House of the rising Moonglum

So, one of my biggest complaints about tiger is that the mail app included with it moved away from the standard mbox format to some file based proprietary format. (Many simple intros to e-mail protocols and formats can be found on about.com.) This pissed me off because the mbox format is nice and standard and will not disappear any time soon. E.g. my mail is safe even if Apple mail disappears. Well, as I eventually discovered with mail 1.0, mail 2.0 also uses a standard.

Rather than using the mbox standard Mail has switched to the newer maildir file format. Rather than using one file per mailbox like mbox, it uses one file per message and uses folders as mailboxes. Maildir was invented for qmail which is an IMAP server that has been around for a while. Basically, the fact that multiple clients can hit the same mbox once you have IMAP led to locking issues which would corrupt the mbox file and make you lose mail. Of course they make maildir look like the great savior, but it just shoves the hard work from the mail clients and servers onto the file system. WU-IMAP makes strong arguments for the older flat file based systems, in particular they are concerned with file thrashing during certain operations. Another MTA producer actually did a study of the different modalities of mail use in a flat file system and a file based system. They both had advantages and disadvantages, but the big disadvantage of the file based system was searching. Of course since Apple Mail uses spotlight to search that problem goes away.

Some other advantages are the fact that if one mail file gets corrupted it doesn’t kill the entire mailbox. The messages themselves become more human readable. The disadvantages are basically that for archival purposes it just sucks. I have like 100,000 messages in my archive. Backing that up will suck. Really suck. Of course I can just gzip it up and then it is one file again.

Mostly I am just happy that they actually went from one file format standard to another. That makes me very happy. I feel much better about upgrading now. Which I still haven’t done. Dude, it’s been like a whole week!

(Another disadvantage is that I guess moving to a different format introduced a number of bugs that they had gotten rid of in the old version. *sigh*)

So last I heard they didn’t want to let women onto the pro circuit because they didn’t have the upper body strength required for racing. Now it sounds like they are claiming that they have an unfair advantage due to weight. Another one I have heard bantered about is that the female pros look more like models than drivers and thus can get the more lucrative endorsements. Wait? Are you saying that they can get a buck thirty to your dollar? And that is unfair? That puts you on unequal footing? More power to them.

For those who don’t know Danica Patrick is a pro open wheel driver who got near the pole position for the Indy 500. Plenty of people think that the sport should be male female split like all the others. Seems like this is one area where there isn’t much excuse for that.

And just so I don’t sound like too much of a feminist… man is she hot!

So, I am holding some items (from Zales) for a friend of mine who is getting married. My wife who was away for a few days came back. I told her that I did something special for her at home, meaning cleaning the house. What is the first thing she does when she gets home? Puts her jewelry away safe and sound in her jewelry box. And finds certain items which are also safe and sound there. Comedic hilarity ensued.

So, everyone knows I love maps. And many people know I love the chicago crime maps. Well someone combined Google maps (which I love) with the chicago crime maps data! ChicagoCrime.Org presents a very accessible interface to their system. Much more usable than the Citizen’s ICam which is where they get their data from. It still has a few things that need to be added to it. Like sticking the crime data into the balloons that popup when you click on a location marker, but all in all a good start.

For example, if we want to find out what went down that day in april, we can use the map and then narrow the search thusly… District 20 from April 8th midnight to the 9th midnight. Getting closer than that was a little tricky, but I tried the biggies and it turns out to be a robbery on the sidewalk. Then getting the time is easy. (Between 8 and 9)

OK, now I want to know the report number… browse by date, that’ll be the 9th of April (a particularly bad day, I wonder if there really was a full moon), then by time, 8 pm. Which leads us to: the actual case number. Dude, there was no weapon involved! I can hardly believe that given the amount of blood, but there you go.

Wow. Cool system. Can’t wait until they get the balloons working so I don’t need to do the recursive search to figure out what the locations correlate to.

