Tuesday, 12/16/08

He’s no Paypal of mine

A few weeks ago I bought a shiny US Robotics V.90 modem on eBay, as the one connected to the office’s space-age phone system had failed. (By space-age, I mean I’d think was designed in the 60s if it wasn’t running OS/2.) I would have appreciated being able to have the modem delivered to the office, but the seller would only ship to “confirmed” Paypal addresses, which for me was home. So I lost a day on the delivery, and had to stay home to sign for it.

Persuading Paypal to accept my work address as valid consists of them sending me a letter via US Mail with a code in it. The code, when it arrived last Friday in one of those tear-on-three-sides security envelopes, was twenty digits long. “This seems excessive,” I observed to myself as I typed it in. That was not the end of the process. Entering the code delivered me to a new page, containing a portly barcode, which Paypal instructed me to fax to an area code in Omaha. Fax! And I’d thought the US Robotics modem was obsolete technology.

But I did it, naively expecting that some friendly robot would read the barcode and I’d get the confirmation email within the hour. Four days later, that email arrived:

This message confirms that we have received the documents you sent to PayPal. […] We review documents in the order in which they are received and generally require 3 to 5 business days to process these documents. Once we process your documents, we will contact you about the status of your PayPal Account.

So much for friendly robots — but wait! The followup arrived a scant four minutes later:

To confirm your alternate address we need additional information.

1. A valid photo ID (driver’s license, passport, or military id).
2. A copy of a utility bill or a credit card statement or a bank account statement.

If the address is your place of employment, please send a pay stub or business card showing your name and the alternate address you wish to have confirmed.

When submitting this information, please make sure your name and the alternate address you wish to confirm appear on the statement.

What, no notary? I don’t think I’m willing to jump through that many hoops without a wetsuited trainer tossing fish into my mouth. Meanwhile, it’ll be far less work to briefly change the billing address on one of my credit cards, which Paypal idiotically trusts. 10:23PM «

Saturday, 12/13/08

Doom

All the howling about the shortcomings of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” made me doubt my recollection of Temple of Doom. So I re-watched the latter, under near-ideal big-home-theater circumstances, and I defy anyone to name a Spielberg movie that’s any worse.

I’ll stipulate that Crystal Skull features excessive George Lucas, a cavalier use of the Ark warehouse, a moderately annoying adolescent sidekick, parallel roads in a rain forest, a poor grasp of both atomic weapons and magnetism, and superfluous aliens. But it also has Karen Allen, Cate Blanchett, and Ray Winstone, who make up for a lot of ills. I saw Crystal Skull with my dad, 19 years after the two of us saw the previous installment, and we had a fine time.

Temple of Doom, after stumbling through an opening sequence that would have been cut from Big Trouble In Little China, comes right back with cavalier use of Dan Akroyd, a pre-adolescent karate-kicking orphan sidekick, parallel unsafe trolly tracks, no conception of which cultures subscribe to voodoo, and a lazy deus ex machina rescue, which would have insulted the audience even if it didn’t consist of delivery from Indian brutes by the British Empire.

Did everyone somehow forget the dining sequence, with the creepy kid-Mararajah? Larry David couldn’t conjure a worse audience embarrassment, and it only fails to stop the movie cold by making Indy too distracted to eat. Lucas’ decision to weakly retread his own trash-compactor scene just six years after Star Wars would have been inexplicable even without putting Harrison Ford in it. And for the Thuggee zombie-juice to be instantly reversible by fire, in caverns where fire is the only light source, makes even less sense than the aliens in Signs besieging a planet that’s 71% covered in water.

And then there’s Kate Capshaw, whose role is so shrilly unappealing that as a ~12-year-old boy seeing this for the first time, I not only couldn’t figure out what Indy liked about her, their continued relationship seemed like a black mark against heterosexuality. To go from Marion Ravenwood to Willie Scott is like breaking up with Formula One and having a fling with a Costco parking lot.

It’s a tribute to the quality of Raiders that the franchise didn’t die with this stinker. I’d sit through Hook, A.I., and Jurassic Park 2 all back-to-back before this again. 04:43PM «

Monday, 08/04/08

My belated iPod touch review

I bought the 16GB iPod touch the weekend it came out, by parking myself with the laptop in the U-Village Apple store’s theater section, and to illustrate what a bad blogger I am, this was long enough ago that the store has since been remodeled and the theater section razed.

