Morons and Mysticism
Reposting things, especially from Wired, is not something I’m inclined to do but the commentary following this article so clearly illustrates the emerging idiocracy that I couldn’t resist. I am always astonished when someone apparently bright enough to type can believe in superstition. I shouldn’t be, I suppose…
What is it about scientific method that escapes people?
Then again, maybe this avid readership is why I let my subscription lapse after the first year…
Holiday Inn On King Patch
The room patch panel at the Holiday Inn on King in Toronto is the best I’ve encountered in a hotel. Watch you tube on the room’s large LCD TV… Play your iPod through the sound system. Free broadband. All hotels should do this.
Red Brick Café, Guelph
As I’m spending more time in Guelph lately than expected, it has been a very good thing to discover the Red Brick Cafe. They have good food items and excellent coffee. No overheated milk and they know the difference between a cappuccino and a latte. With the favorable (to the US) exchange rate, it is a great deal too.
Watch Out George!
This is the rather amusing warning sticker on a Segway. Is it there because a certain president forgot to turn his on?
Late night food in YYZ
576 Queen St. W. in Toronto (416) 504-9736 at Bathurst.
Good shwarma. I got dinner there are 1:30am on Tuesday. Open late and very satisfying.
Poopin’ and Flushin’
- Poop.
- Flush.
Ass Dialing
Or why I hate bar phones.
Ass Dialing is when you have a bar phone in your pocket, bend over, and accidentally dial either the last call or something out of your phone book.
My two best ass dialing stories:
1) I had an old qualcomm spoonphone – the early bar phone with the round end with the speaker in it. Very flat and strong. I carried it in my back pocket. I had lunch with this bodybuilder woman I flirted with and she was sitting with her panties exposed. They became a topic of conversation… a conversation my then girlfriend overhead after I ass dialed her. I wasn’t even doing anything with the woman, just flirting, but boy was that embarrassing.
2) Carolyn’s best high school friend is a gay playwright. He wrote most of the plays she did for a long time, and loves to blow straight guys. Before he moved next to the Marine base and had an infinite supply of buff “straight” guys looking for a BJ he had to search for straight guys to blow at porn theaters. One time Carolyn went to pick him up at some porn theater after he was done and ass dialed me. It’s her phone number on the caller ID but all I hear is uh uh uh oh yes oh yesss uh uh uh.
Certainly the best ass-dial I’ve ever gotten. I hate it when someone ass dials me over and over. They’re running through an airport and every time they shift their bag they ass dial again. Another friend kept ass dialing 911.
Me, I don’t ass dial any more. I stick to flip phones.
Mulberry Mail is Excellent
Not too long ago I got on a plane with Thunderbird, having transitioned to IMAP, woke my laptop in flight and found my imap mail cache had gotten borked. Five useful work hours wasted. So in my searches for “Thunderbird Disconnected Problems” I found mention of this program called “Mulberry” that didn’t have these problems. I had looked at Mulberry years ago and it was cool, but fee and Eudora was then current and free so I didn’t try it out. I am so glad I found it again. Mulberry handles disconnected IMAP perfectly, has a fast powerful search, and is well-organized. I’ve had no problems and I’m using it to write this now on an 11 hour flight.
At the outset, it is clear this is the vision of a single programmer not the work of committee and as such it is quirky and has some unique solutions. I wouldn’t say it is more quirky than Eudora but at first one will definitely spend time searching for functions and consulting the somewhat thin documentation. The basics are easy enough, but some advanced features are non-obvious.
Further, Mulberry is Correct. That is it is a fairly precise implementation of just about every mail standard, including some that are still emerging. Not surprising as the author, Cyrus Daboo, has also written some of the key server-side programs that run the web, including some of the really hard bits like the SASL authentication engine I use on my server and one of the most popular IMAP servers. If something doesn’t connect it is because the other program (the server or whatnot) is making a mistake. This is great as far as it goes, but some non-RFC compliant usages have become commonplace and sticking to the RFC can cause problems. An example I found quickly was that the Message-ID: header Mulberry generates is constructed as unique-message-string@[client.dotted.quad] (something like 3499345954.0253243@[192.168.15.101]). This is correct, but the standard is to use @my.smtpserver.com, and using a non-fully qualified extension (the dotted quad, not a valid domain name). The dotted quad looks spammy to spam filters, and in particular when the client is on NATed DHCP, the private IP (192.168.etc) it looks bad. So Mulberry sourced mail might get a slightly higher SpamAssassin score (it is not a fatal test, but it can’t help) and my procmail spam filter looks for disagreement as a test so I can’t email myself notes to my own account – I have to send them to my MIT account.
Cyrus says he is going to fix this.
Which brings me to another wonderful feature of Mulberry: it has great support from the mailing list and author. You won’t go more than 24 hours without an answer to the most technical questions. And as it is in active development, any bugs are going to be fixed. Compare this to a MS product where that is not going to happen.
Mulberry’s mail interface took me a little getting used to. For example the mailbox list is organized a little differently and single clicks open new mailboxes in the next pane and the message in the pane below it, but this behavior can all be customized in the Window->Options… menu including, critically for me: do not mark previewed message as read.
Another good trick is automatically moving read messages out of the inbox. I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the sort options: the unread messages always seem to sort in the reverse order of what I want, putting the messages I need at the interface between the read and unread messages, rather than at the top or bottom. But the auto move mechanism works well for my inbox and lets me sort the inbox by date, it being all unread mail, the read mail automatically being moved to an archive.
I spent some time figuring out two wonderful features: Mulberry (along with GCalDaemon) supports off-line calendar sync with Google Calendar (YAY! I can answer email about my calendar while I’m on a plane and even schedule a meeting!) and I can sync to ScheduleWorld’s LDAP server (which syncs to my phone address book and my work Outlook address book). And since I use ScheduleWorld to sync my work Outlook calendar to Google calendar, I’ve got all my important information at hand, even in the air. I wrote up the steps to make these tricks work on the Mulberry Wiki.
Even the search function is fast – entirely tolerable though perhaps not quite real-time like Google Desktop, but then again you don’t need to open inane stupid brain dead IE to perform the search like Google Desktop forces you to.
Mulberry is great. It works really well, it is stable, it works offline (disconnected), it syncs right, it has a very good offline calendar client, IMAP support seems flawless, it has great keyboard shortcuts, and fast advanced search. It does everything I need and it is now free, open source, and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Nerds in Lucca
This past weekend there was a Comics and Games convention in Lucca. The plazas had been filled with giant tents, all packed to bursting with eager, sweaty young people with an unnatural fascination for fantasy. Some were amusing, and many people had clearly devoted a lot of their lives to their costumes, but in the end it seemed the biggest celebrity was the police Lambroghini.
It was a fun few hours walking around the tents and looking at the comics, but the best part was taking the train to Lucca from Borgo. It is only 20 minutes each way and less than $2. One walks into town through the old walls. All very picturesque and very beautiful, even when mobbed by kids in strange anime costumes.
