A Glitch in the Matrix, no Template, Sorry.

There was a little glitch in the template, that prevented not only the viewing of the blog, but seems to disable the Atom-Feed, at least temporarily. Apologies for that.

Still, the new Blogger is awesome. I'm almost done with a bigger project—more work than it seemed when I took the tast, but to whom I'm talking to… Sometimes it's simply hard to judge a writing project.
:-)

I'll be back soon, promised.

Movie: National Treasure

I watched National Treasure for the fifth or sixth time yesterday (DVD). I know it's an older movie, I'm still trying to get through my backlog. ;-)

IMHO: It is a story well told. Not flawless, but really gripping. I wouldn't watch a movie that often if it's not well written, even the comical sidekick works (something I'm not always too fond of). Kudos to the actors / actresses / actorpersons(?) as well, the story wouldn't work without a good cast. The well written dialogs and the impecable timing of the cast executing them carries the story over a couple of, let's say, hard to believe plot points, that would not work otherwise.

For example: Nicolas Cage's and Diane Kruger's characters should sport a visible download-socket. Why? Because they seem to have the contents of Wikipedia and Enceclopedia Britannica available for their perusal at any given moment. Granted, there a people in this world with a lot of knowledge at their disposal, but still… On the other hand, seeing the cast spending lots of time in a library might be believable, but is boring to watch. It would slow down the story to a grinding halt. The camera-work and the production design adds to the believability (is this a real word?) of the film, I'll try to catch a re-run in a movie-theater—if possible—just to see the sequence when the treasure is found in its full glory.

I really like the movie and would recommend it to everyone with a fable for fast-paced action which tells a story as well.

Technorati Tags: National Treasure, Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, good writing, Movie

Books: Finished reading Blood Canticle by Anne Rice

I finished reading Blood Canticle by Anne Rice, the latest incarnation of the Vampire Chronicles I got hold of. As mentioned in this post, I really liked the book. Now I'm done reading and I have to say: I really like this book.

IMHO, it maintains a subtle balance between the style of the first couple of books in the Vampire Chronicles series and the more contemplative tone of the later ones. I'm not saying that I didn't like the narrative used in the later books, but I'm still not done with Blackwood Farm, yet. BTW: It seems to me, that having at least an idea what is going on in another series called Lives of the Mayfair Witches by the same author helps to enjoy Blood Canticle even more.

I recommend this book to all readers of the older books, new readers should start from the begining, means start reading the other books first. Interview with the Vampire is still an all-time favorite of mine, the same goes for the other books in the series.

Technorati Tags: Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice, Books

RSS looks weird

Yes, the RSS-feed looks a bit weird at the moment. I switched to the blogger beta and the blog was transfererred. All posts seem to have the same publishing date in RSS. New posts should not be affected.

Just in case you need to know. :-)

Layout changed, Content stays

Longtime readers might notice that the layout has changed, the content is still the same. I'm still fighting with the new system to add an e-mail address that is not that easy to harvest for spammers.
Cross your fingers, please. ;-)

A Faster Way to Train the Spellchecker in OS X

Every author has to love the built-in spellchecker in OS X. Sure, most of the applications in use by authors come with their own spellchecker, isn't it fun to add new words to all of them? That's what I thought. I don't know about you, but I prefer the systemwide solution any time. ;-)

It is just a question of right-clicking to add new words to OS X's spellchecker, but what about transferring lists from one Mac to the other, or bulk-insertions? Let's try the Macintosh-Way™: There has to be a dialog somewhere. Sorry folks, not this time (I could not find a GUI-way of doing this). OK, we have to follow the path of the Geek.

If we never added a word to the custom dictionary in the past, we have to do so now. Type a word, e.g. the name of one of the characters in the new book that's always garnished with this wiggly red line, distracting our attention. Right-click and add to the dictionary. Now comes the geeky part, go to the Library folder in your home-directory and into the folder named Spelling contained in there. You should find a file named en (if you should work in more than one language, then there might be other files as well). Open the file with a suitable text-editor, e.g. TextWrangler or BBedit and you'll see that the added word is in the file followed by a delimiter (looks like a question-mark turned upside-down). Now you're able to add new words to your hearts content (don't forget to copy the delimiter) or paste the words from another machine into this file.

Check your spelling while doing so! ;-)

To cut a long story short, this seems to be the easiest way to add new words to your custom dictionary, used be all well-groomed Cocoa apps.

Technorati Tags: OS X, OS X Spellchecker

Do you want syrup with this book? (On-Demand printing woes)

Lee Goldberg writes about the Espresso Book Machine in his post The End of Book Warehouses?. There are some valid considerations to use such a system, but I buy most of my new books because I had a chance to leaf through the pages first.

Call me old-fashioned, but discovering new authors/books is a hands-on experience [at least for me], so if a book-merchant – utilising said machine – is willing to produce all the books I might be interested in for me to have a look first, I'm fine with the system.

I have to agree, though, that the method allows to purchase books faster that are on my shopping-list anyway. But the latter would pose a problem for the likes of Amazon, printing a book in a matter of minutes beats overnight delivery all the time. ;-)


Technorati Tags: Books

Books: Blood Canticle by Anne Rice

I recently got hold of the book Blood Canticle by Anne Rice.

I'm into the first 80-odd pages of the book and have to say: GREAT! Great story-telling, great scenes, in short: I love this book. It is so different to Blackwood Farm. The main difference – at first glance – is the fact that Lestat does the talking again, means he has written the book.

I found the book by accident, I wasn't actually looking for another book by Anne Rice since I was not able to finish Blackwood Farm, yet.

I'll keep you posted…

Technorati Tags: Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice, Books

The Top-Ten Geeks on TV

How are Geeks portrait on TV, how believable are they? What is missing in this list are Geeks in Sci-Fi Shows, it is just not that easy to judge someone reversing polarity on a warp-engine.

Here are, without further ado, counting down from 10 to 1, the Top-Ten of the TV-Geeks. [IMHO, of course ;-)]

• 10. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) (The X Files)


• 9. Dr. Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) (Stargate: Atlantis)


• 8. John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) (Lost)


• 7. Dr. Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) (Stargate SG-1)


• 6. Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)


• 5. Greg Sanders (Eric Szmanda) (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)


• 4. Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) (Numb3rs)


• 3. Detective Robert Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio) (Law & Order: Criminal Intent)


• 2. Marco Pacella (Richard Kahan) (The 4400)


• 1. Dr. Nigel Townsend (Steve Valentine) (Crossing Jordan)

And as honorable mention for coolness: Dr. Al Robbins (Robert David Hall) (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation).

Technorati Tags: TV, Geeks on TV, Top-Ten Lists

OS X: Supplied Scripts

From the stating the not so obvious department: There is a plethora of scripts on every Mac, waiting to be used. Thing is, they are there, but you'll have to know where to look. The key to activate them is the AppleScript Utility app in /Applications/AppleScript/. Start the application and activate Show Script Menu in menu bar, this gives you a new menu-item (looks like a scroll) with all kinds of menus in it. Happy exploring.

I never thought of that feature as unknown, until a friend asked me about the menu.
;-)

Technorati Tags Start

Technorati Tags:
OS X, AppleScript

Technorati Tags End

Laughter

The post Can the canned laughter by Kevin Levine is a very interesting read. You should read it in its full glory. My favorite part is quoted here:

Can the canned laughter:

…
One final note: On CHEERS and FRASIER we used recorded laughs from our own shows. Not so with other series. A lot of the laughs you hear were recorded fifty years ago. Many of the people you hear laughing are now dead.

Talk about leaving a legacy. Grandma may now be a distant memory but she’s still with us, every week, laughing at Jim Belushi.

(Via By Ken Levine).

Kind of scary, isn't it? OTOH, who would notice?

Technorati Tags: Sitcom, TV

Who is to blame for a bad Story?

I just finished reading the post Q: Who's Fault Is It When The Story Of The Movie Is Bad? at The Artful Writer. I have to say, that I agree with the final statement, but, seen from a writers point of view, some of the people involved with the development of a story are in the same responsibility as the editor at a plain vanilla book-project. It's their decision if a story or a subject, for that matter, sells. I know, doing something creative (like writing) and sell in the same sentence, but, let's face it, writers have to eat, too. ;-)


My point is, no book or film (besides the well-known exceptions) is created by one person alone, be it the input of friends or co-workers or the guiding comments of the editor (or whoever has to make the decisions while writing a script), there will be influences from the outside nudging, or even steering, the development of a story. If everything goes well and the whole project is a success, everyone is happy. If not, one or the other will utter 'told you so! So, yes, Failure is an orphan.

