I Gotta Rant: Daring Fireball

Does anybody seriously pay John Gruber for his hagiography? I mean, except Apple?

He has this paid membership program, but who the fuck really subscribes to that?

If there are actually people who pay for that little clubhouse where Apple gets all the love, all the time, no matter what they do, then Apple should just go all the way and sell their commercials on iTunes.

Java Developers Unhappy With Leopard ★

I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care.

I don't even program in Java, I hate the language, and I detest the enterprizosity of its overhyped frameworks, and I want to kick him in the face for that blasé condescension and mockery. He is like that smug little hipster shit in the Apple ads that have John Hodgman as "PC". Seriously, who doesn't find "PC" more likeable in those? Guess what, a lot more good coders earn their living with Java than Objective C. Because their customers use, say, computers different than Macs.

But I guess in the world according to John, we just shouldn't do that. It's merely the price of heresy!

Now, these developers got royally fucked for trusting Apple (by installing a .0 release on a production machine, which is admittedly retarded). To which Apple responds by deleting questions/complaints in their forums. Always been at war with Eastasia!

But that's a completely tolerable thing if Apple does it.

Steve Jobs found devouring live children. *

I don't see why anyone (other than toddlers themselves) would care.

John Gruber: Professional douche.

Steve Jobs's at least got his supervillain lair. Gruber is just plain annoying.

(Oh, and why Apple should care: I am thinking about building my future on a company selling a Mac-only product that I am designing. I, and I guess quite a few other Macheads/developers, are watching very carefully how Apple treats developer expectations, and worse, handles damage control when developers are left out in the rain.)

Muscles @ SAT, 2007-10-27

Muscles isn't worth seeing live.

But It Was Halloween and the Austrian National Day, So What Could I Do?

Well, Yeah, But I Still Find It Funny

Diesel Sweeties being pretty much right about Family Guy.

Paypal page -> Log in -> Click "help" on the top/right

In a similar vein, this.

The Bridge

I cannot recommend this one highly enough. Emotionally, it's very intense, but rationally it couldn't be more neutral — it's harsh, but enlightening.
Excuse the Flash[tm]y annoyance of its home page.

And a Good Morning to You, Too, Sir!

I can't say that I'm always in a state of not fearing my friends:

08:25	weird theoretical physics concept of the day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)
08:25	Damit könnte man an beliebigen Punkten im eigenen Future-cone schwarze Löcher erzeugen...
08:25	MUAAHAAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA
08:27	Alles was man braucht sind n Photonenquellen ausreichender Stärke (mit n > 2) und ein hinreichend genaues Zielsystem
08:29	hm..
08:29	MUAH HA HA HAAA HAHAHAHA HAHAHAA

Food Timing: My Asian Spices Soup

As in here, but making it without chicken, but mixing in a whole egg (but that doesn't make a lot of difference in time, I measured today:

real    1h0m
cook    0h15m
dishwasher 0h5m

Yes, that's 20 minutes person-time for freshly prepared food. Yum!

Lazy Recipe of the Day: Some Vegetables with Yoghurt

This is inspired by two dishes my ma makes, but done without a formal recipe.

You need: (not too spicy) peppers, cucumber, (preferably red) onion, tomato, garlic, yoghurt, some European style spice mix, black pepper, salt.

Heat some olive oil in a pot or deep pan on medium heat. Cut half of the onion into small pieces and add it to the oil. Start cutting the rest of the vegetables & garlic. When the onion gets glassy, salt & pepper.

Right before the onion turns brown, add the rest of the vegetables and some water. If it doesn't start boiling properly quickly, turn up the heat (carefully!). Boil down until it becomes more of a broth than a stew, stirring occasionally.

When it's boiled down, add the yogurt (and if it's not liquid enough afterwards, some more water). When it's boiled down again, it's done.

This is a pretty hands-off dish — between it and my soup, a pattern starts to form: I'm lazy — but be careful to stir occasionally. It doesn't get disgusting until you really carbonize it, but it's a lot more work when washing the dishes if it burns, and once again — lazy!

The effort required, to say it with time(1), is about

real    1h30m
cook    0h30m
dishwasher 0h10m

I assume, for lack of facilities, a human dishwasher here. And, for heaven's sake, soak before you scrub. The time of the tapwater is cheaper than yours.

The Story Goes On...

The saga begins here.

Turns out the new access ID was created as a co-signer, so I couldn't process transactions fully after all. Most of the previous problems seemed to be due to mishandling in the bank's branch offices, complete with some baseless allegations of problems with central processing. Seems like they don't only smear customers' mothers but also their own IT.

Finally, the problems were solved within minutes (well, after I was through the phone queue...) by a friendly, competent and helpful support person — who I shan't name because who knows what happens to people who are actually forthright with customers in such a completely dysfunctional organization.

My recommendation still is "don't go near BAWAG", but it's nice to know that there's somebody who knows his stuff everywhere.

Running from Apple Mail: Plaxo & Thunderbird

Today, Apple mail begun crashing reproducibly, first on processing Messages on a certain account, then on connecting to that account, finally on starting up.

This is kinda intolerable, so I went back to Thunderbird, only I migrated to TB version 2 at the same time.

Thunderbird 2 feels faster, but seems to be an even bigger memory hog than 1.5, with me. Other than that, the user-visible changes seem to be mostly cosmetic, and futile in that regard - no use putting lipstick on a pig, and compared to Apple Mail it is a pig.

Well, at least TB always seemed to be the graphical client available right now that shows least propensity to kill its data; and not deleting my stuff or refusing to run at all goes a long way.

Enigmail is still simply the best GPG front-end that I know of.

Now, my original reason to switch to Apple Mail was integration with AddressBook (important) and iCal (seemed important at the time, but honestly I didn't use it much).

Now, I use Plaxo for the AddressBook sync, and it seems to work really well and isn't too obtrusive once I told it not to display its huge and annoying toolbar. For its kind of service, the privacy policy is pretty fantastic; their business model seems to be actually convincing users to shell out for their pro service. Nice to see that some people still believe in providing a service and charging for it instead of selling customer data to spammers &c.

The only obvious drawback is that it plasters its logo everywhere (cf picture below), including every address book contact, to tell me that I synced this contact with Plaxo. Yeah, I get it and I'm really grateful and all, but that's obnoxious if I may be honest here for a second.Anyway, given that they solved a problem for me - for free! - I shouldn't complain too much. I'd recommend giving it a spin if you have the same AddressBook/TB sync problem as me; in any case their policy is that you retain full ownership of your data and can delete it from their system, so there's a way out if you're unhappy with it.

From the "things that don't make the AFP tools seem smarter" dept.

Now, we could pretend that it's talking about ARP lookups, but let's not kid ourselves.