Rand Wacker

I upgraded to Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) very eagerly last week when my two main sticking points were addressed: my work VPN software needed to be upgraded to function, and I was planning on waiting for the inevitable 10.4.1 release to shake out some of the early adopter bugs. I’ve been happy with the system so far, Dashboard has some useful widgets, AddressBook LDAP support has improved dramatically, and I’m continuing to find interesting uses for Spotlight. I think though I found the real killer application yesterday, Apple’s Mail.app + Spotlight integration.

I’ve been waiting for Mail.app to get useful enough to use on a regular basis, because the AddressBook integration is something that Thunderbird just can’t get right. Mail.app also had some pretty serious limitations with regards to offline IMAP support in the past. After a couple of false starts configuring the system I think I finally got to the magic incantations right to work with my massive uw-imap mailboxes hosted on a remote server. The most important trick is in the Advanced tab for the IMAP Account, make sure to set IMAP Path Prefix to just “mail” (with no trailing slash), or whatever your mail directory is under your home directory, then click on “Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes”.

After I got this working, Mail automatically found all my folders and started recursively downloading local copies of all my mail…and indexing them. I have server-side rules that automatically file a copy of all my incoming mail into a “mail-log” folder, and so Spotlight now finds all mail that I’ve sent or received for a very long time period, and indexes it in all my searches. This could be verrrrrrrry useful for some voluminous technical email lists at work…

So 10.4 is pretty good (still a little buggy), and Mail.app is better (but it still crashes randomly), but all this new functionality is worth the slight discomfort the new OS has caused.

Sensible Emacs usage with Apple’s XCode

TNPI - Homemade (Do It Yourself) .mac using mod_dav and Apache

If you’re looking for a random gift idea for me, may I suggest the following:

USB-powered lava lamp

With Alexis returning to the desert for a new five-month archaeology project next week, we’ve started booking a huge number of flights back and forth between the Bay Area and LA on Southwest. I fly a fair amount, and I really have to say that Southwest is one of my favorite airlines to deal with. In particular, the fact that they make changing your reservations so easy and NON-PENALIZED eases our worry about shifting plans.

The most annoying aspect of most airline reservation systems is that if you want to change a flight its going to cost you at least $50, most likely $100 or more just for the “privilege” of shifting your schedule. And forget about canceling a flight, on United it will usually cost you more to cancel a reservation and get a refund on the balance than the flight was actually worth (if you could actually get a refund).

With Southwest, you can change or cancel a reservation at any time, even if your in the middle of your itinerary (haven’t used the return ticket yet). You’ll always get the full value of your cancelled flight back as at least a credit you can use towards future fares, and the worst they’ll do is charge you for the difference between what your old ticket was worth and the fair market value of whatever flight your switching too.

But now it looks like its time to land though, so I guess thats all for now!

I got around to seeing Revenge of the Sith this weekend. I guess I wasn’t too late, but it was weird to me how much my priorities had changed from the first films, which were, I’ll admit, somewhat seminal in my early life. After the disappointment of the last two films, I can’t say that I was holding high hopes for this (last?) installment.

My lack of faith was not resolved completely by this movie, “it wasn’t completely awful”. In fact, from the 146 minutes there was at least 80 minutes of really good film in there. In particular, Ewan McGregor was fantastic, the effects were great, and what they did with Yoda was really impressive. I made it a point to see this in a digital projection theater, and was lucky enough to go to the Cinerama Dome down in Hollywood, so the ILM magic was well-presented.

All-in-all, I think George Lucas is a horrible director. He wouldn’t know good acting if it slapped him in the face, and this really shows with the awful line delivery in any of the episodes he’s directed versus Empire and Jedi, which had professional talent at the reigns.

I am of course going to review the Clone Wars animated series to pick up some back story and watch them all again at some point, but I rejoice in the fact that I have three unedited original copies of the first trilogy, on LaserDisc, in widescreen. My childhood memories of the original films will forever be intact in some form (now I just need to figure out how to re-master them on to DVD).

2005, time for a new passport. I did a pretty good job of filling up my old book with some extended travels in 2001, multiple work trips, and of course around six or seven trips to New Zealand. I forgot to scan the old book before I sent it off for a renewal, but luckily they returned the whole thing with a giant “CANCELLED” stamp in the front. I wanted to save pictures of it for posterity, and there are some cool stamps in there.

Now I have to fill up the new double-sized book (48 pages!) I got within the next ten years.

I was pointed at Paul Graham’s latest online essay through a number of different sources, and I finally got around to finishing it. The funny thing is, it’s based on a talk he gave at a UC Berkeley CS group that I really wanted to attend, but couldn’t carve out the time.

Its good, read it. I don’t really have a lot to add that he didn’t already say.

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I grew up on a farm (more produce than livestock) in a tiny town in Northern California, near Chico if you know where that is. And yes, we do capitalize “Northern”. Driving to my house involves turning off of I-5 and then rolling through about 30 or 40 miles of nothing but flat rice fields. The only “town” you pass is a wide spot in the road where the local bar has a huge sign out front: “Ducks Plucked Here”.

One time I was driving up with a buddy from college and about halfway to the metropolis of my youth he turned and said, “I’m really glad I know you, because otherwise I’d be worried that you were taking me out to the middle of nowhere to kill me.”

Even better, a friend from long ago whose family left town just after we completed pre-school sent me the following regarding trying to visit the ranch thirty years later:

last summer i was on my way to warner valley and decided to detour through durham to show the girlfriend where i lived as a kid. on the way in i
recognized the old park and the canal that runs past your mom’s house. so we
took a left down the lane and thought i’d show her around. i was totally
unable to find/recognize your house. i used to navigate there on the basis
of one very important landmark: a goat tethered to a post on the right side
of the road - once you passed it, you had to start looking for a driveway on
the left hand side.

without the goat, i’m afraid, i couldn’t find your house.

I am not making this up.