Technorati Tags: Writing

Books: The Map is Missing!

My girlfriend started reading the latest book by Jilly Cooper titled Wicked!. Jilly Cooper is one of her favorite authors and she waited for four years to get her hands on the book.

She told me, that really likes the book, but that one important feature (present in all other Jilly Cooper books) is missing: The map that shows the location of the houses the acting persons live in.

I have no idea if the publisher just dropped it, or if the author herself decided not to use it this time, but readers tend to notice the little things. Something, we as writers, should keep in mind; needless to say, that the same holds true for the publishers, as well.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Jilly Cooper

HDTV: Did they blew it already?

According to Bud Meyers' article The End of the Early Adopter or A Declaration of Independence, they did.

A thought-provoking opinion piece, which should be placed – for everyday viewing – over the desks of every single executive working in the entertainment industry (the name says it all, doesn't it?).

Technorati Tags: HDTV

Hackman Double spotted at Soccer-Match

I don't know much about Soccer, but I saw a guy – the coach of Portugal's national team, apparently – who is a spitting image of Gene Hackman.

His name is Luiz Felipe Scolari. They could be brothers, seriously. The other thing I noticed, is the fact that both of them have a Steven Hill-like on-screen presence. ;-)

[IMHO: There are not to many actors sporting a presence like Steven Hill in, e.g. Law & Order or Gene Hackman in most of his acts.]

My favorite quote from Luiz Felipe Scolari during a press-conference is (asked why he turned down the job as coach for the british national soccer team): I want to work somewhere, where I can wear shorts all the time and need the sea in close range. The only other team I'd be interested in would be the one of the Maledives.

Technorati Tags: Actor, Gene Hackman, Luiz Felipe Scolari

John August: I want a cheap, slutty DVD player

John August is obviously looking for a DVD-Player:

I want a cheap, slutty DVD player:

I don’t want a princess. I want a whore.

…but I’m officially sick of trying a disc in three different players before finally getting it to work on my MacBook.

I suspect my ideal DVD player is a no-name made in Guangzhou which can play drink coasters. If anyone can point me towards it, thanks in advance.

(Via johnaugust.com).

IMHO: Smart move, the DVD-Drives in the computers my brother is using die periodically thanks to the copy-protection schemes on commercially available DVDs. Swapping the slot-in drive in a laptop is a PITA (excuse me). The other thing is: DVDs written in a computer – given that the writing machine isn't brand-new – tend to be a little bit off track, tricking the internal DVD-drive to get off track, too. I can't prove this theory, but I got the feeling that the loss of a couple of DVD-drives had something to do with that. Still IMHO, mind you. ;-)

…and Amanda's Answer

To be found here.

[This could unfold into a full-blown Soap-Opera, couldn't it? Let's sit back and watch/read. ;-)]

BTW: I will not take either side, because I don't know the persons in question personally, and thus won't be able to judge the validity of the statements. (Just to make sure.)

Rocketboom: The other Side of the Coin

There is an official Response to Amanda Congdon's announcement on Rocketboom's main page.

What do they say? There are always two sides.

[Who are they, by the way?]

Amanda Congdon is leaving Rocketboom.

I'm sad to hear this, but I'm looking forward to see her again somewhere in the Net.

Amanda Congdon is leaving Rocketboom.:

Amanda Congdon is leaving Rocketboom.

(Via Scripting News).

[Getting rid of old habits is harder than it seems, apparently. ;-) I'm not complaining, the man, let me rephrase THE MAN brought me to blogging in the first place, soߪ
I will really miss reading Scripting News if Dave should stop blogging for good.]

upmarket hamburgers

I just found this while testing a new feed-reader:

upmarket hamburgers:

Finely chop a couple of shallots and a clove or two of garlic. Put them into a saucepan with a lot of red wine, and some salt, some pepper-- a teaspoon of brown sugar helps too. Boil until the reduction is syrupy, about 3/4ths of a cup. Cool a bit.



mix with a pound and a half of good lean minced beef. Form into patties. Grill to desired doneness.



toast some focaccia. Brush the cut side with a little extra-virgin olive oil mixed with fresh-chopped rosemary. Top the burgers with mature cheddar and a rasher of smoked bacon.

(Via Nibblous).

The site is great, but now I'll have to get something to eat instead of working; does this mean, the site is not safe for work?

[The feed of Nibblous obviously went straight into the new reader. :-) ]

I'm back

I was busy and neglected this blog, sorry.
New posts will show up within the next couple of days, I probably found an editor (for blogs) to my liking. More coming up soon, promised.

TV: Philips and the Reactions

I stumbled over the post Philips' Stupid Move and I have to say, that Lance Ulanoff has a point here.
Just a hint: Read carefully ;-)

Moving Books in the Store

This is from the Things you learn about eventually, while reading other writers blogs department. The post Confessions of a book mover made me aware of something I did not know. Really, I had no idea.
Bang, there goes my believe in another myth. I thought the placement is about being new and/or good. All-right, I suspected it. Somewhere deep inside.
;-)
Don't pity me, read the post!

What Logic?

Kevin Levine's post It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a logic problem about the original (?) Superman series got me into a reminiscing state. I'm too young to have watched them when they first aired, but I really loved them when I was old enough to watch the re-runs.
Sure, from a logical point of view some of the super-hero's powers would fail for environmental reasons, but this is supposed to be fiction, right? BTW: one thing that Kevin missed was the fact that, using tele-vision (was that the term?), would require the hero to look through parts of the earth's core, e.g. when watching something in India from the office in Metropolis.
Anyway, let's see what comes up when the new movie comes out. To put it bluntly, I prefer the old King Kong from 1933 over every other incarnation it went through, though.
[Is it just me or do the last two words look funny when just separated by a comma and a blank?]

Good Writing: Who Is Cletis Tout?

I stumbled over Who Is Cletis Tout?[imdb] yesterday, while watching TV. I've never heard about this movie before, but I think that it is worthy to be bought on DVD and to be part of my permanent collection.
I really like the setup, especially Tim Allen Critical Jim, a hitman/movie-buff. My favorite quote is The new movies start with a good first act, but then the story lacks and everybody goes 'let's blow something up' to cover up the faulty story-line. I won't go into more detail, because it would spoil the story for you. Chris Ver Wiel did an excellent job as writer/director, in my (humble) opinion.
If movies like Lock, Stock and two smoking Barrels, Pulp Fiction, or Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang are examples of your taste, have a look, really.

Stories that stand the test of time

Fun Joel wrote an article called Good vs. Great?. Spot on! IMHO, Big Fish and Pulp Fiction already stood their test of time, though. But that's just me.
;-)

OS X: Logging Mail.app's Activities on a Port

Another one for the command-line geeks. If you want to log what Mail.app is doing on a specific port, launch it from a terminal like so:

/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail -LogActivityOnPort 25

Mail.app will start as usual, but all activities regarding port 25 (smtp) will be logged into the terminal window. Another port of interest would be 110 (pop).

I found this in one of my one-liner-docs. As I wrote in the "Unix/Linux Survival Guide" (link on the right), always keep a text file with one-liners you stumble over handy. I forgot to take note where I found this hint, though. Whoever wrote about this somewhere in the Internet, thanks a million.

OS X: Mac without GUI

While rummaging in the (developer-)documentation of my Mac, I found an interesting technique to get rid of the GUI without resorting to single user mode. If the sheer thought of a Mac without mouse-control scares you, take a deep breath and read on, if you think that this is a cool idea – the box is running BSD anyway – don't forget to breathe.
:-)

The following implies, that your Mac is asking you for a username and a password after booting or after you logged out of your account. When the Username and Password window appears, type

>console

as username and press Enter. The bigger than sign is needed. The system switches to command-line mode, mind, not single user mode, but command-line mode. Means everything is running except the window-system. If you should read this on one computer and already tried it on another, how to get the windows back will be the subject of a post next week.
:-)
Just kidding, if you are done with the *NIX command-line stuff, just type

exit

and the system will revert to the usual behavior. (No surprise if you know your way around a *NIX based system.)

