Does anybody know which new API in Mac OS X 10.4 is the reason I can’t use iLike the Amazon MP3 Downloader on my Power Mac G4? Any can anybody tell me why it sucks?
Believe it or not, I actually can’t upgrade to 10.4, because it only comes on DVD-ROM and my, ahem, 6 year old G4 doesn’t have a DVD-ROM drive. (You can get CDs if you buy a copy of 10.4 and send Apple a check for ten or fifteen bucks, but… eh, no.) I will not be buying a new computer this year.
Via Andrew Sullivan comes this strange and interesting fact: Barack Obama was awarded more delegates (12) in New Hampshire than Hillary Clinton was (11). Despite the fact that the media covers the primaries as win or take all contests—and, thus, Clinton was victorious and Obama came in second—by the delegate apportionment metric the contest was a tie: they each got 9 pledged delegates. For some reason, Obama has one extra superdelegate, so he came out slightly ahead.
In fake terms, the tally is 1 for Obama, 1 for Clinton. In real terms, the tally is 25 for Obama, 24 for Clinton, and 18 for Edwards. (In really real terms—because the superdelegates are seemingly predetermined—the tally is 183 for Clinton, 78 for Obama, 52 for Edwards.)
On the Republican side, note that Mitt Romney—who “lost” two contests in a row—has the delegate lead with 24 to McCain’s 17 and Huckabee’s 14. If he keeps losing like that, he’ll win.
The takeaway from all of this is that the way we choose presidential candidates in this country is deeply and truly weird. Not only is the media narrative disconnected from the simple human and intellectual reality of the campaign (so that getting choked up becomes an emotional breakdown, or saying something sensible becomes a “gaffe”), it is disconnected from the political reality of the process: the one and only thing that matters here is who has more delegates. But instead we get to hear about who came in first and who cam in second and by how much and how that makes everybody feel…
Annie G. was voted only the second cutest dog in Baltimore, coming in behind a frankly not-that-cute mutt that had the good sense to yawn for the camera. People, you’re making me look like an asshole. How am I supposed to bring home the bacon if I can’t deliver votes?
This is awesome. As H says, there’s nobody better than Martin Scorsese:
I’m obviously not going to shoot them as I would, but… can I shoot them as Hitchcock? I don’t think so! So, who will I shoot them as? This is the question. This is the question and this is the process.
Fair warning: it’s a commercial.
This is my friend Mike’s dog Annie. Annie is the kind of dog that will jump up onto the couch and lay her head in your lap and look up at you with just exactly this look in her eyes. In short: she’s cute. But is she the Cutest Dog in Baltimore? I’d say so, but it’s not up to me. It’s up to you: the people of, um, Baltimore. Vote early and vote often.
We found this strange tombstone in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. No date of birth, no date of death. Just “Morrissey Rocks.” Is this the grave of some devoted, anonymous Morrissey fan? An man with an unusual name? Or did some hipster buy a plot and put up a stone, just for kicks? Would the cemetery allow that? I suppose I could call the management company and ask, but I’d prefer to let the Internet spontaneously reveal all.
The NY Times recipe for Turkey pot pie with chipotle and cheese is awesome, although I did make a few modifications. Instead of the “cheesy stick” lattice top, I made a biscuit topping from this Gourmet magazine recipe (I forgot to add the cheese and they didn’t really rise, but whatever). I used homemade Thanksgiving-turkey-carcass stock. I used 1 cup of heavy cream and 1 cup of whole milk (because I didn’t have enough cream). I added about a 1.5 cups of sliced shitake mushrooms and 1.5 cups of mixed grated Cheddar/Monterey Jack/Colby along with the turkey and veggies. I sprinkled about 1/2 cup of the cheese on top of the biscuits.
I don’t think any of these modifications made a huge amount of difference, although I can testify that it turned out plenty creamy without 2 cups of cream. I would not recommend attempting the cheesy stick lattice.
[UPDATE 12/2/1008] This recipe has frustrated me of late.
This is pretty much exactly how it went down when I upgraded to Gutsy.
Consider this a standing endorsement of xkcd.
I tentatively clicked “Remember current running applications” in Gnome Session Preferences (aka gnome-session-properties) and lived to regret it. What this does is it restarts any currently running application when you login. This is useful for, e.g., your online backup daemon, but kind of annoying for, e.g., five Emacs windows, Last.fm, some random Nautilus directory window, etc.
Now, first I tried checking and unchecking “Automatically remember running applications when logging out”, as the window layout makes it seem as if these two settings are related. They are not. Then, I was tempted to fix this by futzing with the “Startup Programs” or “Current Session” lists. This is Not Right.
The Right Thing is to close all your programs (or just the offending ones) and then click again on “Remember current running applications”. That is to say: the only way to change the “remembered” snapshot is to take another snapshot*.
Note: Session Preferences has a Help button, but the Gnome manual page on it doesn’t mention “Remember currently running programs” or “Automatically remember running applications when logging out”. This is annoying.
* Presumably there is a text file tucked away somewhere that controls this (maybe ~/.gnome2/session?), but I haven’t the patience to find out.
In the midst of some unrelated Googling, I came across Luca de Alfaro’s style guidelines for student co-authors. This is good stuff. I particularly like “one sentence per line” b/w “fill-sentence macro”. It’s an elegant solution to a frequently annoying deficiency of diff, which is unfortunately the baseline for anyone collaborating via CVS or SVN. I tweaked his macro to get nice indentation in AucTeX:
(defun fill-sentence ()
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(or (eq (point) (point-max)) (forward-char))
(forward-sentence -1)
(indent-relative)
(let ((beg (point)))
(forward-sentence)
(if (equal "LaTeX" (substring mode-name (string-match "LaTeX" mode-name)))
(LaTeX-fill-region-as-paragraph beg (point))
(fill-region-as-paragraph beg (point))))))
(global-set-key "\ej" 'fill-sentence)
[UPDATE 1/20/08] Fixed an off-by-one error when the cursor is on the first character of the sentence by adding (forward-char).
[UPDATE 9/19/08] Fixed an error when the cursor is at the end of the buffer by changing (forward-char) to (or (eq (point) (point-max)) (forward-char))
Contact: Chris
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