Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Beta of the day: QuickSilver β24 has been out for a while, but I missed it. The download is buried in their forums in accordance with QS’s current “drive potential users away” policy.
Statistic of the day: Infected Windows PCs Now Source Of 80% Of Spam (from Slashdot)

Daring Fireball reports that the latest Security Update (2004-06-07) closes the Mac hole completely. There goes our big vulnerability, and it never even got exploited. I’ll be keeping RCDefaultApp around for its handy file-type handling, but the days of running a real, leaky, hack-me-hard OS are over for my mac.

Just a few days back, Daring Fireball blogged an interesting “broken windows” theory of PC viruses and spyware:

My answer to question posed earlier — why are Windows users besieged with security exploits, while Mac users suffer none? — is that Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances. Many Windows users are simply resigned to the fact that their computers contain software that is not under their control. And if they’ll tolerate an annoying application that badgers them with pop-up ads, well, why not a spyware virus that logs every key you type, then sends them back to the creator? (That’s a real virus, by the way, Korgo, which hit Windows at the end of May and is spreading quickly.)

The Mac is like a good neighborhood, where the streets are clean and the crime rate low. You don’t need bars on your windows in a good neighborhood; you don’t need anti-virus software on the Mac.

I think the issue is even more basic than adware leading to viruses in the way that one broken window leads to many broken windows. If I were to make the broken window analogy, it would be the broken windows sold by Microsoft that lead to both adware and viruses. If you expect the OS to behave erratically - chewing up your files, popping up mysterious error messages, crashing, and requiring frequent reinstalls for no adequately explained reason - then you already have the bad neighborhood that makes adware and viruses seem natural. You didn’t watch your lovely block going bad as the crack-ho’s moved in - no, you bought a fixer-upper in the ‘hood with your eyes wide open.

That is to say, you tolerated the broken windows by paying Microsoft for them in the first place. Mac users demand a functional OS not by our postulated eternal vigilance (of which there’s neither need nor evidence) against spyware, but by buying a functional OS in the first place. We’ve moved out to the ‘burbs.

Rant of the day: Ray Bradbury curses Michael Moore

It got cloudy in Boston around 6:30am, so I’m watching 3rd contact on webcams from Belgium and Iran. The latter page tells how Avicenna was the first person to record the transit of Venus.

[Update:] The Iran feed stopped feeding around 4th contact. Remember, Venus will be back in 2012 if you missed it this time around. I’m hoping to be someplace sunnier by then.

Despite my fears, Seema has not been squished by the Red Line during her visit to Boston. She’s alive and well and wandering the mean streets of Central Square. Planning With Seema involves a lot of wandering. I tried unsuccessfully to involve the decisive Dr. Deb, but without her we were doomed to the fate of laid-back people: strolling around Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, trying to resist the allure of used bookstores and candy shops with bins.

In the midst of our laid-back fun, Seema did get to Meet the Mac, experience the Joy of Newsreaders, and try out the rice pie. If anyone else wants to try the rice pie, here’s the recipe:

Italian Rice Pie

Filling (makes 2 large pies):

• 1/2 cup raw rice
• 8 eggs
• 2 lbs ricotta
• 2 cups sugar
• juice of 1/2 lemon (1+1/2 tbsp)
• grated rind of 1 lemon and 1 orange (optional)
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Cook, drain, and cool the rice.
2. Beat eggs light and fluffy.
3. Mix other ingredients into the eggs.
4. Pour carefully into unbaked pie shell.
5. Bake at 350°F for 1 hour.

Pie crust:

• 2 cups sifted flour
• 7 tbsp softened butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 egg (plus 1 yolk)
• pinch salt
• pinch grated lemon peel

1. Mix ingredients to form a soft dough.
2. Press half of dough into 9″ square pan or 10″ pie pan.
3. Use other half for a criss-cross top or a second pie.

You can’t actually criss-cross the top for this recipe because the filling is too liquid. The crust is from another rice pie recipe that’s more solid before cooking, but involves scary pineapple. And I have a third recipe from my grandmother - both require milk and more rice.

I stole the yolk for the crust from the filling. I put some allspice in the filling because I like it, and skipped the grated peels because I had none to grate. I used Arborio rice, though that’s not necessary (and perhaps even counterindicated). I also used a 10″ quiche pan, and refrigerated the second half of the crust and filling until the first pie had been consumed and the quiche pan was free again. The filling is very liquid, but it won’t boil over - the main danger is sloshing on the way into the oven. It should be solid enough to turn (carefully) after half an hour.

