maunderings of a meandering mind

For the last seven and a half years, the government's been screaming at us to Be Afraid!! all the damned time. That got old quickly, and seriously old about the time they started making me take my shoes off at the airport.

And now Google joins in?!?

This morning, I went to do an innocuous search — and all of my results came back marked

"This site may harm your computer"

I did four increasingly innocuous searches, ending with a search on "table" ( (Full-size screenshot behind the cut.) )
Out of all four of my searches, the only hits of the first ten not to have that warning were the one sponsored link I got, and links to Google's own "shopping results for <search_term>' page.

Way to go live with a new feature, Google!

(To be fair, Google would have to screw up on this scale an order of magnitude more often to be seriously competitive with Microsoft. I should also note that by the time I was done writing this, the bug was gone.)

I don't remember whether I've posted about it or not, but my okd phone (a treo 680) had been on its last legs for a few months, crashing roughly once a day, having sync problems, and just generally being annoying. The earliest I could renew my contract with AT&T and be eligible for a subsidized phone was Dec. 9. So first thing last Tuesday morning, I went to the AT&T store. It took less than 20 minutes to leave with my new iPhone, with a reasonably full charge and ready to take calls. (The guy would even have transferred my phonebook from the old phone if I hadn't seen what he was doing and stopped him: One of the problems I'd been having was that syncing would introduce garbage duplicate records. I hadn't synced for a couple of weeks, and had cleaned up my Mac's address book in anticipation of a clean start.)

I haven't been playing with it obsessively, as some of my friends might, but I dare say i've gotten fairly well acquainted. Overall, I don't think I've felt like a new toy was this cool since I got my Palm Pilot 5000¹ in 1996. At that time, I remember talking about how I was holding as much computer in the palm of my hand as the Mac Plus of roughly ten years earlier. Now I'm once again holding as much computer in my hand as a roughly ten year old Mac — but that's one hell of a lot more computer, and you can get a lot more done with it. Plus, another ten years of really smart people thinking about palmtop UIs have gone into the iPhone, and boy does it show.

That said, there's plenty of gushing about the iPhone out there, and it's not without its frustrations. So I'm going to focus on some of those. Starting with the on-screen keyboard: this has to be the most annoying and error-prone UI device ever. I thought it would be slightly worse than the Treo's thumb keyboard; instead, I find it takes me two or three times as long to enter any text I need to. And because of Steve's control-freak instincts, not only is there on option of using a bluetooth keyboard when I really care about entering text, but I'm told the architecture would make it nearly impossible even if Apple changed their minds and wanted to allow it. (There is a report of a beta Graffiti, but it would require jailbreaking my iPhone, and I'm not that frustrated about text entry. Yet.)

One place where Apple's control-freak attitude is just flabbergastingly stupid is alert tones. It's not just that the only way to add a ringtone without hacking is to buy it from ITMS, although that's certainly annoying. No: Consider my choices for sounds settings. Silent mode is a physical switch on the phone, which is totally the right way to do that; the sound settings also give me independent control over whether the phone vibrates in silent and ring mode — as you would expect from even the most basic phone these days. Those aside, here follow all of my sound choices:

Item	Choices
Ringtone	Menu w/ 25 items
New Text Message	Menu w/ 7 items, including 'None'
New Voicemail	On/Off
New Mail	On/Off
Sent Mail	On/Off
Calendar Alerts	On/Off
Lock Sounds	On/Off
Keyboard Clicks	On/Off

And what do I do if I don't like the alert tone Apple chose for, say, Calender Alerts? (Which, as it happens, I don't: the phone has to be sitting on the table in front of me for me to even notice it. Which makes it pretty pointless.) Or if I would like a vibrating alert in addition to the sound for something other than a call? Apple's answer appears to be "Sucks to be you."