Woah! So, I listened to a lot of Bon Jovi growing up. So much so that I think I have hardwired paths in my brain for the lyrics. Which is to say I have them memorized really really well. Rather, they are in their very solidly and if they aren’t correct then they are going to have a very hard time coming out. Of course Bon Jovi lyrics are easy to understand (hey, I listen to BOC!) and so most of them are in there correctly. Today walking to work I heard a lyric that for some reason never made it into my brain before. Probably because I just didn’t understand it when I was listening to it before. From Never Say Goodbye from the Slippery When Wet album. I always though it was a nice little song about teenage puppy love. Remembering things… “Remember when we used to park on butler street out in the dark? Remember when we lost the keys and you lost more in the back seat?” I don’t know what I thought that line was, but that is NOT what I thought is was! Dude, so much for a song about childhood innocence.

So I have a problem with this Star Wars movie. My problem is that I liked the last two movies. Well the last one anyway. The first one I found interesting but I only saw it once and my liking of the second movie increased greatly on a second viewing. So what’s my problem? I think that a big part of the reason that I “liked” the first two was that I went into it with extremely low expectations. Well there have been so many positive reviews of this movie that I’m having a hard time avoiding them all. So now I’m afraid that I will be going into it with higher expectations when I see it on Sunday which it invariably will not meet. OK, all I have to do is keep this cynicism up for a couple more days and that should lower my expectations.

I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. The WAPO apparently had an article reviewing a BOC concert that turned into a series of one line interviews with the band and Christopher Walken about the cowbell skit. Go back and click on that first link if you have never seen it. You will thank me later.

FWIW, apparenly Don “Buck Dharma” Roser has “seen it 20 times and [he] still finds it funny.”

Sorry this post took so long to put up, but as you will be able to tell it took a while.

So, Sue and I went to a U2 Concert a week ago. As usual it was incredible. Bono celebrated his 45th birthday the following day, but he still put a huge amount of energy into the show. He is a master entertainer. I have seen a number of these shows over the years and I have to say, they are still coming together as a band. From simple things like giving the other band members face time with the crowd (it used to be a Bono only show) to giving everyone a chance to show some musical prowess (Larry Mullen got some time alone with the crowd and his drums! It reminded me of BOC!) they really felt like a team working together to make sure that everyone got something they wanted.

Beyond the show, Sue and I were in a box seat. That part of it was pretty surreal. It was really nice to have our own space to hang out. There was a bunch of food (including a great dessert cart!) and a nice unobstructed view of the stage. Also no crush of people, and we could kick back on the sofas if we got tired of screaming along with everyone else. On the other hand, we weren’t in the huge press of people, so it felt less like a concert, and we were about a million miles up, so we really relied on the video screens. All in all, I’m glad we did it because it was a really fun event, but it didn’t really feel like a “concert experience”.

Of course it was a U2 show, so there were a ton of special effects. They had the usual catwalk with lights that went around part of the crowd, so they could come out and receive our adulation. They had a particularly neat effect for Vertigo where they sent the lights around the catwalk spinning in big spirals. That was pretty cool. My favorite of the big toys they had though had to be the bead curtains. You know those ones that they used as doors in the 60s? Well they had really really big ones. They went from the top to the bottom of the united center. But each of the beads were colored lights. Then they played movies at different points in the concert using the colored lights. It was just incredible. I bet you could make a normal sized one for the kitchen. Oh yeah. That is what I need. Oh yeah, and they were filming for a new DVD at that show because “they love Chicago”. heh.

So, enough about the staging, what about the music? Well they always have to play a bunch of songs from the latest album. For much of the 90s this could be a reasonably uninspiring event. Sure they have all their huge hits to back it up with, but there were always parts of the concert that you really felt you could sit down at. So the last time I went, when they were touring “All that you can’t leave behind” it was an amazing show. I really liked that album a lot, there were some great songs on it. But the fact was there were some songs that just didn’t transfer well to the stage. Not so with “How to dismantle an atomic bomb”. There might not be as many “great” songs, but they all rock. And really, when you go to a live show what you really want to do is rock. I have to admit that I think a number of the songs on that album are going to have to be re-rated after having been to this concert. This album is really starting to grow on me. I think that I already like it more than the last one, which I love. So, onto the playlist.