Knowing how to switch off the GUI will come handy, if e.g. your "Finder" starts acting up on you and you have a clear idea what needs to be done to rectify the problem.

Learning about Film without going to school?

The article A Film School Education Without Film School should stir up some controversy in the business. I'm not sure about my take on this, actually. Means, I'll make up my mind and comment later.
:-)

TV: Doing the obvious is left to Apple

The article Apple TV: wait and sue is an excellent rundown why the TV-networks have no-one else to blame but themselves. Nothing to add, really.
Oh wait, maybe one thing: We are told ad nauseam that we are living in a globalized economy, why can't we buy everything in every iTMS worldwide again?

Blogs: Footnotes

There is an article over at Darwinian Web called Nativetext: Delivering RSS feeds to the rest of the world which refers to an idea outlined at Nativetext, translating RSS-Feeds.
I like the idea, but, being a part-time translator myself, I have to admit, that I'm somewhat skeptical. Doing a quality translation not only takes time, but a good understanding about the cultural differences to create a meaningful result. The need of understanding the differences may vary in regard to books, but the more successful blogs usually use all kinds of puns and wordplays that don't translate that easy. Means, a five word punch-line might require a two paragraph explanation for readers not familiar with the underlying assumption and might bore another set of readers into switching websites, because they are familiar with the underpinnings that make the pun work. When doing translations myself, I take the easy, some might call it cheesy, way out: footnotes.
No flames please, I'm aware that the use of footnotes divides the writing community into two factions, fighting over the feasibility of the use of them. I might be influenced by books like Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, granted, but they work for me. Here comes the problem, there is no blogging software with a decent way to create footnotes, I could not find one, at least. On the other hand, how could footnotes be incorporated into RSS? RSS is supposed to be kind of a streamlined way of distributing information, and this implies no footnotes, just the facts.
Time will tell if there is a way to overcome this dilemma. If you should know about any approaches to incorporate footnotes in blogs in a feasible way, the e-mail is at the bottom of the blog, thanks in advance.

Where are the Comedies?

We watched a couple of older movies this weekend and stumbled over a question: Why this lack of comedies requiring the viewer to think?
Don't get me wrong here, I really loved "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang[imdb.com]" last year and… Bingo, there is my problem. If I go (way) back in time, there was "Life of Brian(1979)[imdb.com]", "Young Frankenstein(1974)[imdb.com]", "The Blues Brothers(1980)[imdb.com]", "Airplane!(1980)[imdb.com]", you get my idea, don't you? (Provided you are old enough to have seen these movies, of course.)
Sure there are movies using humor like "State and Main(2000)", but again, five years ago. To be frank, I don't enjoy "humor" as in "American Pie" that much, I've seen it, I laughed, but that was basically it. Watched it once, wondered if I would watch it again and came to the conclusion "not really."
I wasn't aware about missing the kind of humor in the aforementioned movies until I watched "Love at Stake(1988)[imdb.com]" last weekend. Granted, not a real masterpiece, but it used a kind of humor that made my girlfriend say, "We should watch this again some time."
We tried to figure out why theses movies still are that much fun to watch. They are politically incorrect, the don't slap the humor in your face as in "let's explain why this joke is funny, shall we?" They expect the viewer to think along, draw conclusions based on miss-pronounced words and sometimes even stereotypes (without trying to explain them!). In short, they force you to think while watching and the complete lack of political correctness seems to help, a lot. Fast forward to now. Where are the "politically incorrect" movies, it's like no-one dares to make them anymore. Where are the producers (I really don't think that the writers are to blame here) bold enough to produce movies where not every joke is explained until nobody is laughing any more? It seems that being politically correct implies to explain a lot – to make sure everybody "gets it".
Is trying to be that politically correct in every aspect spoiling the fun out of watching movies? I'm not sure, but my gut-feeling tells me, it might be the case. Trying not to explain every funny situation, could be a start. The viewers are not stupid, they want to be entertained while using their brains.
My 2 cents.

Dave Winer about RSS

We all know what these little orange icons on the different blog-sites mean. I hope, at least.
Here are some words from the inventor what happens money-wise in this area, the piece is called How much has been invested in RSS? on his blog. A very interesting read.

TV: Good Writing

I had a chance – due to re-runs – to watch Crossing Jordan[imdb.com] in the different stages the series went through. The story-lines are an example for exceptionally good screen-writing, in my opinion, of course.
Is it just me, or were the dialogs toned down a bit in the later seasons? Anyway, really fun to watch. Too bad there are no season-boxes on DVD, yet (?).
Kudos to the cast as well. Every member is well-casted, they just work. I wonder if there is a Nigel-fanclub somewhere in the world. (He is part of my dream-team of investigators, but that is another story to be told …)
;-)

regex in Perl

While looking over code I created some time ago, I stumbled over a Perl-script to plot some vital data of a machine. I used Tobias Oetiker's excellent RRDtool to store the data and create the graphs.

BTW: The "Round Robin Database" is something you should definitely investigate if you need to store any kind of numerical value, graph the stored values, and especially if you don't want to make sure that only the current values are stored in the database. Believe you me!

The Perl-script contains a construct I'd like to share with you. The COMMENT modifier in RRDtool 1.2 and later does not like un-escaped ':' in the string to be printed. Here is the Perl code to do so:

$graphtime = localtime(time());
$graphtime =~ s/\:/\\\:/g;

That's regex in Perl, I really like it. Just don't forget to use Time::Local if you want to deploy this code.
;-)

Interesting "Astronomy Picture of the Day"

There was one sentence that came to my mind while watching this Astronomy Picture of the Day:
You guys watched Aliens, right?
:-)

Caffeine-Addicts unite: We are not alone!

There is a website called CoffeeGeek with every information one needs to make a really good cup of coffee. Sometimes they are going to extremes, but hey, so do I!

Movies: Even more of the same?

The last year sported a healthy dose of part twos or remakes and not so much new, original material in regard of the movies shown in theaters. The year we just entered looks pretty much the same. At first I thought I might get picky or that I was just cranky, but most of my friends agreed with me. John August, he wrote the screenplay for "Big Fish", by the way, has a good article on the subject called What’s with all the remakes?.
The fact that I got a clearer picture now, does not change my resolve that I will watch many of the new releases this year on video or DVD instead of going to the cinema. There is not too much in the pipeline that convinces me to shell out the money at the ticket-booth.

PodCasts: Three I can't do without

My list of PodCasts I listen to on a regular basis is much longer, but here are my favorites:

1. NIGHT PASSAGE JAZZ PODCAST
   A great PodCast from Rome, Italy featuring all types of fantastic jazz music. I really like Renato's taste.


2. Daily Sourcecode
   The PodFather[wikipedia] himself. Nothing to add.


3. From our own correspondent (BBC)
   A very interesting and very personal look of the BBC's correspondents on the regions of the world they are in.

Web: I knew 'slashdotted', 'boingboinged' next?

One of my favorite sites, Boing Boing, seems to have raised its power to the likes of slashdot. A website its pointing to loads really sloooooooooooooow. The bad thing about Boing Boing is, so much to see, so little time. The site in question is Pictures of Pennies. OK, that's not the homepage of the site, but this is where Boing Boing points to.
Your site might have been boingboinged has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Come to think of it, it could be the cache-policy of my ISP as well, but I don't think so.

TWM: "Brothers Grimm", "Big Fish", and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

TWM (This weekends movies), in order of appearance:

1. Brothers Grimm[imdb].
   Based on what I've been told by others about this film: Did we watch the same movie? I really liked it. I have to think really hard to find a Terry Gilliam movie I didn't like, though. Nope, couldn't find one. The story progresses just in the right pace to enjoy the scenery of the movie, never boring and always amazing to watch the sets. It just works. The story goes, that the parts of Heath Ledger and Matt Damon were planned the other way round, but I think the way it ended up is one of the reasons this movie is so much fun to watch. Interestingly a comment on imdb links this film somewhat to the next and I kind of see the point here.


2. Big Fish[imdb]
   Awesome. If you haven't seen this movie, try to watch it ASAP, you won't regret it. This is how movies should be done. A fascinating story, wonderful sets and great acting. Seriously, read the rest of this post and try to see this movie. Tim Burton did it again. I liked the story so much, that I'm inclined to get the book, just to see if John August had a hard time adapting it to the screen.


3. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[imdb]
   My girlfriend didn't catch it in the theater and I don't mind watching it over and over again. Just a question: What about part two?

Before someone starts to blame me not to criticize, but to simply hype things here. I usually don't comment on movies I didn't like for a simple reason: maybe they weren't made for me. Means, either I didn't get it or my mindset is just not compatible with the film and/or the story. This stance might change occasionally, but not today.

Telling convincing Stories

I happened to catch the movie "The Woman in the Window" [imdb] yesterday. I think it is brilliant. It is a thriller, it is shot extremely well (sadly it was the colored version, though), and it gripped me right from the beginning. Colored version? I hear you say. The movie was shot in 1944/45. It was colored in 1996, as far as I know. Not that the company did not an excellent job in painting over the grayscale, but some movies should be left as they are shot and not altered later on. (Do not get me started about the color-version of "Casablanca"!)
The Woman in the Window does not need splashy special-effects or too much blood. OK, someone dies, but this murder is not the fifteen minute blood-fest we are so used to from current films; the murder happens and that's it. This movie is about what happens after it.
If you should have the chance to catch it somewhere, take a look. I don't want to tell anything else about the story, it would spoil the fun.

When should a DVD be released?

After reading the article Fixing broken windows (and the comments, of course), a couple of thoughts popped into my mind.
If the DVD would be on sale in the theater, then I could make a decision right away. I would ask if I'd be harassed by either one of the ridiculous You paid to see the movie, you must be a pirate commercials or by some person nagging me about my cell, if so – and I'm still interested to see the movie – I'd buy the DVD. If I happen to be in a bad mood, then I could do the same thing I do with DRMed CDs, ignore the movie and do something else.
Let's face it, going to the movies with my girlfriend and/or a couple of friends is not the same experience it used to be. Especially if I'm not in the country the movie is shown first. If the film should not be available in theaters in the country I'm in at the moment, and won't be so within a week or two, then I prefer to watch it on DVD in the week it came out instead of getting the plot spoiled via TV or any other medium. Secondly, an evening in the cinema usually costs the same amount I'd have to shell out for the DVD anyway, and I'm talking the first couple of weeks the DVD is available.
I understand that theaters have to make money, but do the have to bombard me with commercials for a solid twenty to thirty minutes? I don't think so. I skipped some movies in the theater for that very reason.
BTW: I'm BFC (before first coffee) right now, I might add some more thoughts later.

Scriptwriting: The Sequence of Buttons

While watching "When Worlds Collide (1951)" [imdb] something odd struck me: why do all controls in the space-ship have to be pressed in another sequence than they are built into the console? Every time, if I'm not mistaken.
It could be for the dramatic effect, some idea of the director (Rudolph Maté), or something completely different, but still …
My theory is: it is done this way to demonstrate that not every ordinary person would be able to press the right buttons in the right sequence. This very behavior sticks with the genre and always puts a smile on my face. The sheer thought, that an engineer would create a console with the controls out of a meaningful sequence on it, seems to be a bit far-fetched, don't you think?
On a related note, the story is in production again. Script by Stephen Sommers [imdb]. I hope the spirit of the original will stay. I really like the movie, you know.

grep with color?

I just found this on Robert's Blog, grep understands the --color flag. So, no Robert, you are not the last to know, and, yes, pretty much live-changing. Best of all, it works on Linux and OS X, that's all I need at the moment.
One has just to use:
grep --color <search_pattern> <files_to_search>
<shameless_plug>BTW: I had the honor to do the German translation of his book.</shameless_plug>

The BBC should be taken as an example

…not only for being a credible news-source (some say the only one), but for demonstrating how to give something back to the people who paid them. (The people in the U.K. have to pay a fee for getting the program. Or should I write programme in that case?)
A disclaimer first: if you are not in the U.K., you are not allowed to play (I know it rhymes, so what).
The BBC, or the Beeb, how they are called sometimes, opened up their archive of news footage a while ago. If you are in the U.K., you are allowed to download the material in the Open News Archive under the Creative Archive Licence and use it according to the set terms. A real case of putting your tax-money to work.
Keep up the good work, ladies and gentlemen.
BTW: Check out my favorite station BBC Radio 4, they even have PodCasts. News can be interesting and fun to hear.

Mac: 12" inches its way back to trusty, but isn't there yet.

For those who want to know: I was able to start the 12" again, no coffee-grinder sound-effect so far. Actually, the bugger acts as if nothing has ever happened. Not that I would store anything important on it before swapping the hard-disk, but it seems to be willing to work again.
Kudos to Apple for coming up with Target-Mode, means press down t after the startup-sound and make a Mac behave like a firewire hard-disk. It made the recovery of all the data not included in the last backup a breeze.
I'm trying to figure out what happened for the time being. What seemed to have helped was storing the 12" in a pretty chilly room in the apartment. I'm not sure if the unexpected resurrection is related to that, though.

A Happy New Year

to all readers. Sorry for not writing so long, but the incident with my 12" (described here, actually one post below) took a lot of time to resolve. The usual holiday-turmoil didn't help to speed things up either.
Again, I wish you a healthy, successful 2006. May the backup be with you, just in case.
;-)

Mac: It could happen to YOU, as well!

How's your backup? It's current, right? Well, let me tell you a story:
It happened during the silent days before Christmas. Life was good. The last backup a couple of days old. Nothing new here. My 12" PowerBook rested next a really noisy SUN-box (with noisy I mean Gee, are we that close to the airport? You get what I mean.). The resting place of my 12" (you notice that I omit the word trusty, do you?) was, as already mentioned, next to that SUN-box. It has been sitting there, peacefully, for about two weeks. To be precise, I sometimes lifted it to my lap (hence the name Laptop) to do some typing, next to the SUN-box, mind you.
While doing a print-run, three days before Christmas, it started to act up. The RAM was maxed out, according to Apple's specs, but some of the programs cannot get enough of it, so I thought that I had taxed it a tad too much. Acting up means that I had to see the Spinning Beachball of Death more often than usual. I closed a couple of programs, we are talking *NIX here, after all, to see if everything else starts to run more smoothly. Things simply got slower. Now I got suspicious. Caches to full? /tmp directory overflowing? I fired up a terminal-session to have a look. I watched the program jumping in the Dock merrily, but no window appeared. I tried to launch Safari, out of curiosity, same thing here. Let's reboot.
It took ages until the PowerBook came up again. A quick check in the /var/log/system.log showed no errors. But it felt different. Something emitted a strange noise. I unplugged the PowerBook to take it someplace else to investigate.

Imagine your favorite suspense music, now!

When I left the room with the SUN-box, the PowerBook emitted a noise similar to a coffee-grinder. It came from the front-left corner of the case (the home of the hard-disk, for non-Mac-users). I placed it on my lap, thus in a slight angle (Laptop remember?), the noise intensified. I tried to hold it straight, the noise changed, but did not disappear. Neither Terminal nor Console displayed any errors, none, zilch, nada. Enough joking around, reboot to Verbose Mode, this mode, in a nutshell, makes OS X behave like any other *NIX system, means you get a lot of diagnostic messages. Nothing to see here. Still grinding. All right, Single User Mode. No errors reported, according to the logs. What is going on?
I rebooted the system using the DVD, DiskUtil told me, that I am not in possession of a hard-disk, great. I mean, it made its presence heard, believe you me! I zapped the PRAM, booted from DVD again and, tadaaaa, a hard-disk. You guessed it, noise but WITHOUT ERRORS.
According to Apple - Support - Discussions - PowerBook G4 12-inch I'm not alone, not that I felt better, though.
I bought a Mac mini to have a backup system and I will try to repair my 12", giving it a chance to earn trusty again.
To be fair, it helped me in the writing of three books and a lot of consulting stuff, but it was always treated with respect.
I'll keep you posted.

