Out of Cheese

Congratulations to Jan, who after a massive amount of work has now been anointed as a doctoral candidate. Way to go!

The British and Canadian media have been running stories about the truth behind the Jessica Lynch rescue for a few days now, but the American press steadfastly ignored them and stuck to the Pentagon’s story. Finally, the U.S. media is coming around. Three days ago, the Chicago Tribune ran a story describing why Lynch’s rescue wasn’t necessary at all and casting serious doubt on the tale of the gunfight with Iraqi soldiers that allegedly led to her capture. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer is running the Tribune story, slightly modified, on its front page.

Recently, when journalists have talked about the media they’ve focused on the story of Jayson Blair, the New York Times writer who falsified many of his facts and plagiarized others. Perhaps the Lynch revelations will prompt some in the industry to realize that false facts don’t only come from nonexistent sources. Fact-checking is critical if the media are to be trusted. It’d certainly be nice if the major news outlets acknowledged that once in a while.

I’d like to talk about this, but Sha Sha just said it better than I would have. Specifically the second paragraph.

Two weeks ago, I noted the unfortunate demise of my Pismo PowerBook’s LCD screen and pondered just how much money — no small amount, undoubtedly — fixing it would cost.

Turns out that I’m quite fortunate to have good friends in the right places. Louis offered a discounted Pismo LCD and advice on what LCD models would fit, Jeff offered to install it for free, and folks at work mentioned that we had an ancient prototype system that had already been scavenged for most parts other than the LCD, so I could use that one instead of paying for Louis’ Pismo. With Louis’ system as a backup, Jeff performed PowerBook surgery this afternoon. The operation took a few hours longer than expected, but the PowerBook came out wonderfully in the end. May there be no more dropped PowerBooks in my life for many years to come….

The Daily Daemon News mentions that Matthew Dodd has implemented prebinding for FreeBSD. The description sounds a lot like Mac OS X’s prebinding. I’d be interested in knowing what the difference is between what he did and what Mac OS X does, and whether the same concept would be useful for Linux (and if it isn’t, why it isn’t).

Our apartment building just noticeably shook. In Philadelphia, that’d probably mean that it was about to fall down. In San Jose, though, that typically means that we had an earthquake. Light earthquakes are kind of fun — the building shakes a little, you say, “Hey, we just had an earthquake”, and that’s about it. I’ve never felt a strong earthquake, and I hopefully won’t any time soon.

Assuming it was a quake, this one was of the light-and-therefore-fun variety, at least in our part of San Jose. The USGS isn’t listing anything yet, so I can’t be sure if it was heavier elsewhere, light overall, or I’ve just stayed up too late and I’m imagining things.

Update: Looks like I wasn’t daydreaming after all. The USGS now shows a 3.8 quake twelve miles east of San Jose City Hall about fifteen minutes ago. I’m glad it wasn’t too bad. A 3.8 would do some serious damage in Philadelphia, but here that’s a non-event.

I’ve used Eudora for my email for the last seven years, ever since I started using graphical email clients. Eudora has many wonderful features — it’s fast, it uses the standard mbox format, it has a simple UI, and so on. Recently, though, I’ve been running into a number of limitations with it. In no particular order:

• Its attachment handling is rather poor. It treats PGP signatures and vcards as attachments and it won’t let me drag attachments to the Trash to delete them.
• Its MIME digest support is just good enough to get me to try it and just broken enough to render it useless. MIME digests get received as Eudora mailboxes, which is very cool, but the mailboxes are attachments and clutter up your Attachments folder. Worse, since they’re mailboxes they show up in the Mailboxes menu. Since I turned on MIME digests a week ago I keep having to restart Eudora to make the Mailboxes menu useful again.
• Its address book isn’t tied in to the Mac OS X Address Book application. I don’t want to type all of that information twice. Since I have seven years of addresses in Eudora, I haven’t really used Address Book at all yet. I’d like to start using it, but not if it’ll be out of sync with my mail program.
• Its HTML mail support is awful. I hate HTML mail and try to receive as little of it as possible, but it’s unfortunately often unavoidable. When I have to cope with HTML mail, I want to be able to read it.
• Its user interface, though fast and simple, screams System 7. I happen to really like antialiased fonts like Lucida Grande and Optima, but Eudora doesn’t look good with those because it doesn’t draw them antialiased. Much of its user interface still looks like it needs an update for Aqua.