City of Blinding Lights

A song I didn’t really care for on the album, and as an opener I didn’t expect it to be as good a Elevation was at the last concert. It couldn’t hold up to Elevation in terms of rocking you out, but given the next two songs, I think it really worked as an intro. Nice and bright, clear without a lot of noise, and gets you up, but leaves you wanting more. Which you get with…

Vertigo

This is an obvious rocker that I was shocked they didn’t open with. But Bono had so much fun with this song that the stadium was going nuts. The Edge also had a great time yelling out his random Spanish. And of course they both were running laps for all I could tell. These guys are getting up there for that kind of antics, but they wanted to raise the roof.

Elevation

More of the same. Bono had to drink up a lot of water to keep this up for two songs. The catwalk is cool but one lap it pretty far. I do sort of wonder how many miles he puts on by the end of the show.

Cry/ Electric Co.

This was a nice breather and a treat for those who don’t hear much off Boy anymore. It was sort of a Boy medley with little snippets from the different songs, though they played a good chunk of Electric Co, it was a bit slower of a version and faded in and out into other songs. As they got a bit further into it, it picked up its natural rhythm until it faded into….

An Cat Dubh / Into the Heart

More of a closer for the last song (faded into and out of throughout the song) but this song always makes my heart glad. “Yes and I know the truth… about you”.) If you haven’t heard this in a while, go grab Boy and throw it in. You will be happy. When they rolled around to “into the heart” Bono found some adorable little kid in the audience and brought her up onto the stage, and they walked the catwalk hand in hand while he was caterwauling “into the heart of a child… I can stay a while…” Perhaps a bit cheesy, but I loved it. And that song is just so great. (Heh, just kicked it up a star on my rating system.)

Beautiful Day

After a little rest we were ready to kick it into high gear for a while. As always this song kicks serious butt live. Towards the end of the song he talked about how he knows that the U2 fans have been around for a while and really like the old stuff, but they have a lot of new fans too, and, well, it’s not like they aren’t going to play any of the old songs. Just rock out to the new ones for a while OK? I have no problem with that. But I think he was just teasing because…

New Year’s Day

Oh yeah.

Miracle Drug

This is one of my favorites off the new album. It’s kind of a sleeper, but I find it really inspiring. I do wonder if some of the songs on the album aren’t better than the last few albums because of Bono spending time thinking about his dad. Maybe it is easier to make good music if you are having strong emotions?

Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own

This song is quickly becoming one of my favorites. And stuck right next to Miracle Drug it is really moving.

Love and Peace

I’m not sure what I think about this song yet. It’s one of only two songs in the entire concert with only three stars in my rating scheme. The other one will get bumped up I suppose, but I have to listen to this one some more. Still, the fact that this was THE ONLY SONG in the entire concert that I could have done without is absolutely amazing. That is a sure sign that this was one of the best concerts I have ever seen. For that alone I don’t mind that it was here. Also I think it ended the portion of the concert where they planned the song order with thought about pacing and tempo. The rest of the concert (except for the last (two) song(s)) are just in order of release. But hey, when you have this many hits who cares! As a side note, I desperately want to make this into an “anime video” featuring every time Vash says “Love and Peace!”

Sunday Bloody Sunday

They couldn’t get away without playing this.

Bullet The Blue Sky

A good beginning for the Joshua Tree section.

Running to Standstill

This is one of my most favorite songs ever. I don’t actually think I have ever heard it live before, but I could be wrong. This was just beautiful.

Pride in the name of love

Good song, but they misplaced it, should have been two earlier.