*NIX: SUN bashed in Survey

The Register comments on a survey about *NIX vendors called Sun ravaged, IBM lauded in Unix server study, which makes SUN look kind of bad, compared to IBM and HP.
There is one fact that needs some extra consideration IMHO, though. Solaris 10™ is a fantastic OS, but it has two drawbacks:

1. It does some things differently


2. It does require more recent hardware

Number one is some kind of drawback because there are usually more flavors of *NIX in a datacenter, means the admins (FYI: those are the overworked, time-starved folks trying to keep everything up and running) need time to integrate it and will only do so if it really pays off in the not so distant future. There is a solid share of machines still running Solaris 8, believe me. The usual practice to install every new incarnation of an OS, so prevalent in the other OS-camp, does not exist in the *NIX world. It even changes, albeit slowly, among the MS-Windows™ user-base, as well. So, *NIX admins have to switch modes, we are talking of the never touch a running system ([my take:] if it does what it should) world, mind you.
Number two is even harder to tackle, most sys-admins do have some kind of staging system for the various *NIX flavors in production, but more than often not the kind I described in my book (in a nutshell: the little brother/sister of the production system). Means they are not able to test-drive and evaluate the OS. Then there are the–smoothly running–production-machines not capable of running Solaris 10; an upgrade would essentially mean getting new hardware, doing burn-ins, testing, installing the software (maybe doing an upgrade), testing again, and, in worst case, rewriting all kinds of scripts and programs to deal with the changed software; think about time-starved and on a low budget.
To cut a long story short: switching to Solaris 10 would mean a lot of effort and re-learning. These are things sys-admins like; it's the reason they took the job. Provided they have the means, budget and time. Go figure!
The fact that most respondents think that SUN will be the dominant supplier of *NIX systems in five years time shows, that the sys-admins would be willing, if supplied with the two things which are usually cut first: man-power and money.
Just my two cents.

A Writers Wish-List

There is one omission in the wish-lists of Fun Joel, the book is called What just happened?. Maybe it is taboo in Hollywood, but I found it at a local bookstore and read it in an afternoon. My verdict: very entertaining.
Check out the other lists here, here and here.

Links: Ken Levine

I added a new link to my list on this blog, By Ken Levine. He worked on some of my all time favorites like Becker, Frasier, Cheers and M*A*S*H.

(Screen)Writing: Writer/Re-Writer

I found some very interesting thoughts in the article The Myth Of The First Martyr...I Mean...Writer at The Artful Writer.
The article deals with the writer/rewriter myth. IMHO: yes, it is much harder to do a re-write than creating an original manuscript; been there, done that (I might expand on this at a later date, but don't hold your breath).

Musings: Programs are the Means to an End

I wrote the section Which Editor to choose? in the Unix/Linux Survival Guide based on discussions, flamewars and the rest of the whole shebang. But I recently discovered, that this type of discussion seems to spread out of the realm of computers. Sure, everybody thinks that the e.g. car that one owns is the best, or the computer, the T.V., you get the picture. But this is not what I'm talking about at the moment. I'm talking about an unsuspecting customer confronted with We are using [insert your favorite operating system/software-package here] and therefore the end product is far superior to what you can expect from [insert the operating system/software-package you really hate for whatever reason here].
Reality-Check: A customer does not, I repeat, does not care about how something is created, most of the time, that is. The German version of the aforementioned book was written in XML using Emacs (no, I won't tell you which flavor [if you really don't know why I won't tell, look here and here]) and the American version in MS Word. The publishers couldn't care less about the program used to create the manuscript, all they were interested in was to get it in the right format, period. The editor used was a tool, the result was a manuscript.
On a side-note: Try writing a text about *NIX commands like date, apropos, etc. and run Word's grammar-checker on it ;-)
Back on topic, as long as your customer wants an end-product, means no further processing on the customer's side, do not bother, or worse, annoy, him/her how you will create said product. It really does not matter if we are talking graphics, layouts, photos, manuscripts, movie-scripts, buildings, cars, airplanes, or cookies (the baked variety). (Try to avoid the if all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail trap, though.) The worst thing that could happen is an—for whatever reason—annoyed customer.
Quick example: I don't feel that good going to the ATM since I learned that most ATMs are running some kind of MS Windows ™ these days.
:-)

Writing: Setting the right Mood and stick to it!

This is something I found out while working as a programmer, but it applies to writing as well. If you are listening to music while doing one of the aforementioned tasks, there will be a noticeable influence on your writing/coding style. DUH!, I hear you say? Right, but sometimes this fact can be used to your advantage.
Let's say you are supposed to work on something really wild and adventurous and you are actually feel a little more mellow than the work at hand allows – or the other way round for that matter. My cure are specially crafted playlists in Apple's iTunes (also to be found on my iPod, of course). That way I have a weapon against my current mood and, especially effective, against the background music in the different coffee-houses I'm writing in.
Too simple? You bet. Give it a try.
BTW: Regarding coding style, check your variables. Mine were called damn1, damn2, etc. for debugging when I was in a very bad mood, looks ridiculous when doing a code-review later, believe me.

Blog: It's nice to be mentioned

Fun Joel added this very blog on a list of blogs he reads, thanks a million El Duderino.
The downside, there are so many blogs in this list I did not know, that the next couple of days will be hard on my usual schedule.
;-)
Thanks again.

Solaris: Simple Display of logged Entries in SunScreen

This is another entry for the I could remember this, but why should I? I have it on the blog. category.
I already wrote about the firewall in Solaris 9 called "SunScreen" here and here. Now a quick reminder for me and others who tend to forget the syntax of commands.
To display a list of all denied connections, the following chain of commands can be used:
ssadm log get | ssadm logdump -i - -t a logwhy 256
This command results in a list of denied connection-attempts to the machine, provided the entry for denying contains LOG SUMMARY or any other valid specifier for the LOG command. log get instructs ssadm to (no surprise here) get the log. It is then piped to another incarnation of ssadm which is instructed to read from standard in (-i -), to convert the seconds stored with every entry to a meaningful time and date combo (-t a) and to filter the entries for a why-code of 256.
BTW: One thing that seems to be really hard to remember for me is the way the numerous options of ssadm are named in the man-pages, e.g. man ssadm-logdump. Who would have thought of that, a hyphen, outlawed in *NIX to prevent confusing the different shells. Hm.

It starts to get annoying!

I'm about to cancel my subscription to the Music Perspectives PodCast. Don't get me wrong, I've been listening to it for quite some time now and I think it is excellent, BUT I can't take the lame Don't steal music stuff any longer. It's probably not even Ed Justen's fault that I am annoyed, but everybody has to draw a line somewhere and the last Music Perspectives PodCast contained this stupid line and this time it was one to many.
I DO NOT STEAL MUSIC! And I really don't like to be a suspected thief, either. If the record companies consider me a paying enemy, then I'm not interested in doing business with them.
My stand regarding DRM is simple – really simple in fact – if a CD contains DRM I ignore the artist. Completely, zilch, I'm not interested. The artist does not exist for me, period. I won't download anything from the artist, I won't buy the CD, I actually will switch the channel on the radio or TV when said artist appears, end of story.
This may sound extreme, but as I said, everybody has to draw the line somewhere. If I really care about an artist, then I will send an e-mail, explaining my view of the world to the artist. I do not expect an answer, though.
I am a published writer, but I would never think of putting a Don't copy my books, please anywhere, neither spoken, nor in writing. It is a matter of trust, you know.
;-)

Mac: Are we really that different?

The article Dear switchers remembered me of one occasion I found out (again), that we Mac users seem to be really thinking different.
I started working with Macs in '86 and continued to do so on and off until now. After an absence of about four years from the Mac-Scene, I got my first PowerBook in 2000. I really liked it and used it to work on a game-design document on a flight from L.A. to London. The flight was over night and the crew shut down the lights in the cabin after a while. I noticed that some people wandering in the plane gave me a Thumbs-Up when passing my seat. I tried to place them, but never met one of them to the best of my knowledge. Number ten or eleven solved the riddle for me: How do you like the Pismo?
I didn't knew about the glowing apple logo then.

InDesign CS2: Inherit Color solved!

I received an e-mail a couple of days ago from Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion of DesignGeek Central fame (if you are into design, check the site, seriously).
The solution to the problem described in this article, can be solved easily, if you know how. I was wearing my programmer hat as I tried to tackle the problem, I guess. If you CMD-click on the offending swatch in the GUI used to define the character-format, the setting reverses to the inherit state. It's that simple!
There goes the plan to create an AppleScript app to fiddle with this (and other) settings, though.
;-)
Thanks again to Anne-Marie.

