The eye of the tornado

Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom 63% Mr. Freeze 61% Lex Luthor 61% Green Goblin 60% Apocalypse 58% Catwoman 54% Magneto 53% The Joker 47% Kingpin 40% Juggernaut 40% Mystique 40% Riddler 40% Venom 39% Poison Ivy 39% Dark Phoenix 37% Two-Face 36%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

Your results:
You are Green Lantern

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

I read a lot of Coding Horror and recently I came up with this post about software bugs. Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing. You should definitely go and check it, it’s worth the reading.

(Via Coding Horror.)

I happened to post a message in the Apple Discussion forums, asking whether it was possible to modify Apple’s iMail default behaviour when replying a message and quoting its contents; by default iMail will encourage you to top-post. If you really don’t know what top-posting or bottom-posting is, you may not get the whole point of this blog entry. My original question can be found here.

If you’ve read the above link, you’d have noticed some differences between posters. A.K.A.: me and the people who replied. This led me to believe that top-post vs. bottom-post is the kind of war which arises when you scream “this Linux distribution is better than xxxx”. Needless to say, that wasn’t my intention.

But what caught my eye was a post made by Timothy Gaden, which you can read here. Timothy, in his way, defends top-posting and throws some of his ideas about why is better. I don’t need to tell you that I completely disagree with Timothy. The only way to give you my -rather unimportant- point of view is to quote part of what he wrote:

First, there is no end to the debate on top-posting vs. bottom-posting in this life and, possibly, in the next. I understand that.
Well, I have to admit that I agree with that. (Now we have something in common).

Secondly, I should disclose that I am a top-poster.
I, on the other hand, am a bottom-poster whenever possible or desired.

Timothy now presents us a screenshot with “the failure of bottom-posting”. I invite you to look at his post for more details.
But there’s a trick; what the screen shot doesn’t show you, is that no matter how ‘bad’ that is -and it is bad- top-posting can get worse. Much worse.

Let’s just try to compare situations.

When you bottom-post incorrectly (without trimming the original text for example) you’re forcing the recipient/s to read a lof of unnecessary information which could have been perfectly excluded. The reader will have to scroll through a lot of ugly text until the new text is found. Then the message is read. End of story. He surely read some of the ‘old’ text while searching for the new one, which -at worst- will refresh his memory (and waste some of his time). Wait… time? waste? That’s not good. Top-Post 1, Bottom-Post 0.
What about the same message top-posted? The reader -provided he knows what the message is about- doesn’t have to scroll at all; the answer is right there. Nice. Top-Post 2, Bottom-Post 0.

Wow, what am I defending? I wonder…

Now let me show you a nice example of Bottom-posting.
Look:

By reading the whole thread thing, you know what the guys have been talking about and no comment or quote is out of place. You can actually learn from that post. Something that top-posters don’t get is that bottom-post is definitely NOT for lazy people.

I could spend the whole week finding the best samples of why top-posting is easier to missuse; it is worthless, because I do not want to convince anybody.

If the message above would have been top-posted, it would have been really hard to read if not impossible to understand. The reply would have been out of context and the original writer -who was asking a question- would have had a hard time finding the exact answer. Ok it wouldn’t have been *that* hard; now multiply that email by 10. Questions and its answers would easily get lost in a myriad of unrelated text.

That picture is well made bottom-posting. Notice that instead of showing you why top-posting is bad -with a sample- (like Timothy did with bottom-posting), I prefer to show you the other way around.

One must not forget that no method is the best or really better than the other; I am merely convinced -by experience- that top-posting can really take you out of context in a matter of seconds. There’s not even a single scenario where bottom posting is not better. Not a single one; even when the original message was in the subject (there are some aberrations like that in this world) and the message’s body is ‘emtpy’. In situations like those, you should definitely quote the subject and “resurrect” the body-less message.

When can you use a top-post and be safe with it?
In my opinion, never. But if you really have to (and Both Microsoft and Apple are encouraging you to do it), you should only use it when the original message is no longer important (why not start a new message instead?) or when you just want to change subject or avoid commenting about what is written.
Excuse me, but in both cases, you can bottom-post, snip the parts you’re not interested and start from there. But that would be much more work and we live in a “lazy” world with lazy people who want faster procesors, faster computers, faster faster faster and faster cars. (couldn’t resist myself, a message like this without a car analogy cannot be real).

