Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Shadows, and Regrets

Regret stems from uncer­tain­ty and wish­ful think­ing. It is often pushed along­side a bad sit­u­a­tion that had bet­ter alter­na­tives, but there, it does not belong.

The “could have been” is our regret. It’s the alter­na­tive out­come; the nat­ur­al course; the hap­py, cer­tain end­ing. That final­i­ty is easy to see, to imag­ine, and the steps between us and what we want seem sure and guaranteed.

Regret is how we react to uncer­tain­ty, when the world is shak­en up. When we take the unnat­ur­al choice, when we try some­thing dif­fer­ent, regret is our wish­ing for the easy way out.

It’s pre­cise­ly when the future seems most uncer­tain, when things seem unpre­dictable and out of con­trol, that we look back and pick a moment, seem­ing­ly at ran­dom: it becomes our regret­ted deci­sion. “If only,” we think, “it would have turned out differently.”

Rugby in November

Novem­ber has start­ed. There’s just 23 short days left until my birth­day. And by birth­day, I mean drink­ing good beer while watch­ing Tech oblit­er­ate UVA in football.

This week has been a blur. I expect the rest of the month to be the same.

Mon­day brought a half day of class­es, and the oth­er half of work: I fin­ished up new search mech­a­nism in time for a meet­ing when I arrived on Wednes­day. At rug­by prac­tice, we did posi­tion­al drills: the tight five split off for scrum prac­tice; the back line went for a run, prac­tic­ing plays; the loose for­wards (flankers and eight man) and scrum-half prac­ticed scrum defen­sive and offen­sive situationals.

The right answer, when any­one asks, is “No, I haven’t played that before.” Learn from my mis­take: the answer is not, “Yeah, I’ve done that once or twice in prac­tice.” I vol­un­teered to scrum-half for the evening, since we were short for the Divi­sion III team. Prac­tice was ter­ri­ble: I could­n’t get the ball out to the fly-half at a decent speed, with any accu­ra­cy, or when the back line was ready to move. By the time we left, I found myself sin­cere­ly wish­ing I nev­er had to play scrum-half for the rest of my rug­by career.

Tues­day brought a long day of class­es, and a sin­cere wish dur­ing prac­tice that the coach­es remem­bered my ter­ri­ble per­for­mance the day before. They remem­bered it, sure, but instead of think­ing, “Wow, we should keep him at flanker, far away from the ball,” they thought, “He’s a quick learn­er: let’s work on that ground pass­ing.” Not one to say no to an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to try a new posi­tion, I agreed to work on it again dur­ing prac­tice. Unbe­knownst to me, our reg­u­lar scrum-half did­n’t plan on play­ing this week­end, and so, I was also vol­un­teer­ing to learn the entire posi­tion, in three days, and to play it in the state tour­na­ment this Saturday.

Yes, that’s right: an inside cen­ter turned blind­side flanker is now play­ing scrum-half.

Wednes­day was anoth­er day of class­es fol­lowed by work. Some­one at work had made sub­stan­tial changes to the data­base on Tues­day and removed sev­er­al indices put in place for our queries: when I dou­ble-checked that my new search was per­form­ing prop­er­ly, I was greet­ed by 100+ sec­ond wait times for result sets to return. Need­less to say, we had to pre-load most of our pages for the pre­sen­ta­tion that afternoon.

Prac­tice went much bet­ter, now that I had accept­ed the inevitable. I was able to con­cen­trate on improv­ing my form, and learned to observe the field and think ahead. For a flanker who’s used to react­ing to the sit­u­a­tion at hand, sud­den­ly being hand­ed full con­trol of game flow on offense is a big change, and it took some rethink­ing of how I played to make it work.

This week­end, we trav­el to Rich­mond to play two match­es against UVA. I’ll be play­ing scrum-half for the B‑side match. It promis­es to be good times.

Leopard Installations

Win­cent Colaiu­ta talks about how bro­ken Leop­ard is for him. To me, that sounds like a bad install on bad hard­ware. Grem­lins with his opti­cal dri­ve seem relat­ed to his old prob­lems with the dri­ve under Tiger, and the rest of the gen­er­al sys­tem insta­bil­i­ty feels like instal­la­tion issues because of a bad hard drive.

This is not to defend a X.0 release from com­plaints of insta­bil­i­ty, but when your list of bugs three days after the release of the OS is longer than ten points, I’d start look­ing to see if any­one else had run into them. If no one else had talked about them, I’d look hard at how much time I could afford to burn doing a block-lev­el for­mat of the hard disk (to mark bad blocks) and a com­plete­ly fresh install.

Sim­ple expla­na­tion: a bad install on bad hard­ware. Com­plex expla­na­tion: a bug­gy OS, with bugs in tons of weird sit­u­a­tions that you’re con­tin­u­al­ly run­ning in to.

I’ll take the sim­ple expla­na­tion over the complex.

Installing Leopard

I’m hold­ing off on buy­ing and installing Leop­ard. It’s only 70 bucks from the book­store for the OS, so that’s a no brain­er, but I’m reluc­tant to install it in the midst of the school year. There’s a chance that the appli­ca­tions I use for work won’t func­tion prop­er­ly, and I real­ly don’t need the dis­trac­tion of a new OS this semester.

Leopard GM Released Early to Journalists, Not Developers

Via Dar­ing Fire­ball:

Apple pro­vid­ed some jour­nal­ists with the Leop­ard GM a week ago.