Priorities: To Noodle or not to Noodle…

A client bailed out of an appointment this morning. Confronted with two days to spare, a tough decision has to be made: How will I spend the time at hand?
Cleaning the apartment? Yeah, right. Actually, I could work on my book (something I had planned for next week). Factually, I think I will do a bit of noodling (I learned about this word at Franklin McMahon's excellent PodCast Media Artist Secrets). It refers to play around with something in a creative way to find out about new and interesting uses for it. For example: I couldn't find the time to nose around in the new features of Reason, there are a couple of approaches to investigate them:

1. Read the manual (could be interesting)


2. Read in a book about it (could give another view on the subject)


3. Noodling

A real puzzler, what would be the most fun thing to do?
;-)

Mono: Yep! Works!

Title says it all. The -r switch did it.
BTW: This is an update to the post below this one ;-)

Mono: Compiling a WSDL

This post belongs to the I had a hard time finding this information so I put it somewhere I can easily find it again category.
I tried to compile a WSDL with mcs like this:

wsdl Service.wsdl
mcs /target:library Service.cs

and always got this error message:

Service.cs(22) error CS0234: The type or namespace name `Services' could not be found in namespace `System.Web'

I found this command after a long search on the Internet:

mcs /target:library Service.cs -r:System.Web.Services

Now everything seems to compile O.K. Let's see if the resulting .dll works.
I'll keep you posted.

InDesign CS2: Inherit a Color

I'm currently working on a book about using XML/XSLT with Adobe InDesign CS2. I have worked with the program and its competition like Quark XPress and FrameMaker (no link here since the Mac version ceased to exist) for quite some time now and I think that the XML support has matured quite a bit. It's not FrameMaker yet, but I keep my hopes up high that the program will eventually get there.
There is one aspect of the Character Formats which puzzled me, though. I could not find a way to change the color of such a format to nothing, the setting the format uses when it is created. If you change the color-assignment for the format in the GUI once, there is no way to get back to nothing, means the color from the enclosing paragraph format is inherited. Sure, one could simply create a new format and exchange it for the now non-working one. But in my case, the format is used (and mis-used) in a number of ways and I really don't want to check in all the places. So I came up with a simple AppleScript to do the switch:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS2"
set myDoc to document 1
tell myDoc
set myCharFormat to character style "insert_cstyle_name"
set the fill color of myCharFormat to nothing
end tell
end tell

Yes, I know that this could have been done in a single line, but this line would not fit in this layout. (It might not fit on certain browsers anyway.) But still, here you go, switching back to nothing.

Writing: Organizing Ideas

After reading The end of One Big Text File at MacDevCenter.com, I found that I'm not alone in my approach. But (a big one, as always) I still advocate using lists, more than one, that is. As I wrote in my book Unix/Linux Survival Guide, I tend to keep lists leaning to a certain subject. They hold all the bits of information I deemed interesting at a time, but are too small or insignificant to create a whole file for one of them alone. On *NIX, these directories can be greped, on OS X they can be spotlight(ed) or greped.
Bigger ideas (think information spread over more than one paragraph) go into their own files with a speaking name. This mode of operation allows me to browse the little ideas or information on a certain subject for inspiration. No, they do not migrate into their own file if I expand on them. I want to preserve the bits a subject started from, when you start polishing something, a.k.a. rewrite it to fit a special purpose, some of the original information could get lost. Said information might give me an insight from a different angle and I don't want to loose that.

Movie: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

I went to see Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang a couple of days ago. Go and watch it, seriously.
A quick test if this movie is for you:

• If the first word that came to mind after watching Pulp Fiction was WOW!


• If you tried, like me, to buy another ticket for the same movie after watching The Usual Suspects.

Go see it, the script is great and I actually could not find anything that I did not like about the movie. Okay, there is one thing, no release date for the DVD, yet.
This movie is so not Hollywood (Will the audience get that joke or do we have to re-write?; OMG, the girl is naked, what shall we do about it?; What would be the target audience for this movie, and isn't it to intelligent for them?). In short: this is how movies should be made!

Confusing Adverts by IBM

Is it just me or should the guys in the new ads for the IBM Blades take a look at the link pointing to Tivoli?
The ad with the runner states: "If we are using Blade-Center, then we don't have to run to the machines." Didn't IBM buy Tivoli for that reason?
Just a thought.

What's next, ASCII?

Read the article Who owns XML?, maybe it furthers the understanding that the whole system is flawed.

All the World's a ... Noise?

The article called "You Know What? Just Shut Up" over at Wired hits it on the spot. Point in case, some of my neighbors use their car-alarms to wake up the whole neighborhood at 3 AM, maybe it's not their fault, maybe it is.
While agreeing with the article, I have to admit, I wrote an AppleScript that makes my Mac call (as in shouting) me if mail from certain people arrives. Gives me freedom to roam the apartment, you know.
;-)

The Curse of the Power-Supply

Yours truly treated himself to a new switch for the office. If you should be into making music or using things like hubs, switches, or something in that line of electronica, then you might already know what this rant is about.
Power-supplies that plug directly into the socket, just wide enough to block the neighboring sockets and render them unusable. The manufacturers of these things seem to believe that their appliance will be the only one in need for electrical power. Makes sense, people using things like switches will never use other devices that might need power as well. Who would use a switch to connect, I don't know, let's say computers for example?

Writing: First Review on Amazon.com

I got my first review on Amazon for the Unix/Linux Survival Guide.

Opinion: TV-Shows on Video iPod

The excellent Register has an opinion piece called Apple and Disney's two-inch disappointment. Granted there is a lot of truth in there, but (a big BUT) I'd be actually glad to pay for this content (being able to watch it the day after it aired) and not wait for an eternity, until some TV exec decides to show it in the part of the world I am at the moment. Regarding high-profile series like Lost or 4400, it is really hard not to stumble over spoilers that ruin all the excitement before I even had a chance to watch.
The article addresses this topic as well, but in the view of the world any TV exec seems to have, I'm not the customer, the ones that pay for the adverts are.
Just my 2 cents of wisdom ;-)

Internet Stamps?

My first reaction after reading the article Internet Stamps at ongoing was, this could actually work. On second thought, though, I really don't think so. (I want recognition for not using I don't think so, Tim. Did it anyway, damn!)
My point is, changes to websites would cost stamps as well. How will the cost (the needed stamps) be measured? Per link? Good, that would avoid link-farms – and punish people for linking into the Internet; who needs links anyway? Per website-change? What about link-farms?
Either I don't see it (only two cups of coffee so far) or the idea needs some more work.
IMHO, of course.

Listing Network-Connections

There are many ways to list the open connections on a *NIX-based system, the first option that comes to mind is usually netstat. The article CLI Magic: Trojan Scan at linux.com talks about two important things to keep in mind:

1. There is always more than one way on *NIX


2. There are tools on every *NIX box, waiting to be chained together to achieve results

I did not investigate the program the article is talking about, I will later, though. What tickled my fancy was the fact that I almost forgot that lsof can be used as well.
In a nutshell: lsof -Pni gives you a listing of the currently opened connections.

OS X: Getting used to Speech too much?

I found myself trying to instruct my Linux box via voice-commands this morning (before the first coffee). Am I getting too used to my Mac? Speech works like a charm. As long as my Sun does not start to do some serious work, that is. The frequency of the fans seem to cancel the reception of the microphone in my trusty PowerBook; same goes for loud traffic noises.
OTOH: If I'd start to talk to my Mac in the coffee-shop, who knows what people would think or do, anyway.

Writing: YES!

It's not my first, but it is always exciting when an author gets to actually hold the result of countless hours in his hands.

You cannot Escape?

Sorry, long time no post ;-) (Excuse: books to read / books to write / Reason / DVDs to watch / take your pick)
Anyway, I rediscovered Speech on my Mac. Why rediscovered? Because I simply forgot about that feature and Apple emphasizes it not enough in their marketing material, IMHO.
To cut a long story short, I was punishing some more incompetent ad-servers in my hosts file and, all of a sudden, couldn't escape out of the insert-mode of vi.
<conspiracy theory>Should some of the bad guys know about my little secret? Duh! I already wrote about it.</conspiracy theory>
Then it struck me: Speech uses the ESC key to control if and when my Mac should actually listen to me! But I don't use the key, since I want the machine to listen continuously. You already guessed it, the key is blocked anyway.
The conclusion: you should really check out this feature, but don't forget to remap the ESC key if you are using vi.