Where the Streets have No Name

This was a really great song, and at the end they did something I have never seen before but I hear is becoming popular. Bono had everyone get out their cell phones and turn the lights on. It really lit the place up. Much brighter than lighters in the old days. But then he started pitching his “one campaign” against AIDS and poverty. Basically he asked everyone who wanted to voice their support to SMS a certain number. So, in response, Bono SMSed me! OK, he SMSed everyone, but it took like a day or two so it was a fun little treat. “Hey this is Bono. Thanks for…” If you are interested: http://www.one.org/UNITE/

One

After all that, this was obvious. Nice opening to the Achtung Beibei section. But they left the stage!! Sure you are done…

Zoo Station

Oh yeah, and a costume change. Bono started talking to the Edge in the effeminate Nazi accent. Woah, I didn’t know they swung that way. Don’t tell me I can’t play with … other boys!

The Fly
Mysterious Ways

These are always great songs, but Bono normally brings some girl up on stage to dance with him. Guess he is holding out for one of the new songs. But what, they leave again? Time for another encore I guess…

All Because of You

This is another song that I love off the new album and was a nice way to start to wrap things up.

Yahweh

This is a song that never did anything for me, but man did the crowd love it! They were singing so loud that they were almost drowning Bono out. I actually found the live performance of this song really made the song much more worthwhile. This was the other three, but I think it is going up to four. It was near the end of this song that Bono got his requisite “bring someone on stage” person up. I guess she must have had a “Party Girl” shirt on because he commented on it. She made some comment about playing it, and the Edge gave her his guitar. Well this has happened before, they love having people hit a few chords on stage, but she started playing for real…

Party Girl

She actually not only knew the whole song, but was actually able to play on stage and when Bono said keep going was actually able not to faint from fear in front of 30,000+ people. Bono tried to get the rest of the band to join in, but they weren’t set up for that song or something, so he just sang along with the one acoustic guitar. A very slow, plodding, heartfelt, and just amazing rendition of Party Girl. If for nothing else I will buy the DVD for this. This was one of the most amazing moments I have ever seen ever. The more I think about it, the more I think it must have been staged. It was too perfect to be real. OTOH, why would the Edge give up playing for a song? That just seems unlikely. Whatever the reason, it was a moment of perfect beauty, the kind that only comes around once every few years. However it came into being, I’m just happy that I was there to see it.

40

The fact that they went from that to this completed everything in my mind. (Which is one of the reasons I think it may have been staged.) But 40 is the perfect ending song. (WAAAAY better that anything by Dido.) It finally closed with the audience chanting “How long… how long to sing this song…” over and over and Larry Mullen keeping up in time with the drums. It fit in perfectly with the version of Party Girl that we just heard and was the perfect ending to a perfect evening.

And I wasn’t even going to get to see it at all! I just want to thank the person who got Sue and I there. You know who you are and you are the best!

I posted recently about the national id program which recently passed. Other people are more eloquent than I am about why it is a bad idea.

Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s for the kids. Pardon me if I don’t jump entirely behind Microsoft’s completely unbiased educational art project. It should really be called an ad competition though. I wonder if the people who produce these films will retain all rights to their work? At least this is better than the “Worker Bees turn you coworkers in” brown shirt style campaign they had going on a few years ago.

Starting July 8th talking on your cell phone (while driving [ed. thanks mike!]) in chicago will be illegal. City aldermen are now lobbying Springfield to make it statewide. I’m actually in favor of the ban… sort of. There are plenty of studies which show how dangerous driving on the phone is. The problem is most of those same studies show that handsfree headsets are just as dangerous as not using them. And of course handsfree sets are exempted.

I believe that most states have provision for “dangerous driving”, and it seems like this might be a good place to apply those laws.

Mike told me about the all important iTunes Blue Oyster Cult Essentials section. I probably would have swapped dominance and submission or the red and the black for the golden age of leather, but all in all I have to say that they made really good choices. I have to say, that essentials thing is going to make me a believer of the iTunes Music Store. I love being told what I need to get for a specific band. That might even make me experiment some more with it.

