I got asked by a few people to post my views on MailSmith... checking their site, they're up to version 2.1 now. Below is part of an email exchange from August 11, 2003 where a guy was getting on me hardcore to check out MailSmith 2.0, as while the original OSX port was... problematic, he swore this one had reaffirmed his faith.
posted on May 30, 2004 at 01:24 PMThe first time I got asked by someone over the internet why I had been gravitating away towards BBEdit, it was because I was touting Hydra... Now I've been asked the same, but it was within the context of me gravitating away from Hydra SubEthaEdit. Ironic, that.
At any rate, I had an email from the first time I was asked where I actually had it in my saved message folder, which means it's pretty old (so it might not all be relevant, but it was then), but it should get the point across. There's an even longer one about my disappointment with MailSmith, but that's long enough that I wouldn't bother to convert it into HTML unless someone actually asked. Pretty sure you could actually find it at the x4u list if you looked...
Either way, here you go:
Just realized that it'd been a week since I'd posted on DrunkenBlog, which is a little trippy. Just a really, really crazy week... lots of coffee and little sleep. I'll have time to kill tomorrow in the waiting room, so I'll probably spend it wittling down an Apple-related post I've been meaning to push out.
That or making time with the nurses... so about a 50/50 chance that there'll be a large post on here by Friday. I've been meaning to clean up the design and categories pages too... maybe this weekend.
I really don't understand those people who have 5+ blogs going on at once... if you're like me, you can't keep a woman for more than two weeks can barely make the time commitment to one blog, let alone several. Incomprehensible.
...especially when it's software I actually really, really like.
I've been checking out the new version 2.0 of SubEthaEdit for the last several days (I know, I'm kind of behind right now), and I have to say I'm both very happy with whats new and a little wigged out and disappointed in other areas...
If you're not familiar, SubEthaEdit started out as an app named Hydra, and is essentially a collaborative text editor that allows you to share documents over your local subnet via rendezvous.
Cringley has a new column out called "Divide and Conquer" which is worth a read if you're a mac user. Of particular interest to me is this bit:
Absolutely look for the rape of the resellers, and then MAYBE look for the end of Macintosh hardware.
...as I've been wondering about resellers more and more as time goes on when looking at some of Apple's stock configurations.
If you are buying a PowerMacG5 or PowerbookG4, and want any decent kind of options at all (decent video card, more VRAM, faster stock drives) you aren't going to be able to get them unless you order through Apple.
Resellers are stuck with the stock config. When the Powerbooks hard drive isn't even user-serviceable in the newer models... if I were a reseller, I'd be pretty pissed off.
Then I'd be scared to death.
And arguably the retailers have a real right to be scared... this isn't the first time Cringley and others have seen small moves by Apple, which when added up really, really paint a dire picture for the resellers.
I've gotten mail about the new security exploit going around for MacOS X, either to give me a heads up on it, or to ask my thoughts on it... which is kind of odd, but cool too...
I've always kind of wondered what exactly Al Gore brings to the table by being on Apple Computer's board of directors. At the very least, you'd think he'd be sorta up on current events and could raise some red flags.
Some current oddities:
- Apple's WWDC (worldwide developer conference) has been announced and scheduled for June 30th, 2004. If you aren't aware, that's kinda sorta when sovereignty over their country is supposed to be handed over to Iraq. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't be surprised if something might happen that caused technology announcements to get... a little drowned out. Unless Gore knows something we don't, and gave Apple the big thumbs-up. Yay.
- They've code-named the upcoming release of Mac OSX "Tiger", which does keep in their current tradition of product code names involving cats. Unfortunately round-about the time that Tiger will be released, a certain flamboyant las vegas magician who, you know, got bit in the neck by a white tiger will be starting to make the rounds on TV and giving interviews... and you just know they're going to be running that clip on TV millions of times. Start making your jokes now, I can already picture the desktop wallpapers we're going to see. Unfortunately they're already linked in my mind.
Anyways, just a thought. Then again I'm the guy who held onto his 667MHz Powerbook because the real CPU frequency was 666.666, and, you know, having the devils laptop is a good conversation starter.
This one is being passed around pretty heavily, and I wasn't going to post it to my blog except, you know, I have a few pretty big posts coming up, and those movabletype ones were pretty heavy, so I might as well try to keep it light before the storm. And it's applicable to something that happened earlier today that I'm not at liberty to discuss publicly until the statute of limitations expires.