With all of that, I’m interested in switching to a new email application. The catch, of course, is that there’s little reason to switch unless I can do better than what I have today. I can compromise on a few of the advantages of Eudora that I mentioned above — I don’t need mbox, for example, if I can finally convince myself to set up the copy of Retrospect that I bought in January (it looks complicated, and I don’t like dealing with complicated software).

The obvious first contender is Apple’s Mail, but I’m not a huge fan of Mail. It isn’t as flexible as Eudora, it doesn’t search as well, it’s less stable, and it’s slower. Then again, it certainly looks better than Eudora, it uses mbox (I think), and if anyone’s going to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X technologies like the Address Book, Apple will. Are there other contenders? Goodness knows there are tons of email applications for Mac OS X, but it’s tough to figure out which one I’d like the most without trying all of them, and I’d rather not do that. I’m definitely not averse to paying for the right program; I just need to find it.

I’m about to reboot my computer. For most people that wouldn’t be something worth blogging about (unless they lead exceptionally dull lives, I suppose). But here’s the thing — I’m restarting it for the first time in 60 days. This isn’t some server that’s sitting in a closet running the same tasks over and over again. It’s my PowerBook. I use it for about four hours a day, every day, and I open and close apps, download software, play music, change network locations, sleep and wake the computer, and so on. Through all of that, it just works.

There’s something weird about the thought that I restart my computer less often than I get my hair cut, wash my car, or pay the rent. And since I last restarted the PowerBook, Apple has released two system software updates to make the already stable system work even better.

Why restart now? For one, coreservicesd must have crashed a couple days ago. I noticed that some icons in the Finder toolbar weren’t showing up correctly, but I didn’t realize that was a coreservicesd issue until I couldn’t drag and drop in NetNewsWire tonight. I checked, and yep, coreservicesd isn’t running. Just as importantly, though, Apple has released a new version of QuickTime and two updates to Mac OS X in the past two months. I’m currently running 10.2.4, but reports on 10.2.6 are positive, so I might as well upgrade to it. Perhaps it’ll even fix whatever caused coreservicesd to crash.

A few days ago, Judi Sohn wrote about seeing a TiBook on Friends, where apparently the poor PowerBook was used to download a virus that deleted the hard drive. That reminded me of a conversation I had over the weekend (yeah, after Judi’s post…I’m a bit behind) with some friends about anti-virus software. I think I shocked them a bit when I mentioned that I don’t run any anti-virus software. My computers just don’t need it.

Mac aficionados like to say that there are 50-something viruses for the Mac, while there are 10,000 or more for Windows. That’s not entirely fair, since many of the Windows viruses are Word macro viruses that can theoretically affect both platforms. And Word has become much better at warning about macros in recent years. It’s now good enough that I don’t worry about macro viruses any more. If I’m opening a document that has macros and Word warns me, I just turn them off. No big deal.

As for regular viruses, though, Mac OS X has been out for more than two years now and there’s a grand total of zero viruses for it. Not a one. I’m not so silly as to claim that Mac OS X is some kind of magical virus-proof system, since it isn’t. But one of the advantages of being a minority platform is that there’s no great incentive to write a virus for Mac OS X — it couldn’t reach enough Mac hosts to stay alive. I don’t know much about epidemiology, but I don’t think being able to infect only 2-3% of all potential hosts is enough for a human virus to survive, and the same probably holds true for computer viruses.

Given all of that, I’m not sure why people buy anti-virus software for Mac OS X. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. I know I won’t buy any until someone can show me a real threat, rather than a vague and theoretical one.

Congratulations to Alexei, who’s coming to work for Apple next month. Even better, he’s joining my team! I’m very excited. I’m also looking forward to being able to see him and Laura more often than once every few months.

Alexei is one of two people who I’ve wanted to bring in to Apple for a few years, but couldn’t because neither of them lived in the Bay Area. Miro Jurisic is the other. One down, one to go….