But then I saw this. All the Final Fantasy soundtracks ever? And ones that you can’t get anywhere else??? Now that is too cool. I would download the cosmo canyon theme, if I hadn’t already put it on my phone as a polyphonic ringtone that sounds almost exactly the same.

I just wrote a letter to my senator and though you might like to see it. National ID cards are a Bad Idea (TM).

Dear Senator Obama,

I am concerned about the upcoming vote on national ID cards. I am writing to encourage you in your stance against them. There are many problems from a social standpoint, however my concerns are much more straightforward. I believe that national ID cards will make us less safe.

If we have a national ID card system in place it will be used as the single source to determine who an individual is. As we well know in Illinois, id cards are not always correct. There will always be people who can go around the system and get drivers licenses who shouldn’t have them. Similarly there will be ways to obtain fake national ID cards, whether through forgery or social engineering.

Since these ID cards would be the single point of verification many of the checks that are currently in place when identification is needed will fail. Places where multiple forms of identity verification are currently needed may reduce to only needing one. Because it is national people will easily be lulled into the notion that it is secure. This false sense of security will in face make us less secure.

Please continue to work against this disaster waiting to happen. Thank you for your time,

Josh Flachsbart, PhD
Chicago IL.

I just finished the book “A World Lit Only By Fire” by William Manchester. It describes the period of time around the beginning of the renaissance. Since he is looking for overarching trends rather than fleshing out specific events (with one exception) he begins by looking at the way Europe was during the dark ages. This introduction to the “medieval mind” proved critical to his point, however it led to the beginning of the book begin quite disjointed. The book is divided up into three chapters, the first on the middle ages, the next on “the shattering” and the third on… Magellan. The first part is a series of what basically amount to anecdotes on how european society worked during the middle ages. In particular it looked at the hard lives of peasants and then at the nobility and knights and finally at how the church held sway over all of them. Setting up these relationships between the Church and the rulers of the land, as well as the lack of national identity that existed generally under the Christian domination of Europe during the middle ages was critical for the later chapters since it led to the destruction of the mediaeval order that was the renaissance, however I thought he could have been a bit more coherent in his description.

Having said that, I found the individual anecdotes to be quite interesting, and I learned a lot about the middle ages that I didn’t know before. Once you make it through to the beginning of the renaissance things pick up and he starts stringing the thoughts together to really give you a sense for what was happening politically, academically and religiously. Having finished the book I do now feel like I have a much better understanding of what was going on in the world between 1450 and 1550. In particular I have a much better understanding of the importance of the dissolution of the power of the holy roman empire. My previous education into the “first reich” (as the Holy Roman Empire was later called) came from German history classes which took a rather provincial look at what the aims of it were. Having read this book I now feel that you simply can not understand the HRE without also understanding what was going on in Rome, Venice, and the near constant struggles between France, Spain and England. This is especially true with the second sack of rome from the troops of the HRE which had only very few (if any) German troops in it.

Something that surprised me that I learned from this book:

The wars caused by the reformation were much more political than they were religious. The book has a big chunk devoted to the reformation. (If you don’t know much about Luther, you might be surprised to find out that he was truly the product of a medieval mind. He believed in witches trolls and all that sort of thing, saw the devil and farted at him regularly.) I actually went into this book knowing a fair bit about Martin Luther and what he did, however I didn’t understand much of the politics behind what happened. In particular the effect of the rising German nationalism that forced Luther’s hand on many occasions. Frederick’s knights that accompanied him to Worms actually had order to kill him if he recanted!

In the end I think that the point of the book is that rising nationalism and trade and the rising humanist movement led to the collapse of the church’s control over the new nation states. And that was the renaissance. If you don’t know much about the period it is a good read as it will give you a (relatively) quick overview. If you already know a bit, but don’t have the connections between events, this is a good read because by the end of the book it does a pretty good job of linking them together.