Which brings me to another matter, Apple's arbitrariness in its role as App Store gatekeeper. Perhaps their contract with AT&T really does require them to limit the functionality of iPhone apps. But given that Steve used that excuse for his original decision not to allow third party applications at all, only to backpedal on it and open the App Store a year later (and given the applications that exist on other smartphones), I'm dubious. I like Apple a lot, and I'm an Apple shareholder, but I hope if they don't get their head out of their ass about this, someone finds a way to drag it out in court.

And while we're on the subject of the App Store: Damn, what a terrible UI. If I have to use iTunes as a special-purpose web browser, can't I at least please have spacebar give me page-down? And how about letting command-click open, if not a new tab, at least a new window? And command-left-arrow take me back a page? No, scratch all that: Just make the damned App Store a fucking website, only calling iTunes for downloading. (Then, among other things, people could link to App Store descriptions of iPhone apps in a discussion like this, instead of having to Google for a page about each app, and mostly not finding a satisfactory one.) The App Store also turns out to get an F in arithmetic: A couple days ago I was looking at two iPhone spreadsheets. Both, according to the App Store, have an average customer rating of three stars. But when I looked at the reviews for one of them, which has only been out about three weeks and only had eight reviews, I found myself thinking these don't average three.. In fact those ratings are 1, 5, 3, 5, 5, 4, 5, and 4 — that's a total of 32. Dividing 32 by 8 and getting 3 is the kind of arithmetic I expect from politicians, not computer companies.³ Oh, and Apple: once you've mastered the arithmetic thing, maybe you could get your buddies at Google to help you with the search thing? Searching the App Store for "spreadsheet" gets me 34 apps, of which at most a half-dozen are spreadsheets and another dozen or so special-purpose apps you might, if you squint, think of as spreadsheet-like. The rest include the likes of gFlashPro (a flashcard program) and RPN Calculator, neither of which appear (there is no searching or copy-pasting the descriptions; see previous remarks about iTunes sucking as a web browser) to even have the word in its description. And none of those 34 is i123, whose description starts "i123 is a spreadsheet program for iPhone...."


One last point: I really love having high-speed internet in my pocket, and the combination of that plus GPS had me thinking of the iPhone as a basic navigation tool after only a few days. I was consequently extremely frustrated last night when I couldn't get any network connectivity, even though I had four or five bars of voice connectivity. I'd have gotten home a good 20 minutes sooner last night if that had been working. (Or if I hadn't assumed it would work and had instead done what I would have last weekend or any other time in the past decade: spent a few minutes downloading and printing maps and directions before I left.) I'm told losing 'net is a known issue, and that switching into and back out of airplane mode. Call me naive, but I expected a product that's been out for five months and sold tat least eight million units to be out of beta.

Now, to close on a positive note, some things I'm enjoying about my iPhone:

Favorite way to kill time on the T:

Tiltsnake: the classic snake game, controlled by swipes of your finger — or, if you change a setting (which, oddly, has to be done in the Settings app, not in Tiltsnake itself) by using the iPhones accelerometer.

Best amusement:

urbanspoon: Launch it, give it permission to use your location, and shake your iPhone to see a slot-machine display (with appropriate sound effects) of nearby restaurants. Keep shaking til you find one you want to try. (I have not yet used it to find a place to eat, but it's fun to play with.)

Best gee-whiz UI:

Google Mobile app: Pick up the phone, launch the app, hold it up to your ear, speak your search, hold it in front of you, and read the results. Totally amazing. Now I know why they've been giving away 1-800-GOOG-411.

Most useful:

The strangely named Air Sharing: a combination of a WebDAV server that runs on your iPhone — enabling you to easily upload any files you might want to have in your pocket — and a file browser that lets you look at them, in most of the formats you might care about. This is so much cooler than it sounds. The other day I spent roughly an hour on the T, reading a book all the while without having brought my bag. I can review a spreadsheet, show someone my resume, or proofread a friend's thesis, all in this one app.

