I hereby join the rest of the tech world in noting that the Firefox browser had its official 1.0 release yesterday. Congratulations to Mitchell Baker and the rest of the Mozilla crew! It’s a great browser – I use it as the default browser on all of my computers. If you’re still using IE, especially on Windows, you really ought to switch.
Archive for November, 2004
Some very interesting uses of cartogram mapping techniques to visualize the US Presidential Election results from Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan. Thanks to Dave Weinberger for pointing this out!
From the out of the mouths of babes department….
Last night my six-year-old son started crooning along with Ella Fitzgerald doing Cole Porter. When I looked at him in wonder, he said “I like to copy the song!” Then he said – “If you copy the whole song, then you’ve learned the song.”
That about sums it up.
It’s my experience, in both of my former lives as a musician and as a programmer, that I’ve learned first by copying what others have done, modifying it bit by bit, until understanding has deepened to a point of originality (or sometimes, my inability to achieve a good copy becomes its own originality). The myth of the creative genius creating brilliant works of art from completely blank slates is just that… a myth.
In jazz, if enough people like to work off your creation as a starting point, it becomes that most revered of compositions – the jazz standard. If the current enforcers were around, we probably wouldn’t even have such a thing.
For the last couple of months I’ve been living with Thunderbird as my primary email client. The good folks at Mozilla have released Thunderbird version 0.9.
So far I’ve tried it on my Macs and it seems much faster and more responsive overall than previous versions.
There are new features that enhance usability, and it seems to me that both of these features will exacerbate the trend towards very large inboxes, which has implications for those who have to manage large mail servers – generally speaking, the larger an IMAP folder is, the more processing time it takes to open, read, or perform other operations on it.
The big new feature is “saved-search folders”, which creates what looks like a folder in your folder list, but is really just a view into your inbox based on a filter. So I can have, for example, a “folder” of all messages from Joe Blow, based on the string “Joe Blow” occurring in the
from:
line of the email. This means that I don’t have to find and drag all those messages into that folder, and new messages are automatically added to the folder as they come in, but without being removed from the inbox. This is similar to how views work in Google mail.
The other new feature is “message grouping”, which lets you organize collapsing groups within your folders, based on criteria like when it arrived. Here’s the example screenshot, of an inbox with groups based on arrival date.
0.9 does not fix the problem I’m having on the Mac platform of the software crashing when I try to compact folders (which, as far as I know is the only way to expunge deleted IMAP messages in Thunderbird). This seems to be something peculiar to my account, as it doesn’t happen on my other test accounts, nor can I find anyone else who’s seen this problem. It is very odd, though, that it doesn’t happen if I use the Windows version of Thunderbird. I’ll continue trying to track down the details on this one…
What is the deal with the current comment spam
Published November 3, 2004 Technology Leave a CommentOvernight another 103 spam comments posted to the blog.
What the heck is the deal with these?
I used to think that the idea was to get the links published in lots of places so that those links came up higher in Google searches for those particular uhhh…. topics.
But I took a couple of the latest batch and tried the links – and they don’t even go anywhere or resolve at all! What the hell do these folks hope to accomplish with these ads? It don’t make no sense to me… color me aggravated.
My depressed thoughts on the election are posted over on our Vietnam Bike Ride Blog.
I’ve received several hundred comment spams to this blog in the last 24 hours.
Go away you lame-brain scuzzballs! Don’t you realize that your comments never make it onto the blog?
All you’re doing is causing me work and clogging things up on the server.
May you all rot in a long lasting hell.