Yes ladies and gentlemen, bottom-posting takes some time to master. You need to read and edit something you have just already read. That is more work. Yes. That takes more time. Yes. And Yes.
But that is what will help the reader understand you easily. If he correctly quotes then the favor is returned and you have initiated a “mail-chat” session. Where each paragraph is followed by a reply and so on.

Of course you’ve got to be careful; it is easy to fall into the hands of the “over-quoter”; just like Timothy showed, configuring your mail program to start writing below the quoted text can lead to the temptation of not touching the original text, giving top-posters something to whine about. We don’t want that, do we?

But don’t worry. Apple’s own mail program, iMail, won’t allow you to do that. You’ll have to either top-post (as many do) or slowly scroll down each time. Note: this behaviour is not “too” bad if you think about it, because it enforces you to read the whole thread and snip, edit, quote, write, etc. Unfortunely most of the people won’t do that and will simply hit enter a few times and start from there; now that is a shame. To be honest, if the cursor were below, the same people that top-post today, would horribly bottom-post, not even wasting a second editing the quoted text (which could be worse depending on the scenario, Timothy found a nice example for us).

In the end, what we need is either something as good as The Bat and its templates or, as I tend to think, more user education.

In the mean time, read before you hit reply, it can save people’s time.

Althought I don’t use WMP at all, I came across this lovely post about Windows Media Player, or: Usability Going Down the Hill. You’ll love it.

So at last, the mystery has been unleashed. For almost 5 years everybody thought: there has to be a x86 version of OS X running somewhere inside the Apple bunkers at Cupertino. After all, why not, if Darwin (the Core of the OS) exists for the x86 architecture.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, said it. Apple is dropping PowerPC microprocessors in favor of Intel. Nobody knows “what” CPU they are going to use, but when. A year from now, they are going to be selling these new “IntelMacs”.

I just wanted to say that although this sounds weird and makes you feel like your “power”Mac/Book or whatever you have, sounds less “Mac”ish, in the end this will be a good move. The ability to run Windows on a Mac will be something cool, you can now play your games with a simple Dual Boot.

Other than that, Intel has achieved more performance with its “M” line of chips and many other things that IBM was failing to deliver.

So, Less Macish, but more powerful.

What do you prefer?

I go for the later.

It has been exactly a month since I have installed Apple Mac OS X 10.4“Tiger”. It would be very easy to find a review that covers almost every piece of technology that Tiger has. This is not a fancy review plagued with screenshots; I’d like to point out the features that I have been using and that seem to be Tiger only.

Spotlight
This searching technology has been (and it’s constantly being) accused of being unreliable, because it cannot find “some simple things”. For me, it has been amazing, but I do not use all the super-geek-query features that live under the hood. I have my folders and files organized (thanks to Windows which taught me that, because its searching technology sucks), so when I use spotlight, I know what I am looking for; I know where it is (or almost). I always find it in “no time”. Blame me for using it and actually find it useful. People are complaining about missing files, index corrupted, etc. Maybe it has got to do with the fact that I don’t have external drives, I don’t do fancy Mac things, etc., mainly because those “gadgets” are too expensive here. My powerbook is plain factory default. Enough of spotlight, as a final note: Yes, it has some flaws, but will eventually be polished and it is already changing the way we think and organize our stuff.

Smart Folders
I couldn’t talk about spotlight and leave these out. Think of these as a way to save a query, have the results mimic a folder that updates automatically and place it wherever you want. They just work, I still haven’t found many uses (because I perform Spotlight searches all the time) but have a few with some PDF stuff that is useful to have quickly at hand. Again, if spotlight has a bug, these folders use the same technology, so you will probably come across the same problem here; i.e.: if spotlight couldn’t find a file, the smart folder won’t find it either. Sigh.

Burn Folders
The way burning should have been. No more copying into a temp space. Just drag stuff into these, and when you’re ready, burn. The folder will find the items and burn them. No need to create local copies (or duplicates). It works (tho I don’t burn too often).

