareware utilities and folding them into the OS. In a sense, this is what Apple has done with OS X, and many of the features are 'borrowed' from other utilities or OSes. The dock is clearly an attempt to build a better DragThing (or insert toolbar of choice here) and the traffic light (the green, yellow and red buttons) in the window's corner emulates that of several other desktops, especially KDE and Gnome.

But my biggest problem with the new OS is how it deals with multiple applications. I don't think it's terrible to have small introduced into the OS, though it's questionable to introduce so many, all at once, without the ability to 'settle-in' to them by way of making several optional.

One of the most fundamental paradigms of Mac OS, and the most distinguishing points of diference between the Mac OS and Windows, Linux, Soalris, and the other Unix variants, is that it's application- rather than document-centric. What I mean by this is that, on the cognitive level, you switch from using one application to using another application, rather than from using one document to another. In OS 9 (or 7, or 8), when you want to switch from your photoshop document to your word document, you can do so several different ways, either selecting the proper application from the application menu on the top right, clicking on a document's window to bring it to the front, clicking the application in a third-party dock, or what have you. No matter which way you choose to get there though, your Mac, at that moment 'becomes' Word. the Menu bar is reconfigured for word. Floating toolbars pop into existence to aid you with your word tasks, and all your word documents pop to the front. OS X, on the other hand, treats the application as nigh invisible, centering around the document. As is the case with other document-centric OSes, each document should be seen as having the power of the application as a framework, but not seen as running 'within' the application. Click on a browser window in Windoes, and that window comes forward. Close the last window and the application is gone, not as if it quit, but because it's simply no longer necessary.

I'm not here to say which model is better, though I'm probably showing a leaning toward the application-centric 'modal' model, but it is interesting to note that several Windows applications, including Adobe Photoshop and, even more interestingly, Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of hte Office suite, behave as if the document-centric view isn't optimal and create a single window for their documents, a 'virtual desktop' where all the open Word docuements, for example, can live together and share the immense toolbars and palettes the application requires. In this case, they're emulating an application-centered model within a document-centered model for a truly displeasing and inefficient result. Other Windows applications, and Unix apps, hold their functionality entirely within the document's own window. Open an Explorer or Netscape brower and you have menus, toolbars, and the rest all within the single window. when you bring it to the front to use it, you're not fundamentally changing the computer into a 'Navigator', you're just getting a better look at one existing process so you can use it.

Wow I'm getting long-winded. If anyone expresses the need, I'll rewrite this into a more cohesive article but if you've come this far, then it doesn't really matter.

Okay, so we have a 2x2 matrix. The X axis is the 'window metaphor' axis, and it has two options: Document-centric and Application-centric. Document-centric is where an individual docuemnt of an open application can be manipulated, brought forward, sent back, closed, or even quit without having any impact on other open documents of the same application. Application-centric is where the application is seen as a singular entity which may have one or more documents open, but all the documents come forward when you activate one, and quitting the application closes all the documents.

The Y axis represents whether the OS is modal in nature or not. That is to say, whether the fundamental unary interface elements that live outside the document window, such as the menu bar, floating palettes and toolbars, change to reflect the 'currently active' application.

Windows falls into the 'document-centric non-modal' box. Several more complex applications within windows fall into the 'application-centric non-modal' box because all the applications documents are held together in a common 'application window' (the aforementioned Office suite, Photoshop, and many others). This breaks the metaphor and is bad, beacuse it hinders the new user from understanding the consistant computing metaphors used in the OS (because they aren't consistant), and consequently hinders them from getting work done efficiently.

Mac OS 9 (and 7 and 8) is an 'application-centric modal' OS. Click one doc window an they all come to the front. Quit and the docs all close. You can always tell what application 'you're in' by looking at the menubar.

Linux is 'document-centric non-modal' mostly, but some applications have associated toolbars that pop to the front when a document of that application is brought to the front (GIMP is a good example of this behavior).

Mac OS X is a hodgepodge, worse than either Linux or Windows. It's document-centric, in that you can bring one document of an application to the front while leaving the others buried, but it's also application-centric in that you can bring all the documents to the front by clicking on the application's icon in the Dock. It's modal in that the menubar changes to reflect the 'currently active' application, it's so modal, in fact, that it breaks even the document-centric/application-centric dualism going on. Case in point: Open application A, open three documents with application A (Docs 'A1, A2, and A3'). Now open Application B, and open one document with it ('B1'). Right now B1 is in front, and A1-3 are behind. Bring A1 to the front, and you get expected behavior. The menubar shifts to 'App A' mode, and A2 and A3 are still behind B1. In addition to stacking windows, the drop shadows emphasize this ordering. Now, close window A1. what should happen? In a document-centric view, the next window down, B1 should come to the front, and because it's a modal OS, the menubar would then be an 'App B' menubar. what actually happens is doc A3 jumps up from behind B1 and becomes the active document. The rationale is apparently that, although they're breaking the app-centric model enough to make each document an individual instead of a slave to the application mode, it's still preferable to bring the next doc from an app forward, rather than change apps. This is a clear flaw.

Okay, I've rambled enough. Here's where I'd bring in more supporting evidence, wrap it up in a nice conclusion, probably with a brief analysis of which of these were conscious architecture decisions and which were holdovers that just slipped in, and more importantly, how all this fits into a roadmap of how OSes should behave in purely application-centric and document-centric OSes, and a study on whether both models can or should co-exist in the same OS, but then suddenly I've written a book, or at least a proposal for one.

Hopefully I've stirred up some thoughts, and that's enough to make me feel happy about a quick essay I wrote before breakfast and class.

Opinions are always welcome.