Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Batboys and Internships

“…not all jobs offer intern­ships, and those that do don’t teach you much more about the work than being a bat­boy teach­es you about play­ing baseball.”

From Paul Gra­ham on Find­ing Some­thing You Love.

A Useful OS X Interface Tweak

OS X Tweak of the Week:

Turn­ing Dock mag­ni­fi­ca­tion on, but set­ting it just slight­ly above the Dock­’s set size. Gives me a lit­tle “pop” when I mouse over icons, but does­n’t make them so big that the rel­a­tive move­ment of the icons when mov­ing the mouse makes me sick. (A Dock on full mag­ni­fi­ca­tion makes me want to scream. Sud­den­ly the icons become big­ger, faster-mov­ing targets.)

TextMate is Love

Just anoth­er rea­son I love Text­Mate and the users who use it with me: odds are, if you’re try­ing to solve a spe­cif­ic prob­lem or con­fig­ure things just so with the edi­tor, some­one else has all ready done it. Start search­ing Google with site:lists.macromates.com instead of re-invent­ing the wheel.

I had want­ed PHP and HTML syn­tax edit­ing all with­in the same files, since a lot of my use at work (and my orig­i­nal rea­son to buy Text­Mate) was for PHP and XHTML web devel­op­ment. And, as I sus­pect­ed, there was a fix for exact­ly what I was try­ing to solve: set the syn­tax high­light­ing to HTML, and it sees the PHP envi­ron­ment automagically.

The insanity of ID checks

At the air­port, you’re asked to show a gov­ern­ment-issued ID along with your board­ing pass before going through a secu­ri­ty screen­ing checkpoint.

You can elect not to show an ID, but you’re required to sub­mit to a more rig­or­ous (read: fair­ly inva­sive) search if you do.

There’s a few basic prob­lems with this approach.

First is the implied increase in secu­ri­ty that you get from a sim­ple ID check. It’s easy to “pass” the ID check that’s per­formed in the secu­ri­ty line. A real-look­ing ID is easy to get: ask any under­age col­lege stu­dent. Alter­ing the infor­ma­tion on an all ready issued ID is no walk in the park, but it is cer­tain­ly fea­si­ble. With an inside con­tact, get­ting a new, valid ID issued with the desired infor­ma­tion is easy.

In addi­tion, only the pho­to is matched to the hold­er of the ID: it’s pos­si­ble to print a fake board­ing pass (Googling this is left as an exer­cise for the read­er) to match the giv­en ID’s infor­ma­tion, then use a dif­fer­ent (read: valid) board­ing pass at the gate of the aircraft.

The sec­ond core prob­lem is evi­dent with the “mul­ti­ple paths” way of look­ing at the ID check. A mali­cious per­son will always take the low­er detec­tion or low­er risk of cap­ture route through a secu­ri­ty bar­ri­er or check­point. Fal­si­fy­ing an ID is much eas­i­er than try­ing to sneak explo­sives, sharp objects, or bal­lis­tics through a more thor­ough secu­ri­ty screen­ing. There­fore, the only peo­ple who do sub­ject them­selves to the no-ID, extra screen­ing method through the secu­ri­ty check­point are all, in a sta­tis­ti­cal sense, harm­less trav­el­ers. This quite obvi­ous­ly defeats the pur­pose of addi­tion­al screening.

Why aren’t my posts ever well-written or edited?

Because I’m lazy, because I’m see­ing how well I write in a quick and dirty draft, and because I all ready have enough bar­ri­ers to post­ing some­thing. Stor­ing some­thing as a draft post, then hav­ing to dig it out lat­er, re-read it, edit it, and post it is going to elim­i­nate what lit­tle pro­duc­tive flow and groove I’ve established.

Football Ending

I have only four home foot­ball games left before I grad­u­ate. It will be a sad, sad day when this sea­son ends.

But, on a brighter note, the final reg­u­lar sea­son game is at UVA, on my 21st birth­day. I’ve all ready got plans to watch the game with some friends and enjoy some good beer. Here’s hop­ing we crush UVA.

USB 2.0, and FireWire’s Slow Demise

USB 2.0 ver­sus FireWire 400 has been an inter­est­ing bat­tle to fol­low. The orig­i­nal iPod was a FireWire-only device: USB 1.1 was too dog slow to even think about using it to fill a 5 GB hard dri­ve. FireWire first appeared on a Mac in Jan­u­ary of 1999, while USB 2.0 did­n’t even appear on an Apple machine until 2003.