A couple things that might annoy you: He says that the reformation ended the renaissance, but then that leaves Kepler and Galileo out. In fact I recently read another article on the middle ages which claimed that there was no Renaissance. The period of technological, artistic and philosophical advances were too spread out to define a nice period to call the Renaissance. He also spends a little too much time praising Erasmus in my opinion. Sure he was great and all, and helped spread humanism, but from Manchester’s own writing in the book it seem to me like nationalism and politics had much more to do with it than humanism which affected a tiny portion of the population.

Another thing that might annoy you is the end. It is almost like he realized he was siding with the thinkers too much and wanted to throw a man of action in there. He devoted the third chapter of the book to Magellan. I admit, the dude was cool, but he did not prove the world was round by circumnavigating it. Many people already knew it. And he didn’t vindicate copernicus. He knew the world was round, he was proving that the sun was the center of the solar system instead. I just don’t get why Magellan is in there. That part of the book is very well written and reads really quickly. He also ties up all the other parts of the book in that chapter. He does point out how people bringing stories of other, similar, religions from all over the planet brings into question the divinity of Christ, but Magellan is an odd figure to use for that since he was actually one of the greatest proselytizers history has ever know. He began the near complete conversion of the Philippines with almost no loss of life (other than his own).

All in all a very good book. Make it through the beginning (which is fun to read about, just disjointed) and you will be rewarded with an interesting look at an interesting time in the history of Europe.

Finally if you like reading about scandal read this book. Manchester really digs up all of the badness of the Borges and the reformation and the counterreformation and presents it in all its glory. And then puts in a bunch of caveats so you feel like you are reading a learned book.

And finally. It would suck to be left on the Tierre Del Fuego for having tried to mutiny. I mean really really suck.

I am about to head off to NY for a week, so this well be a quick post, but I just discovered something that may be of interest to some people who read this. As part of the 10.3.9 update that came just before the Tiger release (which I won’t be getting for a while I guess. The tiger release, not 10.3.9 which seem to be running great for me) they also included safari 1.3. This release of safari include a number of great improvements which among other things make web browsing much faster, but also is much more standards compliant. In particular it fixes the transparency bug that I believe I complained about earlier. You can now print maps with directions from google maps on safari! Woo hoo! That is great! I have to give Apple come kudos there. In addition their javascript implementation seems all around faster, but that is much harder to see.

SO I finally plowed through the entire review that Alain gave in his comment. Overall Tiger looks awesome. The one thing I didn’t like I don’t like so much that it almost makes me not actually want to upgrade at all. Apparently in Tiger, the searching happens on a file granular basis. Because of this, in order to search e-mail, they will need to abandon the venerable mbox format. I don’t know how many of you know my mail habits, but in the bad old days I used to switch mailers all the time. The common thread was the mbox format. Somewhere along the road I decided that Eudora would be my backup system from then on, so I started saving all my mail in Eudora. Their file format is very close to mbox, but has some flaws. When apple’s mail came out I thought it used some proprietary format. Well it turns out that they just needed some extra stuff that mbox didn’t include, so rather than expanding it like Eudora did, they just included the extra info in other files and packaged it all together in a os x “Package”. But the underlying format was a true unadulterated mbox. I discovered a mail program that would work even better than Eudora as my archival format. Well it looks like they are abandoning that nice, pure, dare I say perfect? format. *sigh*

Looks like I’ll have to make a trip to the Apple store and play with Tiger’s mail implementation and see how it works on the inside. Dude that would suck, I finally switched over last year and have been loving life ever since. Oh well.

I am not making this up. Apparently Bill Gates has teamed up with Ford on making computer infrastructures in cars. “Eventually, Gates said, there could be a car that wouldn’t let itself crash.” Maybe we should work on computers that don’t let themselves crash first?