Advogato blog for broonie

Sunday afternoons

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:10:42 GMT

I do most of my reading in the atumn and winter. In the afternoon when the day is still I sit on my sofa, listen to music and read. On those days the light is grey and soft, casting shadows not much darker than the light itself - if you hold the page flat you can see the grain in the paper. During the summer there’s always some reason to do other things. In the winter there is so little natural light I feel I’m just making the most of what there is.

Today I’m doing that for the first time this year; summer is ending early.

Apple Mail and format=flowed

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:06:59 GMT

There’s one thing that the Apple Mail client gets right which I’ve never seen anything else try to do - the way it formats messages. Most mail clients seem to offer plain text and HTML as user selectable options and do exactly what they’re told regardless of the content of the message. If HTML is enabled they always send a mail with both text/plain and text/html renditions of the message. Normally the plain text version is a fixed, 80 column version. This is wasteful of bandwidth, especially since very few users actually use any formatting at all, and means that mail programs that don’t do HTML have to treat the mails as though the fixed layout the sending system chooses is important even when it results in poor layout (for example, on mobile devices with small screens).

What Apple Mail does here is to only enable the more complex formatting options if they add information that can’t be represented in the less complex formats. By default mails are sent in text/plain with the format=flowed option to let the reader know it can safely reflow the text and no HTML alternative is generated. If something that can’t be represented using format=flowed is included in the message then a HTML alternative is generated - transparently and without user intervention.

This is good partly because it’s nice to see format=flowed used, it’s a nice technical solution to the problem, but mostly because it’s great user interface design. Most Apple Mail users will never notice if it is or isn’t generating HTML e-mail, they’ll just see that it’s doing what they expect and won’t have to deal with an option that they probably don’t understand or have much of a view on. Other users won’t be troubled with HTML generated by Apple Mail users unless there is some content in the formatting. It’d be good to see more MUAs implementing similar behavior, at least optionally.

Touching like spacemen

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:09:31 GMT

Rhonda, have you reported the SCons problems you’ve found to either the Debian mantainer or upstream? That’s much more likely to be an effective way of improving things than blogging about them. For what it’s worth the .scons files are a bug in the SCons core AFAICT (it needs a distclean equivalent that doesn’t appear to be there; I suspect nobody has asked for it before) and the failure to clean up other generated files will be bugs in the support for whatever tool is being used to do the build.

Paradoxical Undressing

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:09:41 GMT

Paradoxical Undressing is a mostly spoken word show by Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave front woman Kristin Hersh. A series of ten minute autobiographical fragments covering the time up until about the first Throwing Muses album read over guitar riffs, interspersed with excerpts from songs (mostly hers but a couple of covers).

The texts have much of the obliqueness of her songwriting, made less obscure by the extra room for explanation that the extended form allows. Everything is apparently impressionistic and naive but expertly wrapped up and structured, with a wry humour taking the edge off the darker material and showing self knowledge that gives a great degree of insight into the experiences being described. Most of this text has been mailed (out on a mailing list I can’t find a link for right now) so it was familiar. The performance added a lot - Kristin has great timing and delivery, adding a lot of warmth to the proceedings.

Much of this has been covered in detail in other reviews but one of the things that particularly struck a chord with me which I don’t think I’ve heard anyone articulate particularly clearly was the description of talking to other people who were doing music and realising that there were people who just didn’t get it, who just did things and didn’t really connect with what they were doing in any meaningful way. There are some things that seem so natural and obvious that it causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when you realise that it’s not so for everyone - in my case it’s been things like abstraction and the engineering idea of elegance but I’m fairly sure that this is actually a universal experience. I believe there are some people with hand eye coordination and stuff.

The only reservation I had was with the music. Since I knew most of the songs the musical interludes were a bit frustrating at times - I kept on being disappointed when the second verses failed to appear. Of course, this probably doesn’t peg me as the most critical observer of her work so you might want to take what I say with a pinch of salt.

Wii cleaning

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:08:54 GMT

My Wii had been feeling a little toasty (even when it had only been sitting in standby) and had had a few glitches recently. A quick blast with the vacuum cleaner and it’s now running a lot cooler in spite of no visible effect when doing so.

Giving can be hard

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:11:23 GMT

One thing that charities often seem to like to do is give you discounts on things they sell or events they run. This is a nice way of saying thank you but if you’re trying to give them money it’s not always something you want to take advantage of. Sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to convince them if this which always seemed counterproductive on their part - “You’re a charity. This is a fundraising event. I want to give you money - why are you making this hard?”.

Of course, that’s less of a problem than the magazines most insist on sending you - pretty much all of the ones I get go straight to recycling, serving nobody, while you can always donate some other way. I can see the argument that they keep you in touch with what the organization is doing and so on but I’m happy to do that via other means (like the Internet) or, often, not at all. Honestly, I’m really not that interested in the details of the new RNLI lifeboats but I do think they’re a jolly good idea.

Paging Doctor Grumpy

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:09:01 GMT

Please, folks, when emailing the same question to multiple people or places send a single email with multiple recipients. Don’t send separate mails to each destination - at best you’ll waste people’s time, at worst you’ll irritate them. There are a few exceptions, mostly to do with confidentiality, but they really are pretty rare - especially for free software.

Not that this should be in any way news or non-obvious.

The Wire

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:07:22 GMT

Recently I’ve been watching the first season of The Wire. I now see exactly why it comes so highly recommended - the best TV I’ve seen in years. The comparison with a novel is spot on, as much as Babylon 5 was but without any of the weak spots on the acting front. Arc plot and characterization all the way, it’s blown me away.

With perfect timing it just ended. Such a shame it never got a terrestrial airing in the UK. Never mind, four more seasons for me to get through.

Standard Operating Procedure

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:08:49 GMT

One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly involved or around the camp at the time. The images are all very cinematic - blow ups of the photos, half-seen reenactments and very simple face on shots of the interviewees.

This is obviously a subject that has been gone over in the media but not in this form - as ever, Morris mostly just lets his subjects talk and leaves it up to the viewer to put their own intepretation on what is being said, foregrounded even more here by the presence of the person responsible for sifting through the images describing going through exactly this process with the images. The effect is much more chilling than the condemnation of the media - the body language and the words of the soldiers speak volumes but nothing gives you enough distance to simply switch off and say “I’m not like them.”

The people in the film who feel they can say that do not always appear as morally distinct as they might hope to. The title comes from one of the things that had to be done when examining the images during the investigation - the investigator had to decide which of the images showed things that were perfectly normal interrogation techniques (the standard operating procedure) and which were crimes. His verdicts aren’t always what you might expect.

Release day churn

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:08:29 GMT

The 2.6.27 pull request for ALSA was something of a surprise to read - a large proportion of the changes in there are for ASoC. Not what I was expecting given how many ASoC changes there are still to be merged, but it’s nice to see, especially given the general problems with embedded users contributing code back.

In other kernel release news, I’m glad to see some of my other work is making people happy.