I could see the service door from the theater, and figured I would notice the day’s shipment hitting the floor (iPods were selling out instantly, but weren’t in such high demand that people were queueing). To prevent my self-esteem from falling too far, I limited myself to the charge of a single battery. And it worked! I brought that sucker home feeling like I’d scored a pint-size version of the 2001 monolith.

This was setting expectations too high, and for weeks I felt ambivalent about the thing, because a) it quickly proved to be a mediocre iPod, and b) the software development story was far from clear.

It was a bad iPod in that it required visual interaction to make frequent changes like volume adjustments or track-skipping, both things I could do by touch while the previous model was still in my pocket, and likewise issues that the iPhone had managed to avoid. It’s also surprisingly bad at precise scrubbing, as I discovered all over again when my mom tried to use it on a car trip. Also, I was ambivalent because the Touch had 20% of the capacity of the iPod I’d bought the year earlier, while costing more.

I thought I’d explore jailbroken software development but underestimated my distaste for undocumented frameworks. (I couldn’t even muster interest in Core Animation until Leopard shipped.) Eventually Apple announced the official SDK and even later than that they delivered it, and despite the bizarre developer NDA policy and still-missing pieces and Apple’s strings attached to software distribution, it is bloody terrific. Writing software for the iPhone/iPod is the ground floor of something that will eventually be bigger than the Mac. I have no idea what the ceiling is going to be for the platform.

All that came later. I was still leaning toward returning the iPod in its first two weeks because of the lack of hardware volume control. I changed my mind watching Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” in bed, when Marlowe opens an envelope in the elevator and finds this:

My first thought upon seeing such a ludicrous denomination was, of course, the Mr. Plow episode of the Simpsons, where Homer cons Barney into driving out to Widow’s Peak:

Homer: There’s a $10,000 bill in it for you.
Barney: Oh yeah? Which president’s on it?
Homer: Uh, all of ‘em! They’re having a party. Jimmy Carter’s passed out on the couch.

My second thought was that someone in the movie thought Philip Marlowe was as gullible as Barney Gumble, but that didn’t make any kind of contextual sense. So I paused the movie and googled for “five thousand dollar bill”, which swiftly led me to Wikipedia’s page for large denomination bills in US currency, which told me that Nixon had withdrawn the $5K bill in 1969, only four years before the movie came out, but that they were still legal tender, which made a certain oddball sense for a movie that has already yanked its protagonist forward in time by four decades.

I also learned that the true face of the $10,000 bill was Salmon P. Chase, civil war-era Governor of and Senator from Ohio, as well as the sixth chief justice of the US Supreme Court. But the most important thing that I learned was that the iPod touch’s true value was that it was the first desirable device short of a laptop that allows one to both watch and fact-check a movie without getting out of bed. OK with me. 07:58AM «

Sunday, 07/27/08

It’s getting pretty Putiny in here

John L. Allen Jr, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI”, in the paper of record today:

In a nutshell, [1968 papal encyclical] “Humanae Vitae” held that the twin functions of marriage — to foster love between the partners and to be open to children — are so closely related as to be inseparable. In practice, that meant a resounding no to the pill.

The encyclical quickly became seen, both in the secular world and in liberal Catholic circles, as the papacy’s Waterloo. It was so out of sync with the hopes and desires of the Catholic rank and file that it simply could not stand.

And in some ways, it didn’t. Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding 80 percent.

But at the official level, Catholicism’s commitment to “Humanae Vitae” is more solid than ever.

[…]

Advocates of the encyclical draw assurance from the declining fertility rates across the developed world, especially in Europe. No country in Europe has a fertility rate above 2.1, the number of children each woman needs to have by the end of her child-bearing years to keep a population stable.

Emphasis mine. Given the Times’ copyediting standards, is it unfair to think that this isn’t just a Freudian slip, and that to be the sort of Catholic who believes Humanae Vitae was correctly argued, you also have to misunderstand the difference between population averages, and the reproductive responsibility of “each woman”? Even when the number is expressed fractionally?