Dashboard
Ok, I have used Konfabulator. I have used Dashboard. Are they useful? Hmmm, yes and no. Which one is the best? What do I know! I don’t care. They are “somewhat” similar. One thing’s for sure, unless you have plenty (1GB >) of RAM, using more than three or four widgets is a waste of a lot of RAM.
You’ve heard it. Dashboard (and Konfabulator for the matter) eat RAM. Tiger eats RAM. I like dashboard a little bit more than Konfabulator, because on a 15′’ Powerbook, you don’t have too much screen estate. Those crazy Mac users trying to hack Dashboard (or using Konfaulator) to populate their “small” 1280×800 screens with widgets are nuts. But what can we do about it. You either love it or hate it. I don’t :) Let’s just say that I am jealous of those who have 2Gb of ram and do not mind to throw a few megabytes for fancy effects and widgets. If you’re curious, here’s what I have:

• A clock showing Buenos Aires time (where my family and friends live) (I hate to do the conversion every time).
• The great iCal events (not from Apple, they forgot about it)
• Weather.

So, do I need these things? No. Do I like them? Yes. I think that I am constantly on the move with these. Some days I have had almost 10. When I felt the thrashing of my HDD, I simply removed them; I guess that it’s just a game between you and your mind. Nah, you don’t need them, but they look nice. (That, if you don’t count the “few” seconds it may take dashboard to “update” its screen) Sigh (2).

Automator
What the heck, this is nice, but I have only used it 4 or 5 times. It has a lot of potential. It’s a little bit slow. I won’t talk too much about it here, since I have only performed “stupid” actions, like renaming a lot of pictures, changing their sizes and formats and then I dragged ‘em to my Mail app…
But the good news is, that took me only “ a couple of minutes ”. Otherwise you’d have to do a lot of hack and slash actions… very repetitive. Automator is really cool.

Dictionary built It
Yes, now everything in OS X is “lookupable”. Right click on a word and you can search it in spotlight, google or… the built in Oxford Dictionary. (There’s an App called…er… Dictionary). There’s a Widget also, but due to an excessive RAM Usage (discussed above) I simply removed it. The other “hidden” function is that in some applications (more specifically some Window Controls) you can command-option-d and Tiger will search the word “under your mouse pointer” (not the one you’ve got selected) and will display it in a very small screen. Very nice and I’ve used it a LOT.

Mail
People are hating the new Mail app. I love it, not because I care about the new look (I like it anyways), but because the app is much better. Those “religious about consistency between applications” can go to hell :) The application is much better. I used Mail.app (1.0) a lot and the new one is amazingly better. Faster, more organized and… it supports… guess…
Yes.. Smart Mailboxes. If the old Mail search box was good. This one is even better (integrated with Spotlight) And you can actually save the search and will be saved as a smart mailbox. Very nice, because it will be -obviously- automatically updated real time.
The new Mail app is very good. And if you have SpamSieve, much better. :)

What else? There are more than 200 features in Tiger, I wasn’t planning on talking about them all…

CoreImage, CoreData, CoreCoreCore…
These are hidden below the OS. You won’t notice ‘em unless you are using them. Of all the Core* stuff, I have played a little bit with CoreImage and I can tell it’s amazing. Real time image handling in the Graphic Processor Unit (GPU) instead of the CPU. Very nice. CoreData is incredible as well, I have been reading a little bit about it. But most users won’t notice it. Time will tell. What thing is for sure, these technologies will make life much more easy for a lot of programmers.

Other stuff
Well, what else can I say? The new iCal looks exactly the same as the old one with some new additions. Notably it now includes a “special” Birthday calendar… (it was about time). And you can share iCals, Publish ‘em…
Term.app looks exactly the same.
You know about safari, the new safari, faster, with RSS support (I use NetNewsWire Lite anyways). But the RSS support in safari “is ok”. The address book supports now “smart groups” (you can get the idea), apart from that, it is the same ‘ol address book. (And I use it).