Third-par­ty devel­op­ers still have to go buy a copy to test and fix their appli­ca­tions, or wait for their free ADC copy to show up in a few days (or weeks).

Note to Apple: this is not how to make devel­op­ers happy. 

Apple has pro­vid­ed a down­load of the GM to ADC mem­bers as of Fri­day evening. Much cool­er guys, thanks.

Apple and Third-Party Developers

Apple, as the Leop­ard release approach­es, has cho­sen to take their cus­tom­ary approach with third-par­ty devel­op­ers and the Gold Mas­ter. Although ADC mem­bers have been pri­vate­ly (under NDA) beta-test­ing Leop­ard for months, work­ing to ensure appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and report­ing bugs, their final seed was released weeks ago. There have been leaked reports of many changes since the last seed to the Gold Mas­ter, and none of those changes are avail­able to be test­ed by third-par­ty devel­op­ers until the retail ver­sion of Leop­ard is available.

Third-par­ties can’t test their appli­ca­tions on the ship­ping ver­sion of Leop­ard until you and I, the reg­u­lar users, have our copies in-hand and start open­ing up those third-par­ty appli­ca­tions. It’s not only poor treat­ment by Apple of the devel­op­ers, but it’s poor treat­ment of cus­tomers as well. There is no guar­an­tee that the appli­ca­tions you’ve used on Tiger will work on Leop­ard, despite the best attempts by the third-par­ties to ensure that the apps will work.

It gets worse. Apple sends a copy of Leop­ard to ADC mem­bers, but it’s not a dig­i­tal copy, it’s by mail. So, ADC mem­bers have a choice: go to an Apple Store on Fri­day and drop 130 bucks to buy the OS they’ve been test­ing for months, or wait days or weeks for their free copy to show up, while pos­si­bly thou­sands of cus­tomers use bro­ken or non-func­tion­ing applications.

Not the best sit­u­a­tion for devel­op­ers or customers.

The Spinning Beachball Of Death

I know it as the Spin­ning Beach­ball of Death, or the Spin­ning Piz­za, but Craig Hock­en­ber­ry of Icon­fac­to­ry knows it as the Mar­ble of Doom, and made a site just to track how much time we all col­lec­tive­ly lose to that damned cur­sor. Wikipedia is more kind, call­ing it the “spin­ning wait cur­sor”. And Spin­ning Beach­ball Of Death is just the place to go if you want to relive your night­mares over and over again. Go ahead, put your mouse inside your brows­er win­dow, click, and type some­thing to hide the mouse cur­sor. Now just imag­ine your machine grind­ing to a halt as it crash­es from hard­ware fail­ure, a crash­ing process, or thrashed vir­tu­al memory.

Ahh, feels like home.

The Finder

While read­ing long-ago posts from John Gru­ber about the OS X Find­er, I came to real­ize some­thing odd, curi­ous, and a touch dis­turb­ing about my usage of OS 9 and OS X.

I grew up on an OS 8/9 machine. From a Mac IIsi to a Bon­di Blue iMac (it’s still in the base­ment back home, and when semi-opaque plas­tics come back in 2028, I’m total­ly bring­ing it out), the only com­put­er I knew and used was a Mac. As a tod­dler to an ado­les­cent to a teenag­er, I rocked the spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion of the OS on a dai­ly basis.

And yet, when I first installed the OS X Pub­lic Beta on that same iMac—something I would­n’t wish on my worst ene­mies, it was so slow—I don’t remem­ber any feel­ings of being lost nav­i­gat­ing in the Find­er. Either my mem­o­ry has purged my worst days of the OS 9→OS X tran­si­tion, or my brain sim­ply did­n’t miss the spa­tial view at all.

As I read through Gru­ber’s arti­cles, start­ing with an inter­view he did with GUIde­book and con­tin­u­ing lin­ear­ly through time from That Find­er Thing to Find­er Reflux, I strug­gled to under­stand his com­plaints about the OS X Find­er. It occurred to me that I don’t think in a spa­tial sense: my brain does­n’t mind the spa­tial assis­tance, but when I made the jump to OS X, and start­ed learn­ing Unix via Ter­mi­nal, I start­ed think­ing more in paths and work­ing direc­to­ries, and that’s how I view the Find­er now. Every Find­er win­dow is anoth­er shell instance, with an abil­i­ty to change work­ing direc­to­ries and copy and rename files. An icon view of a fold­er does­n’t “rep­re­sent” that fold­er to me any more than pwd; ls does in a Ter­mi­nal instance: my mind abstracts that fold­er back to a fuzzy, dif­fi­cult to grasp enti­ty some­where with­in the machine, con­tain­ing files and fold­ers X and Y, and exist­ing at such-and-such path.

The OS X Find­er: I don’t under­stand how I use it, or how I per­ceive it, but I do my best to get by with what the OS has giv­en me.

Rice Krispies

I’ve been stuck in this cycle with Rice Krispies and marsh­mal­lows for weeks.

“Hmm. I have marsh­mal­lows, I should get Rice Krispies and make tasty treats.”

“Hmm. Now I have Rice Krispies. I should get marshmallows.”

Damn those man­u­fac­tur­ers for putting exact­ly two recipe serv­ings in each bag and box. I start­ed with a half-bag of marsh­mal­lows, and now I can’t escape the deli­cious cycle.

Strange, that’s not what I expected…

“The most excit­ing phrase to hear in sci­ence, the one that her­alds new dis­cov­er­ies, is not ‘Eure­ka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny…’ ”

Isaac Asi­mov