For hard dri­ve trans­fers, FireWire is inar­guably bet­ter: it had high sus­tained through­put, ded­i­cat­ed hard­ware chipsets, much more pow­er com­ing over the (option­al) two pow­er pins, and mem­o­ry-mapped trans­fers which allowed the host com­put­er to stay out of the way dur­ing data trans­fers. USB 2.0, while tech­ni­cal­ly spec­i­fied with a high­er pos­si­ble band­width, was nev­er able to sup­port the time-sen­si­tive, asyn­chro­nous data trans­fers that FireWire allowed. FireWire was king of the con­sumer realm for hard dri­ves, burn­ers, scan­ners, and DV cam­eras, espe­cial­ly on the Mac.

But USB 2.0 had one big thing going for it: it was back­wards com­pat­i­ble with USB 1.1. Had a 2.0 device on a 1.1 com­put­er? It worked, but it ran slow. 1.1 device plugged a 2.0 port? You did­n’t even know the dif­fer­ence. USB 2.0, instead of being the new kid on the block, all ready had an “installed base” of mil­lions of devices plugged into mil­lions of machines. Sure, the speeds would­n’t be 2.0, but they worked, and that was good enough for most users.

And so, with the inclu­sion of USB 2.0 on Macs start­ing in 2003, the near-ubiq­ui­ty of them on the PC side, Apple vot­ed in 2005 to drop FireWire sup­port from the iPods, pick­ing up a small­er form fac­tor along the way (those sep­a­rate hard­ware chipsets take up space, no mat­ter how small you make them). FireWire slow­ly fell by the wayside.

I’m espe­cial­ly glad that from day one, I always bought dual-con­nec­tion FireWire/USB 2.0 hard dri­ve enclo­sures. Aside from mak­ing trans­fers from Mac to PC or back easy with­out hav­ing to have FireWire sup­port on the PC side, it future-proofed things. If/when USB 2.0/3.0 took off, I knew I’d be able to plug the dri­ves in and run with them, and not have to fret about the con­nec­tion I was using.

Sad­ly, USB 3.0 will fin­ish the job start­ed by USB 2.0: the com­plete obso­le­tion of FireWire. As a high­er speed, 2.0‑compatible con­nec­tor (cur­rent­ly planned with a dual-use optical/wired cable, capa­ble of 10x high­er speeds than 2.0, and pos­si­bly, nay, prob­a­bly 1.1‑compatible), it has all the mak­ings of the next suc­cess­ful hard­ware pro­to­col to con­nect devices to the computer.

(Wikipedia, as usu­al, has great arti­cles for FireWire and USB.)

Java: The Nomadic Language

After read­ing waf­fle → The Uni­ver­sal Sol­vent, I got to think­ing: why do Java desk­top apps piss me off? Whether it be SmartSVN, Eclipse, or Azureus: I can stand using them on a PC, only because they’re fast and do the job well, while on my iBook, I’d rather suf­fer a piece­meal solu­tion than put up with a pro­gram that’s bloaty and slow.

Part of my hes­i­tance on OS X to use a Java app is the look-and-feel. And that’s when it hit me: Java pro­grams are like nomads: they can go any­where, but they don’t have any­where to call home.

Indefinite Data Storage

No mat­ter how bright an idea it may seem at the time, set­ting “days of saved his­to­ry” to 500 in Camino is a Bad Idea.

It was nifty to have a huge his­to­ry of auto­com­plete URLs, and speed did­n’t seem to suf­fer much for it, but the fold­er orga­ni­za­tion with­in the His­to­ry view­er isn’t con­ducive to the idea: they have a sep­a­rate fold­er for each of the last sev­en days, and one last fold­er for “all old­er than 7 days”.

When that fold­er has over 20,000 entries, bad things result.

In gen­er­al, pro­grams, espe­cial­ly those designed for access the net, need to keep data reten­tion in mind. With appli­ca­tions like GMail (or setups like my site’s host­ing stor­age space being avail­able for IMAP-based email stor­age), users see no rea­son to lim­it the data that they retain over time. Even my Twit­ter feed, as far as I know, will be avail­able for all time, from start to end.

On the sur­face of things, “save every­thing I’ve ever accessed, cre­at­ed, or delet­ed” is a rule that makes sense, and ought be prop­er­ly sup­port­ed. Disk is cheap, CPU pow­er is cheap, and so indef­i­nite stor­age and access/search of all records should be an option. Some users want things delet­ed, and for good rea­son, but if I want to save every­thing, then I should be able to make that choice.

Here’s to the dumb ones

Rea­sons to keep a key under your car:

• You lock your­self out of the car while it’s run­ning (done that).
• You lock ani­mals in the car by mis­take (done that).
• You take your key, sans key­chain, to rug­by prac­tice, then pro­ceed to car­ry it in your cold, mud­dy hands (just did that).

Here’s to AAA and neigh­bors that don’t laugh at men in rug­by gear.