Writing: How to avoid being boring

Technical writing poses an inherent danger, if done according to some peoples will and fiercely guarded opinion, the result should be sold in your neighborhood pharmacy as sleeping-aid, possibly covered by Medicare. There are two opposing factions at war, actually. One of them thinks technical writing should never contain any humor, paint an understandable picture, or (god forbid) should be fun to read. The other faction thinks the opposite is true. There is some middle-ground, granted, but still…
I don't mean to advocate one or the other here. As a writer, I have to trust the editor and his/her knowledge of the intended audience, but when skimming over my bookshelves, the latter faction won – in my case, at least. The majority of my technical books works as reading material on the beach (in bed / in the bathroom / take your pick), as well. There is a minority of books I read once, found the contents interesting, but gathering dust by now, because, as stated, they were interesting, but not fun to read. There may be a connection regarding the style of my preferred fiction books, but hey, who says science has to be boring? It's about getting a point across, isn't it?
To illustrate my point here, head to the ISC website and read the article Follow the Bouncing Malware IX: eGOLDFINGER, it is an excellent example (some people might think a bit over the top, you have been warned) of how to write about a, sometimes kind of boring, subject, security. Tom Liston did a fantastic job describing a common malaise in today's IT-world. IMHO, of course ;-)
Speaking of painting a picture, I collect quotes, as most authors do. I stumbled over a nice quote in my collection yesterday: The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

A Reason to upgrade?

I've been busy working on a music project that kind of dragged along (I promised to master a CD containing my tracks and didn't find the time to do it).
Originally I decided to postpone the upgrade of my favorite music software, Reason, until I would finish the project. Yeah right…
The temptation was too strong, the new mastering tools to interesting, and anyway, I was simply nosy how it would compare. So I installed the 3.0 version of the program: WOW!
First the downside, the new possibilities are tempting, one has a hard time to fight the temptation to just tweak that sound a little. I will resist (until tomorrow I guess). One of the reasons (pun intended) is the fact, that the latest patch (3.0.4) is a new install including the usual serial number shebang, etc. On the other hand, I'm glad and thankful that I do not have to use an USB dongle like in the other program I'm using. Actually using less often and thinking about abandoning it completely. Granted, one cannot compare the two programs, but using a dongle with my 12" PowerBook is a nuisance, PERIOD.
Back to Reason (couldn't resist), the new binary churns along on the last CD and should be ready within the next couple of minutes and I'm still entertaining the thought of staying on track, being strong, resist the temptation to change just some little things, blah, blah, blah…
The new mastering tools are awesome! You really have to hear for yourself, if you should be into music production, do yourself a favor, check this program out! (No, I do not get any favors from the Propellerheads for saying this.)
[update]The new binary didn't nag me about the serial number, let's hope it won't ask me about one of the additional CDs while I'm sitting on a plane or a train, let's keep the fingers crossed.

Advertising Stereotypes

There is an article called The modern rules of advertising? at the BBC News website, containing a list of advertising stereotypes. The list in itself, taken from a book by Michael Buerk, is very interesting, but the comments by the readers are worth looking at, as well.
Found it via Boing Boing

Tiger: Slow browsing...

After I installed Tiger, the whole system felt quicker, more responsive. Certain websites rendered like molasses, though.
I kept wondering for some days now, until I remembered that the advertisement punishment system was not in place. Said system works like this: If an online ad does certain things, it (or better its host) gets punished by me:

1. Playing sounds -- VERY BAD, I sometimes surf next to my sleeping girlfriend


2. Using 1 pixel gifs or pngs -- VERY BAD, I don't like to be spied upon


3. Distributing malware -- Do I really need to comment on this?


4. Loading lots of small .js files -- Either do it right or don't do it!


5. A couple of other things judged by a more personal nature...

You might guess where I am heading here: /etc/hosts.
Sites deserving punishment end up in my hosts-file with an IP-address of 0.0.0.0. Restart the lookupd or reboot, instant relief.
Don’t get me wrong here, I know that advertising funds many websites; that is the price I have to pay for free. The only thing I ask for is, do not annoy me! That’s all. I do not use any other ad-blocking software, that is my part of the deal.
BTW: Pop-Ups or Pop-Unders are VERY BAD.
;-)

Tiger: Weather Widget Woes...

The Weather Widget in Dashboard is a handy feature to get an idea what is going on weather-wise, but sometimes (especially in cities not located in the US) the display seems to be off or outright strange. If you are like me, adjusting the location and timezone data while on the road, then it sometimes works and sometimes tells you very strange things, e.g. you are sweating in a coffee-shop in blazing sunlight and the widget tells you that it is cold, raining, and in the middle of the night.
The reason is quite simple, if you change your location, then this change is transferred to the weather widget as well. But what works for your trusty *NIX system in regard to the information about your geographical location, will not always work out for Accuweather.com; the names of the cities are sometimes written differently, that’s all.
Just head to the website and navigate to the city you are in at the moment, the string after zipcode in the URL is what you need to copy to the weather widget. Confirm the entry by hitting Return, wait until the widget validates your entry, and you are set.

Tiger: revitalizing my SC760

Hmm, it seems either Apple or Epson forgot to include the plug-in for my Stylus Color 760 in Tiger. Let’s assume it was a simple oversight and no ploy to tell me to dump the old printer and get a shiny new one, preferably equipped with RFID chips to prevent me from using cheaper ink or re-fills, shall we?
The solution is not perfect, but works for me; your mileage may vary.
I copied the missing file SC760.plugin from a 10.3.x backup (you made a backup before installing, didn’t you?) to /Library/Printers/EPSON/. The Utility icon in the Printer Setup Program is still grayed out, but launching /Library/Printers/EPSON/Utilities/Epson Printer Utility.app from the Finder, allows me to check the amount of ink and the cleaning of the heads again.
If I want to replace my printer and my suspicion regarding the use of RFID chips or any other technology to prevent me from using refills or other inks is true, then my next printer will definitely not be manufactured by EPSON.
Based on recommendations of some people, it might be built by CANON.

Blog: New color-scheme

I started to work on the new color-scheme for the blog, inspired by the recent changes at A List Apart.
The old template was created by Jeffrey Zeldman, by the way. The new one is still based on this work.

Writing: I love Tiger

Seriously, having access to a dictionary/thesaurus just a press on F12 away is great. I used to have Britannica installed on my laptop but this space was freed for other purposes; the other thing I like (as a writer) is the system-wide spellchecker, but that is not a new feature in Tiger.
BTW: If one writes *NIX related texts in Word™, then one should never forget to run the grammar-checker for some good laughs, especially if the text is about *NIX commands.

Blogs: Splogs?

There is an interesting article at The Doc Searls Weblog called How to Save the Web from Splogonoma.
I came to the same conclusions, basically. Being on Blogger and sometimes clicking the Next Blog link, reveals a lot of blogs without any content besides add-word related babble.
I started my first blog in 2000 or 2001 (I don't remember) and the same thing started to appear back then, though. Even if we don't like it, maybe its the price to pay? Only time will tell.

Solaris: Adding Rules to SunScreen

I already wrote about SunScreen, the firewall you receive with Solaris. I stumbled over a little thing to keep in the back of your head while adding rules to it: the order of the rules is significant!
Not that I didn't know about this, but sometimes in the daily rush one tends to forget or simply not think before typing (the very reason was in not enough coffee/phonecalls coming in/basically being busy doing something completely different/don't ask).
I created a new service for Adobe Document Server:
edit> add SERVICE "altercast" SINGLE FORWARD "tcp" PORT 8019
and created a new rule to use the service:
edit> add rule altercast * self ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
I verified the settings with:
edit> verify
Saved them:
edit> save
Left the program and activated the new settings.
Eager to see the admin-interface, I fired up my browser and tried to connect; timeout. The software was running (it starts itself, contrary to the manual). I added the rule, the right port, etc. What is going on? Time for a cup of coffee.
I reopened the SunScreen configuration, checked the service settings for altercast, everything seems to be fine. Then the coffee kicked in and I did:
edit> list rules
1 "ssh" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "allow ssh from everywhere"
2 "ping" "*" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "icmp echo"
3 "netbios" "*" "*" DENY COMMENT "no DOS allowed"
4 "*" "localhost" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "allow outgoing"
5 "*" "*" "self" DENY LOG DETAIL COMMENT "look who is knocking"
6 "altercast" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "altercast traffic"
Rule number five pipes everything not covered by the preceding rules to the trusty /dev/null data-sink, the rule for altercast never fired!
To cut a long story short:
edit> insert rule 4 altercast * self ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
edit> list rules
1 "ssh" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "allow ssh from everywhere"
2 "ping" "*" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "icmp echo"
3 "netbios" "*" "*" DENY COMMENT "no DOS allowed"
4 "altercast" "*" "self" ALLOW LOG SUMMARY COMMENT "adobe altercast access"
5 "*" "localhost" "*" ALLOW COMMENT "allow outgoing"
6 "*" "*" "self" DENY LOG DETAIL COMMENT "look who is knocking"
Don't forget to delete the misplaced rule from the rule-set first.
;-)

Solaris: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket.