The payoff is on the 3rd page, but do read through... the setup is worth it:
...I, Joe The Peacock, was actually FIRED from Wal-Mart. I would say that only a retard could get fired from Wal-Mart, but even the door greeter with Down's Syndrome who once bit a female customer's inner thigh was still employed. Truly it was one of the low points of my life.
It's not for everyone, but was right up my alley... but then again so was "Black People Love Us!" but many I've showed it to just couldn't see the humor.
In light of recent developments going on with MovableType, I find it somewhat ironic that Userland, who makes a content management system that in years past went closed and paid (which SixApart has squarely positioned themselves as a competitor to now), has decided they need to release their kernel under the GPL. You can read the specifics here.
You can try to make distinctions between the two situations, and that's fine, as history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Amusing.
Lots of weird mail, and my activity log is swamped with people searching for a video. All I can think of is that I've really pissed someone off at Google. I don't want to make it worse so I'm not going to give the actual terms, but screenshots should suffice:
Might be time to lay off on the Gmail for awhile and spend some more focus on pagerank...
If I didn't know better I'd think SixApart was intentionally giving me fun stuff to blog about while I hold back on other things until the WWDC. They're just continuously showing the wrong, yet predictable thing to do... which is kind of what textbook cases are all about and why they're great to learn from.
A particular movie I've been trying to follow the buzz on for awhile has just put up its public website and, because it's kind of obligatory now, a development blog.
Worth a look, even has some movies. It really does look promising... the tone feels right so far. All I can really say is this is one that better not get screwed up.
And, because it's obligatory, don't forget your towel!
Awhile ago, I had to take a crash-course in cooking simply because the situation warranted it. Before that, my domestic skills were... somewhat non-existent. I was kinda known for it. More than once I'd lived in a place for over a year without being able to say for sure whether the stove worked, because I'd never tried to use it. The fridge was basically stocked with condiments and various distilled liquids.
Spent a bunch of time this evening (ok, morning now) getting started on integrating categories into DrunkenBlog, and seeing what kind of a speed hit might be associated with them. The actual category pages are pretty rough, as, well, I hit my RSS feeds and saw the new "MovableType Publishing Platform" announcement and got distracted by the sound of my head banging against the wall.
It's kind of nice to be home. It's been a very hectic few weeks, to where I'm not sure whether I'm coming or going again... but nice to be home. The only downside is that now that I'm home, there's a lot of stuff that needs to get taken care of around here that doesn't involve a CPU in any way (think laundry, cleaning, progress reports) that is decidedly unsexy but needs to get done.
Adam Johnson was kind enough to pass this guys blog entry on, which gives the details on how to get Mac OSX running on x86 hardware via PearPC. The guy demoed it on ScreenSavers tonight.
This just hit the wire a few minutes ago. It's sickening, sickening stuff:
An al Qaeda-linked Web site posted video Tuesday of an American man in Iraq speaking briefly before being beheaded by his masked captors... Berg is heard screaming as his throat is cut. One of the captors then holds up his severed head."For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage for some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused," the hooded man standing behind the American said just before the killing.
I don't normally post about this sort of stuff, but it just hit the web a few minutes ago and smacked me in the stomach like a brick.
Been kind of a wiggy week. Hospitals are about the most depressing and stifling place I've really been exposed to. You walk outside and put some distance between yourself and it and you find yourself standing straighter, and feeling lighter.
For those of you emailing asking about my connection to SphereXP, there really isn't a big one. :)
I just liked the project, and their server was getting hammered so I helped them out with a mirror of the screenshots & movies about a month ago.
If you haven't followed, SphereXP is a small project for WindowsXP (with linux port being worked on) that adds a 3D interface, similar to Suns Looking Glass project, using C# & OpenGL. Not quite ready for prime-time just yet, but an interesting project.
The problem is that the guy is going fast & furious on the damn thing. I originally said "Sure, I'll mirror you for 30gigs/mo or so", but now he's doing 30gigs a day, and almost 100gigs for the month so far. Considering the month isn't even half over yet... Crazy, so I'm prolly going to have to drop the mirror. Sorries.
There's a pretty nifty interview with Miguel de Icaza over at OSNews that's worth a read, if your brain goes that way. It mostly focuses on Mono, software patents and Linux adoption.