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¹ Boy do I wish I'd hung on to that little piece of computing history.

² Called, imaginatively enough, "Spreadsheet" and "Spreadsheet LX" — I want a ringside seat if one of those developers sues the other for trademark infraction.

³ Yes, I checked the other as well: Its 59 reviews average 3.17, for which rounding to 3 is entirely sensible.

The museum and associated projects at Bletchley Park are in dire need of funding. Historic buildings are crumbling and need restoration. Despite its historical importance it receives no ongoing public funding and is urgently seeking donations. The iconic Victorian Mansion alone requires somewhere in the region of £1,000,000 for repairs and some of the symbolic Codebreaking Huts are in a desperate state of decay.

More at savebletchleypark.com.¹

They're soliciting donations. If you live in the UK, they're also soliciting signatures for an e-petition to Downing Street to get government funding.

It would be a shame to see this important part of geek history fall into ruin.

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¹ Yes, that URL caused me to consider the possibility that it's a scam targeted at geeks. The donation link takes you to bletchleypark.org.uk, which has been in DNS for ten years and is registered to Bletchley Park Trust Limited. So if it's a geek-targed scam, they're thorough and have a long planning horizon.

I'm told I should be able to use iChat on my Mac to have audio or audio-video conference with a Windows user using the latest official AIM client. If you're a Windows + AIM user, and would like to let me try this with you, please leave your AIM username and some times today or tomorrow when you'll be available (don't forget to mention your timezone) in a comment. (Or if you're uncomfortable doing that, in email to xela AT mit.edu.)

The goal here is for me to be able to send mail to Windows users I want to talk over the net with saying "Do these things and we can talk online."

Thanks in advance!

I just for the second time in as many months bought coffee at Shaws in Porter. And for the second time in as many months, realized only when I got home that I had forgotten to grind it. I never do this at Whole Foods.

I am tempted to attribute this (geek is a rationalizing animal, after all) to a subconscious aversion to the grinders at Shaws, which are always so grungy that I suspect they've never been cleaned, and which my nose can't help but notice have been used for that sin against nature, flavoured coffee.

I'm looking for a tool to help me filter my email. Whenever I've mentioned this before, someone always mentions procmail. At which point I take a cursory look at procmail, find myself thinking about cats having hairballs, and go do something else.

But at this point, even though I have really excellent spam filtering, my mail is getting unmanageable. Before I actually dig in to the procmail hairball, I'd like to know what, if any, alternatives I should look at.

I think my pony here would be a special purpose language (or better, a python module) with which I could write scripts that I would run either directly on maildirs on my imap server (i.e. I would run them as a local user on the sserver), or that would function essentially as a scriptable imap client.

My starting point for thinking about the features I want is mh: I've been using shell scripts and mh to filter my MIT mail for years; at minimum I want the features that gives me. Which is, in a nutshell, the ability to filter on the content of any header. I could live with less annoying syntax, though:

# punt any discussion involving tom lord on fsb
rmm `pick -lbrace -to fsb -or -cc fsb -rbrace -and \  
          -lbrace -from lord@emf.net -or -to lord@emf.net -or \
          -cc lord@emf.net -rbrace `

Leaving aside how inefficient that code is, I could totally do with being able to express that instead as:

for item in inbox:
    if item.to(fsb@crynwr.com) or item.cc(fsb@crynwr.com):
        for user in ["lord@emf.net", ... ]:
            if item.to(user) or item.cc(user) or item.from(user):
                trash(item)

        refile(item, fsb_folder)

I'd also like to be able to alter messages.

    if item.from(my_fax_service):
        # save a copy of the original just in case
        copy(message, fax_archive_folder)
        for element in item.body.parts:
            if element.type != 'application/pdf':
                delete(element)
        refile(item, faxes)

So, if anyone knows of a mail filtering system that would be closer to my pony than procmail, I'd love to hear about it.