No, probably not, but between the copyeditors and Mr. Allen, there’s still enough egg on faces to feed a good Catholic family breakfast for a week. 11:40AM «

Sunday, 05/18/08

Colonel Panic seeks Generalissimo Chillpill

I left the laptop at home on Friday, where its last normal Time Machine backup was at 5:30 PM. At 6:30 something odd happened; that was around the time I got home but I’m not sure what it was. Friday night the machine kernel-panicked a couple of times, which is unusual. As Google had nothing useful to contribute, here’s the panic log, with the marginally interesting bits highlighted:

Fri May 16 22:51:59 2008
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0031E569): "hfs_getnewvnode: bad ca_blocks (too small)"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.4.31/bsd/hfs/hfs_cnode.c:660
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 
0x52bef5a8 : 0x12b0f7 (0x4581f4 0x52bef5dc 0x133230 0x0) 
0x52bef5f8 : 0x31e569 (0x484f4c 0x65b52ec 0x14 0xf2d92) 
0x52bef698 : 0x32f7d4 (0x10802804 0x0 0x52bef788 0x52bef7b0) 
0x52bef7e8 : 0x32facf (0x10802804 0x66d10b 0x52bef93c 0x1) 
0x52bef848 : 0x1f66f4 (0x5c15260 0x66d10b 0x0 0x52bef93c) 
0x52bef898 : 0x1d524a (0x5c15260 0x66d10b 0x0 0x52bef93c) 
0x52bef958 : 0x1c3708 (0x52befa00 0x1040ec9c 0x52bef9c8 0x19d8da) 
0x52beff78 : 0x3dcf13 (0x5ae3c50 0x779bc20 0x779bc64 0x6d498c4) 
0x52beffc8 : 0x19f1c3 (0x6456a60 0x0 0x1a20b5 0x851a7d8) 
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xb0101218

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: backupd

Mac OS version:
9C7010

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro2,2 (Mac-F42187C8)

By the next morning it was clear that the machine was hanging on every backup cycle. It wasn’t quite hourly, because fsevents had gotten out of sync and it had to perform a full-disk scan each time, which knocked it off schedule. At some point during each backup cycle (whether during the scan or the copy, I don’t know) it was invariably panicking with the above signature, which is pretty much the worst thing a frequently-recurring data-saving device can reasonably do, short of actively deleting things.

I had the bright idea to remove, in Time Machine, that most recent 5:30 PM backup, but that also caused a panic. I noticed the following morning that a 6:30 PM backup with the “.inprogress” filename extension was still hanging around in my Time Machine backups directory, which the Finder allowed me to delete, however, doing so had no effect on the panics. I was able to use the Time-Machine tweaked version of GrandPerspective on the 5:30 backup, which ran without complaint and showed it to be wholly unexceptional. Not very interesting.

Sadly, I have no concrete resolution to report to anyone else who’s seeing this irritating condition. I renamed the TM sparse image (I’m using a Time Capsule), which smoothly caused TM to recreate it and start from scratch with a new initial backup, which I re-ran over gigabit last night. It’s since done five incremental backups, which at least suggests the problem was in the backup, not on my disk, and while that means I won’t lose the whole weekend to this, it also means the problem is likely more prevalent.

If anyone has any bright ideas to try, I’ve still got the afflicted backup image, and next week when I’m over some deadlines I plan to give it another go, using tms and more concerted efforts to delete the trailing backup or two.

Belated update! Matt Deatherage did the responsible thing, located the error in the Darwin source, and suggested running Disk Utility’s repair command on the mounted sparseimage. DU cranked away over wi-fi for just over eight hours (the image was about 140 MB at that point), but when it was done, the panics ceased. If it happens to you, I suggest performing that surgery over gigabit, which may shave off some time. Thanks Matt! 09:36AM «

Saturday, 04/12/08

What Variety hath wrought

I have a lot of contempt, and also some bile, for the made-up Hollywood hipster vocabulary of Variety, and I hate to see it spread to smaller movie news sites and outlets. I didn’t realize the severity of the problem until last week, when the Seattle Times ran the headline, “7 Billion Gives Shaky WaMu Firmer Footing For Now”, and my first thought was, “What the hell is a ‘firmer’?” 09:47PM «

Sunday, 04/06/08

O frabjous day!