If you should find the message in the title in your /var/adm/messages file on your SUN box running Solaris 9, welcome to the club.
It seems that Patch '118305-04' is the reason. From what I gathered so far, SUN is looking into the problem.
There are reports that forcing sshd to operate IPv4 only, sometimes solves the problem. It made no difference on my machine.
Given that, I don't have a solution, yet. I just wanted you to know that you are not alone in this.
:-(

Blogs: Interesting

While reviewing my link list on this blog, I noticed that a lot of the writing links are links to blogs written by screen writers. I don't know why, actually. These are the blogs I read on a regular basis. The latest entry to this list is not for the easily intimidated and is aptly called I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Take a look, you'll like it.
[update] I didn't capitalize all letters of the title because that is the electronic equivalent of shouting.
;-)

Tiger: to busy to install other applications

The whole system feels different, not marketing lingo, it really feels different; faster; more responsive; can't put my finger on it now...
The mail.app lacks the little status line that shows what's going on, but that is just a minor inconvenience.

Tiger: Wow!

Tiger is up and running; it is actually up and running for a while now (got carried away playing with the new features).
The spring cleaning effect was badly diminished by the imported user accounts, a.k.a. my desktop is still a mess. I was hoping to copy the things I need piece by piece and loose some in the process.
My two favorites are (as of now): Dashboard and Spotlight, the latter is incredibly fast in finding things, not that I would need that functionality that bad.
:-)
I'll keep you posted (need to play around with some more things before installing other applications).
BTW: The whole system feels much faster.

Tiger: Installation done, migrating accounts

The installation worked, I added the two jumbo patches to get the system to 10.4.2, no problems so far.
The Migration Assistant is churning away at the moment. Would have been nice if you had a choice of applications and folders to migrate (maybe I just could not find the option, though).
Let's wait and see...

Tiger: After the Backup

Permissions repaired, data backed up, ready to go.
I decided to put the promises in the installation manual to the test (not really a bold decision regarding the existing backup), a.k.a. erase and install (also known as spring cleaning) and restoring some of the settings with the assistant application. We'll see...

Is that a Tiger in your pocket?

Never touch a running system. This saying still holds true in today's computing world. Apple's new operating system Tiger is in the wild for some time now. My approach to new releases is simple, if something does what I want, why change it right away? OS X is just another *NIX-based OS and I do not switch the Solaris release on my SUN to a new .0 release just because it is available, why should I do so on the Macintosh I use for my daily writing?
Don't get me wrong here, if I should have a spare box to test new software, I do so. There was just no spare Mac to be used for testing, that's all. Since most of my projects are in the finishing stages right now, I decided to jump the gun and install the new OS for my trusty 12".
I'll blog the progress as it develops. Since I will treat the new OS like any other *NIX OS, including the usual precautions, the whole shebang might be interesting for you.
I started with the usual steps, means I prepared the system for a backup using the steps outlined in Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Computer Hygiene to get a backup with all log-files in a clean state, a.k.a. with the oldest files purged.
I'll be back after the backup-run.

From the Imagination of the Writer to the Screen...

After reading the post You Can't Walk Into An "Office Building" at the The Artful Writer, I kind of wondered aren't authors supposed to lay a solid foundation for the story and the characters? Don't get me wrong here, my way of working could differ from the ways of others, but (big but to be precise) I thought that creating a personality for a book requires to create some more background than what will be visible to the reader/viewer of the story.
Creating such a background will simplify things for the author, it allows to answer questions about the behavior of said character and stay focused on the story. Call me old-fashioned, but the looks of the office building mentioned in the article will be on my list of things about a certain person appearing in a book, to answer simple questions like if the persons looks out of the office window (if he/she is not located in a cubicle), what will be visible? Just thinking about the potential description of the office and the building sparks ideas for plots and scenes.
Granted, descriptions like this should not end up in a script; not in the level of detail I create them, but doing so first, would give me all I need to talk to the A.D. in case of doubt.
Just my two cents (YMMV) ;-)

Most alien planets look like Vancouver?

Or more like the surroundings of Vancouver,B.C. if you are into watching Stargate, that is. Why, do you ask?
The Artful Writer explains why in an article called Runaway Production...And Why It Happens.
BTW: guess why most of the planets in Farscape looked like Australia?
:-)

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Computer Hygiene

I you should use a Macintosh running OS X, then said OS needs to do some maintenance on a regular basis. If the computer runs through the night, it will take care to run the necessary steps itself. BUT if you are a good citizen of this planet, then you told your system to go to sleep when not in use for some time, to conserve energy.
Here is the catch, like you are brushing your teeth every morning and evening (or more often), the computer tries to keep itself clean. You cannot brush your teeth while asleep, do you? Same goes for your Macintosh, if it sleeps, it cannot clean the system.
Apple set up three cleansing rituals for the system, but these rituals tax the system considerably. For that very reason, these rituals (vulgo: cron-jobs) are scheduled to run sometimes during the night. On a side-note: if your systems seems to get unresponsive during the day, check the setting of your timezone; the machine might think that the time is somewhere between midnight and early morning and starts the cleaning (another reason to set the correct timezone).
Back to the problem every environmental conscious being faces, the computer cannot take care of the cleaning, but there is hope (you already guessed it, didn't you?). One can easily start the necessary programs by hand:
sudo sh periodic daily
sudo sh periodic weekly
sudo sh periodic monthly
Can be run in the terminal at the appropriate times. One word of caution, though: the weekly and monthly scripts can take a considerable amount of time to finish, plan accordingly.

The man's got a point here

I really like podcasts, they allow me to listen to stuff that interests me at my own schedule while being busy doing things that cannot be avoided (or at least shouldn't) like filling up the dishwasher, watering the plants, you get the idea.
John August found a reason in a similar line, read the article Podcasting is for babies at his blog.
Two more things to add, I completely agree with his take on ringtones and I promise to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as soon as I find the time.
(I know writing shouldn't occupy all of ones day but still...)

Blogs: Have you tried BlogPulse?

I spent some time today playing around with the Trend Search tool at BlogPulse. Quite addictive I have to say.
In a nutshell, the tool allows you to enter up to three phrases to search for and plot a graph over the last month or the last two months showing the frequency the phrases turned up in the blogsphere. Sounds simple? It is and as I already mentioned, highly addictive.
I'll be heading back there....
:-)

OS X: Clear those Caches (sometimes)

My cuddly 12" reared its ugly *NIX head today. Mail and Safari showed a spinning beach-ball and did nothing else. What is a writer to do?
PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Silly thoughts like pen and paper again? or if you want to get on my nerves, think what will happen if I throw you out of the window!; the latter is, based on the price of a Mac, an empty threat, of course.
Time to switch from panic-mode to let's fix this-mode.
I headed to the excellent macosxhints.com and started searching. Why didn't you use MacFixIt?, you may ask. Because the last thing I need is a This content is for subscribers only message while in panic-mode, period.
During the transition from panic-mode to let's fix this-mode, I made use of the 19+ years of *NIX experience. Single-User mode, fsck -fy, did not help. (Hint: to get a Mac into Single-User mode, press the Apple-key and the S-key simultaneously after you hear the startup-sound.)
I used another account to repeat the steps with Safari, everything works as expected. So it has to be something in my account. One of the searches revealed another direction to go: caches.
I cded to the following directories and used my trusty friend of old: rm -r *:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
/System/Library/Caches
and while in the vicinity, I deleted /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache as well.
To cut a long story short, everything seems to work again. I posted the steps in case someone needs to solve a similar problem.
BTW: Before doing anything like the steps described, back up first!