But several have mailed be about this blurb on the second page (which is cool):
We asked whether a Mac OS X native version of GTK# or Cocoa# is planned, but the answer was negative. Ximian is not working on OSX native toolkit bindings (and he doesn't think that Apple is working on something like it either)... Miguel told us that Quark is using Mono for their next major Quark Xpress release! Apparently Quark is working on Obj-C bindings for Mono.However, the graphical toolkit bindings will be minimal (an update on this here), so he hopes that Mac enthusiasts will jump in to complete a full Cocoa# solution, or natively port GTK+ 2.x...
...which has apparently sparked some deja vu. Things are getting really, really interesting on the desktop side of things, really quickly.
You get the sense of a buildup waiting for a catalyst, but no one is quite sure where that's going to come from, where Apples strategy is going to fit in the whole deal, or if its going to get squeezed out.
I want to know who did this, just to offer them a beer or something. It's so perfect, and so well done, that the instant you grok it you're saddened because you know that one day it won't be there.
So, this is the absolute worst.
My 15" Powerbook has been having problems for awhile, and Apple has been being a bit ornery about sending it in. I know I registered AppleCare, I've got the box for it sitting in front of me... but for some reason they can't find it in the system, which means a whole rigamarole. Faxing invoices, UPCs, a real drag.
Since I've had a few massive projects over the last few weeks, plus the whole blog getting swamped thing and some personal stuff going on... I've been trying to make do. When your powerbook is your main machine, doing without it for a week is just seriously unappealing. And the problems weren't that bad, so I've been putting it off and trying to make do.
Basically it came with a broken RAM clip, and the fan was starting to make a slight noise when it spun up and spun down, nothing major but noticeable. Figured better safe than sorry, but with the whole crappy process of getting it fixed... just wasn't pushing myself to get it in over those two little things, like I said, I can make do, and it's not as though the fan has ever been quiet. Normally it's simple. Call, explain, box gets sent...
The kicker was the hinge. I've been gone for awhile, coming and going, so I get home and open it up and *crack* the left hinge snaps. The hinge didn't separate, or come loose. It literally snapped where the screen met the hinge. As a slight digression, titanium my ass. This thing has been babied. It doesn't even get opened and closed once a day on average since I've owned it. And it snaps in half. That's... disappointing.
I faxed in my info and it was past AppleCare hours, so called today... and they said they didn't get it. Great, I'll do it again tomorrow, but that's a Saturday and it's going to be such a drag. Either way, I've been working very, very hard on a ton of projects and I need that data, some of it can't even be replaced via hard work. So even though the S.M.A.R.T. status says its fine, I need to back this data up, and now.
I happen to use a piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner to do my backups to a set of firewire drives, and it's a nifty piece of software. Plug the drive in, load up the software, copy laptop hard drive to firewire and done. Unfortunately CCC has a habit of getting "confused" when old data is involved, so it's recommended to initialize the target drive, then clone to it. I always do so, with good results.
I don't touch the screen, just carry it into the other room gingerly and everything seemed to be working fine, even though the lower left hand corner seemed a bit dim. Plug in the drives and load up CCC. Initialize the firewire drive, start the copy, and go put on some coffee as I'm going to be making a lot of calls over this. Making calls, enjoying coffee.
Then I hear this from the other room:
whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack* whiiiiiiir *clack*....
Freaky scary.
I've bowed to the pressure and registered drunkenblog.com and pointed it here.
There were a few reasons, all of which are really too boring to mention, except the fact that people were trying to go to drunkenblog.com anyway, and googling, and then finding the site, and sending me a message about being confused. Most of the links have been made relative, and I'm still trying to decide if it's worth going through them all, we'll see.
It doesn't really matter which you use, both will work and point to the same thing... and I haven't noticed any problems so far.
Experiences with the life and death of a tapeworm by an american in Belgium, related with extraordinary care. Amusing, but don't eat first. Certainly makes me feel better about my day, but prolly means I'll be ordering chicken this Friday evening.
There's a page of pictures over at the 2004 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race that are really worth a look, if for no other reason than to enjoy watching peeps enjoy life.
The bear is the one that had me laughing out loud, but I'm a total sucker for two types of humor:
- Someone is beating themselves up with a body part out of control. Think Me, Myself & Irene or Evil Dead 2. Rollin.
- People dressed up as mascots in general lower my willing-to-laugh threshold by an order of magnitude. IE, in Jackass: The Movie, where they're skateboarding around Japan in panda suits.