Tiger boots faster, yes. Many new stuff in it and a partially broken samba install are included :) Yes samba is not working properly, most notably the integration with finder, automount and permissions. Who knows what they broke. 1.4.1 update doesn’t fix it.
In my case, I upgraded directly, all went smooth. No problems, no nothing. But again, I am a sorta power user (in terms of knowledge), but I am trying to be just a User. Mac will give you a hand there. ;)

I like Tiger so far. I know it is going to take a few more updates till it’s much much better, but since I haven’t lost any functionality (and gained a little bit more of slowness) I am happy with it.
’tis late, so if I come up with something more interesting, I will update.

Enjoy.

I have come across Fetch 5.0 from FetchSoftworks; I’ve been part of the beta team for the last couple of months and I must say that they were great fixing bugs and providing feedback. You should definitely give it a try.

What I found great about Fetch is that it’s quick, and very simple to use. You just feel like you’re using Finder, and that is something that other FTP clients do not enforce. For me FTP ought to be like a normal folder. Fetch contributes to that. Here are a few screenshots of Fetch in action:

As seen on Fetch’s Home Page, this is the main window. Needless to say that you can have two or more connections and perform file transfers between servers, thus, mimicking the finder’s metaphor.

This is the main dialog presented when Fetch loads. You have (of course!) Shortcuts and Favorites:

This is the Dock icon when there’s a transfer in progress:

If you abort (or while the transfer is in progress) a shortcut to the file will be created; the nice thing is that you can abort the transfer, and at a later time double click the shortcut to resume. I am involved in many FTP transfers daily and the ability to start them and leave the shortcut there ready to resume is very useful. (more on this later).

Here’s what the fetch Main Window will display when transfering (the OpenBSD 3.7 BSD Kernel in this case) ;)

As I’ve already mentioned, you have the ability to resume an aborted transfer by simply double clicking its icon; while this is neat, the only drawback I have found about Fetch, is its inability to pause/resume “on the fly” or the idea of a transfer queue where I could decide what to transfer and how. This also reminds me that having the ability to throttle the speed of a download (kind of what Total Commander for Windows does) would be a big plus.

Despite these things, Fetch 5.0 is a very very simple FTP program designed to do what it was created to do. File Transfer Protocol. It goes without saying that it supports SFTP and encrypted connections, plus many other things you may want to try. The beta process has been quite good and notwithstanding a few glitches, all went very smooth and the 5.0 release has been very stable.

I know there are many good FTP clients for Mac OS X (Transmit, Interarchy, CaptainFTP, etc.), geez even Finder in Tiger has FTP capabilities, but none has support for download throttling which would be my number one requested feature; Interarchy is nice, but has a lot of features I don’t need. Transmit is nice too, in fact I used it all the way till the end of the trial (I haven’t tested latest 3.2 version tho) but the concept of two panels is not what I was looking for. CaptainFTP I didn’t test more than a few minutes.

Then I found Fetch. The team was giving away licenses to beta testers so I enrolled and now I am a happy user (after a few months of bugfixing and testing, in fact I even lost a transfter due to a bug which was quickly fixed; the team sent me a special build to test the fix and I was able to save other files).

In summary: if you need a nice, simple and effective FTP client for “only” $ 25 (or $15 if you upgrade), Fetch is the way to go.

Well, this is my opinion and your mileage may vary, but if you’re new to the Mac platform or are simply hunting for a FTP client, give it a try.

I am off line, as you may have noticed, but that’s simply because I am working more than twelve hours a day (ok, it is a little bit more, but I wouldn’t want to impress anybody). Albeit this ugly fact, the D-Day is comming (June 1st).

I’ll be back.

Well, after some time using it, I cannot but confirm what I’ve been saying and what you may have been reading…

Take a look at these stats:

Filtered Mail

1788 Good Messages

3102 Spam Messages (63%)

37 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy

13 False Positives

83 False Negatives (86%)

98.0% Correct

Corpus

478 Good Messages

900 Spam Messages (65%)

108039 Total Words

Rules

773 Blocklist Rules

437 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since

21/02/05 2:28

If you use Macintosh and receive spam (who doesn’t?) you need SpamSieve.

I will repost my stats from time to time, just because I like the Copy Stats button… yes, just because of that.