Up in northern New Jersey is Pyramid Mountain, a trek up which yields a pretty amazing sight: Tripod Rock, a “glacial erratic” – a 160 ton boulder, to put it in simpler terms – abandoned by the receding Wisconsin glacier. What makes this massive rock amazing is that it is perched atop three comparatively tiny rocks, and this seemingly impossible arrangement has survived thousands of years.
On the left is a photograph of it, taken by me (click on the image for a larger version). Even to an amateur like me, it is evident that this is not a great photograph – among other failings, it is low on detail and sharpness. It has however one thing going for it on the photo sharing service Fotopedia: it is the only photograph of Tripod Rock that has been submitted to the site.
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It is I think by now well known that Google’s IMAP interface was an afterthought that was awkwardly grafted onto their splendidly useful label paradigm, and as a result promises chronic annoyances for those actually using it full-time. You could follow Google’s prescriptions for client configuration — here I will be talking about the OS X Mail app — to the dot, but find scant alleviation of your woes. Read the rest of this entry »
Via MacApper:
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article. “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
The question that follows naturally: after replacing MobileMe executives in retaliation for launch time SNAFUs, did Jobs find that the service attracted more customers or net greater love from existing users? I do not have the data, but I suspect not. If I am correct, this might be a rare case where Apple and Steve Jobs serve as a negative example: it’s easy to play the tough guy (ask Steve Ballmer) than try to identify the root causes of failure.
If like me you have not yet learnt to drop the ‘u’ from ‘colour’, then you might have noticed that Mac OS X Snow Leopard makes it annoyingly difficult to switch the system language preference, especially for spell checking (worse, I suspect the interface for spell check language settings is buggy). To that end, below is a quick outline of the steps I used to switch to British English (click on the small images to see the full version). Read the rest of this entry »
I am fairly certain I was one of the earliest adopter of Dropbox. I loved the simplicity of the application and the free version provided a generous amount of disk space (2GB). I used it religiously, recommended it to friends, and was ready to drop down to the terminal to create symlinks to get over Dropbox’s one big weakness: it’s crippling need for all sync’ed files to be rooted under a single directory. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been searching for an app that lets me quickly write notes that also double as tasks – and therefore could use a due date/time and reminder alarm. There is the built-in “todo” capability in OS X iCal, but not only does it sport a terrible UI, it is also dismal at syncing across computers (this feat can be accomplished, as far as I know, only by the hack of storing such Todos on an IMAP server). Below is a summary of my quirky search for such a tool. Quirky because the authors of these apps could justifiably object that their app is being unfairly evaluated here. For example, Day One is a journal application, not a note-taking app, much less a task manager. At the same time, there are candidates, like JustNotes, that have a reasonable claim to appear on any such list. But nevertheless, here they are:
Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least some of them):
All of them are free. One or two are ad-supported.
Three year olds are clever people. Take the example of my son who vehemently resisted our pleadings to ingest more food: “My stomach is full. There is just no place left for any more food”. But his resistance turned to enthusiasm when, just a few moments later, some ice cream made an appearance. Upon being reminded that by his own admission his stomach was out of room, he scoffed dismissively: “That’s my stomach for food. Ice cream goes into a different tummy“.
It is less humorous and hardly clever when a corporation adopts this line of defence. Nevertheless, time and again, this is the very approach employed by corporations both vending products and selecting them. Like most subterfuges the effect is achieved through wordplay, in this instance the [mostly] false dichotomy created using the words ‘consumer’ and ‘enterprise’. Read the rest of this entry »
Right at the outset I must admit that the title of this post is a fair bit exaggerated. Marco leaving Tumblr isn’t the sole cause of my reduced usage of Posterous. As is always the case, these things are complicated. So I shall explain.
Most important to note is that Posterous is a splendid service. It is well designed, managed, supported and its use of email as a significant interface is downright retro brilliant. To linger a bit on support, to make the point on how good Posterous is: head honcho Sachin Agarwal once spent multiple hours over many days trying to hunt down an import problem that blocked transferring my posts from a [by now] obscure CMS/blog system called Nucleus. These guys are dedicated. And I still use Posterous heavily for my family blog, where the email based interface beats anything else, to transmit the mundane activities of grandchildren to doting grandparents.
For their part, Tumblr is quick to respond to questions and offer help (though not necessarily as dedicated to fixing them). If you are shopping for a mini-blogging platform, the two platforms do offer an embarrassment of riches. But with all that, I find myself using my personal Tumblr site a lot more than my Posterous one (despite Posterous’s autopost feature which can make the content appear in both places). And I am yet to explain why.
People like lists. So here is one with three reasons why Tumblr won out for my personal mini-blogging.
Douglas Crockford, in the intro to Javascript: The Good Parts:
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature. Eventually I figured out that some of those features were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them were poorly specified, and so were more likely to cause portability problems. Some resulted in code that was difficult to read or modify. Some induced me to write in a manner that was too tricky and error-prone. And some of those features were design errors. Sometimes language designers make mistakes.
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature.
Eventually I figured out that some of those features were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them were poorly specified, and so were more likely to cause portability problems. Some resulted in code that was difficult to read or modify. Some induced me to write in a manner that was too tricky and error-prone. And some of those features were design errors. Sometimes language designers make mistakes.
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