Fafblog is back, at least for the present. They went off the air in 2006 a day after I sent them a small amount of cash, and I’ve always felt somehow responsible. 09:00PM «

Things I’d have tweeted if Twitter were not currently down, first in a series

I completely approve of Summer Glau becoming an xkcd recurring character. 12:06AM «

Saturday, 04/05/08

The wreckage of April 1

April 1 foolishness is bad enough before it gets timeshifted to days when Americans aren’t culturally conditioned to expect lies (surely also one of our most unpleasant cultural exports). I’m doing dishes tonight listening to Marketplace podcasts from the last few days, and they launch into this story about how the IRS is issuing refunds in the form of consumer goods to taxpayers whose financial situations make them more likely to save or pay down debt than continue to prop up the economy with spending.

I think I just made it sound funnier than it really was. First I’m wondering why, if this subprime couple got their IRS air-conditioner in February, it’s only a tax-time story in April. I had started to figure it out by the time Robert Reich told a long anecdote about Viagra. The story ends and Kai Ryssdal sheepishly recommends that I check my calendar. It’s April 5th, Kai. David Brancaccio called, he wants his radio voice back. 11:59PM «

Happy Q2

Apparently I have a rule about not blogging during the first calendar quarter. It’s new. 11:57PM «

Monday, 12/31/07

Lie to me, Barack

Another calendar month of blog neglect? To get in under the wire, I leave you with the two best things I’ve seen written about Barack Obama’s maddening campaign strategy: Lambert Strether with the negative view that Obama really believes the highly effective twaddle he’s been delivering, and Mark Schmitt, with the positive view that Obama is a crafty badass who’s rooked the left in order to rope-a-dope the right. I’m leaning slightly toward Schmitt (who is nearly always right), but I can’t tell how much I’m coloring that opinion with hope — which is the crux of Obama’s schtick right there. 11:35AM «

Wednesday, 11/07/07

VNsea

It’s well-established that I am a neglectful blogger, and I haven’t finished writing anything about the iPod Touch that I bought the first weekend it was available. I’m still pretty conflicted about the little bugger, though less so than the first couple of weeks. In a nutshell, there are things it does extremely well, but “being an iPod” is not one of them.

I break radio silence now to praise VNsea, the first fabulously useful third-party iPhone/Touch app I’ve seen. It’s a full-on VNC client, capable of displaying remote computers’ displays in full color. Versions previous to .5 were pretty much read-only, but .5 is a vast improvement, delivering resizability, rotation support, and a full keyboard, including a row of buttons substituting for modifier keys. The password is still stored and displayed in plain text, which limits its utility in even the least security-conscious situations, but it’s a tremendously impressive piece of work. 10:59PM «

Saturday, 09/15/07

Kashrut

I stopped for something resembling breakfast this morning at a kosher Noah’s Bagels tucked into a grocery store. I learned it was kosher some time ago when I asked why they didn’t carry asiago, my gateway bagel. Today, while standing in a long line of Washington Husky football fans engaged in varying degrees in public displays of affection (their poor team not yet having lost 33-14), I found myself confronting the store’s framed kosher certification, which included these two fascinating addenda, emphasis in original:

Sliced bagels are only Pareve if sliced by machine. Hand-sliced bagels are considered dairy.

The Egg Mit Bagel and Breakfast Panini are only acceptably kosher when the customer turns on the microwave used to cook the eggs. Store clerks will direct the customer to the microwave upon request.

I wonder how often they get that request. 10:31PM «

Tuesday, 09/11/07

Bury that lede

It’s almost midnight and maybe I’m missing something, but the eighth paragraph of this article on Guiliani’s electability among conservatives drops this nugget like it’s nothing:

Six of 10 Republicans surveyed, including an equal number of conservatives, said they would be willing to vote for someone whose views were less conservative than their own if they believed the candidate was electable.

In other words, four in ten Republicans, and an equal number of the furthest right Republicans, tell pollsters they won’t vote for someone less conservative than they are even if it means losing an election. It’s the sort of tough talk that I’m inclined to dismiss as predictive of behavior, but in this case, considering the weakness of the Republican field of candidates, it’s a shock just that so many ostensible voters said it. 12:01AM «

Sunday, 08/19/07

Netflix

Eye-popping graf from a story about Netflix’s new emphasis on 24-hour high-quality customer service (to the exclusion of email-based support):

Ms. Funk, 36, said some people call because they are lonely. Her lengthiest call of that kind lasted 35 minutes. Others need basic help with their computers or with the Internet. Some people do not own a computer and call regularly to have a call center employee rearrange the titles in their queue.

Wow. 10:46AM «