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Edit: Added 2007-11-01 at 19:29

I forgot to mention one of the main reasons this is a pony: I should have made clear that part of the reason I'm thinking in terms of something I can run on the files in a maildir is that I don't necessarily just want to filter mail upon receipt. For instance, I'd like to be able to run aging filters, to archive or trash messages past a certain age that match certain criteria. Or to send mail to myself saying, e.g., "You have mail in your personal inbox from Charlie that's two weeks old. You should answer that and refile it." That said, I'm not really expecting to find my pony, and am looking at sieve docs right now....

I was thinking of riding my bike somewhere today and realized I have no idea what's become of the key to my bike lock. It's an old Kryptonite "New York" lock: A heavy square-stock hardened chain with a small U-lock, not much bigger than a typical padlock to hold the ends of the chain together. I could get a new key for the lock, but I suspect it's suceptable to a variant of the bic pen attack, and fortunately I stored it unlocked, so it hardly seems worthwhile. Instead, I'd like to see if I can find a different lock to use with the chain. I'd like to find a lock that wouldn't be conspicuously the weakest link in comparison to the chain. Can anyone recommend a padlock (or some other type of lock) that would be roughly as daunting to thieves with bolt cutters as heavy hardened steel chain?

I often use Google when I'm not sure how a word is spelled, especially when I have two alternative spellings in mind, on the theory that if the number of hits differs by an order of magnitude or more, the one with more hits is probably correct. Today I tried this in a way I quickly realized was subtly sloppy, with misleading results:

• 4,660,000 for hermann miller
• 806,000 for herman miller

Two "n"s beats one by better than five to one, that's straightforward enough. But I can't help but notice that the top four hits for both searches (i.e. the ones I can see without scrolling) all conspicuously say "Herman Miller", with one "n". What's up with that?

What it is, of course, is that I'd constructed my search sloppily. I was interested in how Herman[n] is spelled when conjoined to "Miller", but what I had searched for was how it is spelled when the two words happen to appear on the same web page. A situation in which, for whatever reason, Hermann vastly outnumbers Herman. Putting a dot between the two words* yields:

• 28,900 for hermann.miller
• 2,080,000 for herman.miller

One hundred to one. Now that's more like it....

* Googling miserable.failure and "miserable failure" are equivalent; I prefer the former because it's less typing and I'm lazy.

Every geek has had the experience of saying a word aloud that they learned from reading &mdash and discovering that they pronounce it wrong. It's rather a rite of passage for young adult geeks¹. It's been a few years since I experienced this phenomenon from the speaker's side. But yesterday I found myself using the word "fecund" in a sentence — and just as the F sound started passing my lips, realized I did not know how to pronounce it. Which isn't to say I didn't have a pronunciation all loaded up and ready to emerge from my lips. But I had no idea whether it was, in fact, the normal pronunciation². This tangential thought caused me to screw up the bit of mental arithmetic necessary for the rest of the sentence, such that I said "August" when I meant "May".

(Perhaps the threat lies not in a large vocabulary, but in the meta-state of observing yourself stumbling over your own vocabulary and thereby menacing your arithmetic skills.)

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¹  I do wonder, with the advent of computer dictionaries that will pronounce a word for you at the click of a mouse, whether we may be the last generation of nerds to share this common experience. It is both vastly quicker to look up a word online than in a paper dictionary, and much less work to click your mouse than to figure out your dictionary's pronunciation key. I'm sure if I were a kid today I would use an online dictionary far more than I in fact used paper ones when I was little. (I was always very fond of dictionaries, but it was nevertheless rare that I wouldn't try to puzzle out a new word from context first, and only turn to a dictionary if I couldn't. Or — rarely — when eiher zero or two obvious pronunciations occurred to me.) This is, of course, not an unmixed blessing: We may also be the last generation discover the pleasure of browsing the dictionary.
²  According to thefreedictionary.com I in fact mangled it rather badly.