The last until recently had me kinda worried, in that I really didn't like the idea of having some sort of furry fetish. That just kinda wigged me out until I realized that:
- It doesn't have to be an animal, I laughed just as hard watching the human-esque mascots topple at the baseball game. Whenever I see one of those creatures jump up and start dancing on a dugout, part of me is always hoping to see it get rush-tackled by someone in the stands.
- I really only found it humorous when they were in out-of-context scenes, such as the above, or when they were being beaten on in some fashion. I'm not exactly a big fan of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective as a movie, but lord when he starts wailing on the team mascot I lose it.
Erm, that might say something even worse about my psychological makeup, but I've learned to live with it.
There's a lot of flack that's started yesterday and today, mostly over the amount of holes that may/may not exist in Mac OSX that aren't being exploited, but that isn't really what worries me.
Most technology platforms seem to catch their breaks and go full-on once sex gets involved. Witness the VCR, the internet, or most pop-music careers.
This prolly bodes well for Apple's iChat AV, now that iChatnaked.com is in um... beta testing. It's worth a look just to see the group icons. You can't make this stuff up.
For more iChat weirdness, you should head over to Zachs' Freakiest iChat Evar post. I lol'd pretty hard while reading down, but it was late at the time.
Looks like David Bowie is cashing in on another trend, this time with "Mash Ups". If you haven't followed, mash-ups are a little interesting.
You take two or more separate pieces of music and overlay them, bringing out different parts of the tracks for something that is often distinct and more than the sum of its parts.
Mash-ups often get their holy-shit from using totally divergent sources, like the infamous "Grey Album" by Dj Danger Mouse that blended The Beatles "White Album" with Jay-Z's "Black Album" and sparked a pseudo net-protest dubbed "Grey Tuesday" that some acquaintances took part in. This is probably the work that threw mash-ups into the mainstream, and if you're curious about their possibilities I'd highly recommend you check it out.
This obviously infringes upon the artists copyrights like nobody's business, and you're not going to find "They Grey Album" in stores. But it's mostly been an underground club thing and it's only recently that the labels have been going after these guys left and right.
I'm kind of excited by the contest, just a little disappointed at the details:
"The contest requires entrants to blend any song from the singer's latest album Reality with any other Bowie song... ...The winning song will be released as an MP3 and its creator will win a car."
While I'm sure this will be very, very cool, it'd be that much cooler if Bowie indemnified the winning artist from being sued for infringement for their track, instead of having it be two Bowie tracks. Sure you'd prolly end up paying hundreds of thousands or more since it was "willful" but the publicity and even the quality of the track itself would be vastly increased.
Bowie gets a lot of flack for "capitalizing on trends", as evidenced in one of my favorite Bongwater tracks, "David Bowie Wants Ideas". It's very much the same type of flack Paul Simon got when he went to Africa, then came back and started incorporating African percussion sounds into all of his music and generating huge sales.
I admit to being a Bowie fan. No, not everything, but by and large and it's hard for me to get down on Bowie for that, just because he's so blunt about it (often calling himself a hybrid artist) and he does often bring his own ideas and flair to whatever new thing he's "incorporating".
And I've never really understood the idea that an artist should stay in what they've gotten known for. Artists have to evolve and incorporate new medias and ideas, like a shark has to keep swimming, or they're gone, or turn into something worse.
Either way, this is the sort of thing GarageBand will excel at, and what the hell else are you going to use it for?
Go nuts.
Sooo... been an interesting couple of days.
The weekend started out innocently enough, I just happened to notice I hadn't touched the blog in awhile & the front page was looking kind of empty... so I threw together Rhapsody in Yellow to assuage the guilt and posted it in a hurry on Friday afternoon before I headed out the door.
Cool evening ensued, which consisted of (in order):
- Kill Bill vol.2 (rocked my world)
- Food
- 4 tall Tooheys
- 5 white russians (talls)
- 1 shot of something I don't really remember
- 1 shot of tequila the bartender bought us
- Stop @ Krispy Kreme for donuts and lots of coffee
So, decent Friday. Got home well after midnight and decided to check the computer for messages before I crashed, and even in my altered state it was obvious something was wrong. Gyazmail was taking forever to pull in my mail, and AdiumX was telling me there were messages from 20+ people I'd never heard from left while I was away.
My mail came in, and I thought I'd been mail-bombed for a second there.