Besides the milk and scary pineapple linked above, I’ve seen recipes with
cream or raisins (which is getting a little too far into rice pudding territory for my tastes). The rum and citron version sounds interesting, though the jimmies are a bit much IMHO.

Enjoy!

Cartoon of the day: D-Day 2004 by Mike Lester at Backspin
Missing sibling of the day: if you see Veronica, tell her to answer her email. Or her phone.

At sunrise on Tuesday morning here on the East Coast you can see the first transit of Venus in 122 years. See Space Weather for details by country, live video links, and the like. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you not to stare at the sun or put your retinas at the receiving end of any magnifying equipment pointed at said sun. Sky and Telescope has some information on solar filters - the most interesting one being the Pop-Tart wrapper.

The weather in Boston will be partly cloudy, so we may have to wait until 2012 to see Venus in action.

Scott at Gene Expression asks why the mental health profession is wasting time with Asperger’s syndrome, when it’s hardly a debilitating mental illness. Jason Soon replies:

People who enter the psychology/psychiatry profession disproportionately suffer from a pathological condition called Feeler Syndrome. Symptoms include a deficit in concentration abilities, deficits in forming genuine interests in things as opposed to people, a tendency to prefer style over substance in conversation and thought and general dependence on social milieu and the approval of others for sustaining a sense of self-worth. Notwithstanding these problems sufferers retain a high degree of functionality. This is reinforced by the fact that the skills they have overdeveloped to the detriment of others allows them to get into positions of social influence. As a consequence such symptoms also come with a tendency to label others as deficient. Nonetheless the condition is not a hard one, as the wealth created by normals with adequate concentration and conceptualisation skills allows for the redistribution of resources sufficient to sustain these sufferers and allow them to lead happy lives.

Another commenter links Niall Ferguson’s political diagnosis: America has got Asperger’s syndrome.

I’m having line break problems again here in WP 1.2. The fix that fixed 1.0.2 isn’t working as well as it did before. It still fixes the big problem of old Blogger line breaks in posts, but it messes up those posts in which I used MovableType’s “convert line breaks” option. (Maybe it did in 1.0.2 as well, and I somehow missed it.) Fortunately, I didn’t use MT linebreak conversion as much as I did Blogger, so I can go back and edit those posts easily.

The code to fix has moved to wp-includes/functions-formatting.php. Change function wpautop($pee, $br = 1) { to function wpautop($pee, $br = 0) {. This seems to cause some odd double-spacing inside pre tags, which I may try to fix in the future.

I tend to think of neoconservatives as libertarians with a foreign policy, so it surprises me afresh every time the libertarian columnists at LewRockwell.com tear into the neocons, exaggerating the size of the neocon movement and then beating on this oversized strawman.

This week Jim Lobe pops his own blow-up neocon doll in Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad. He admits that no top-level administration officials have been neoconservatives, but somehow still sees neocon shadows behind the throne being routed in the aftermath of recent Iraq scandals. As evidence, he offers a fruitless meeting between some former staffers and Condoleezza Rice - how the mighty have fallen!

I’m assuming most of my readers can’t tell a neoconservative from a paleoconservative - I have trouble myself sometimes, even though I’m familiar with the neocon approach to foreign policy. The Neocon Collapse article doesn’t specify what the fatal neocon mistake was, nor what the “realists” are doing differently now that they are allegedly in power. Instead, Jim Lobe’s rant reads like paranoid ravings about neocons being “a key part” of this and “lead[ing] the charge” for that, placing people “in key positions”, “dominating” this, “push[ing] hardest” for that, having “friends” in the media, “outflank[ing],” “influenc[ing],” “circumvent[ing],” and so on.

When the powers of good push back the neocons, they do so in equally vague terms of “wrest[ing] control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon” (as if Iraq policy were somewhere our elected officials hadn’t put it), and a former staffer making “blistering attacks” against “powerful figures” that the media was “ever cautious about taking on” - figures no one has even heard of.

It takes some writing skill to say “I hate neocons for reasons I’m not telling you” in a thousand words or more. Mr. Lobe didn’t have to drop a hint, but I suspect he couldn’t help himself. Which country in the Middle East has “territorial ambitions”? Is it the one that invaded Iran and Kuwait? Is it the one that invaded Israel and turned Lebanon into a puppet state? Is it the other one that invaded Israel? Or maybe the other other one that invaded Israel? It’s a tough question, but he has an answer.

[Update: I’m not the only one who’s spotted this phenomenon. Backspin links Dore Gold on the ‘neocon conspiracy.’]

Lorem Ipsum of the day: The Motherlode can even generate Morse Code

Veronica asked me about FTP clients for the Mac. I’ve been using command line ftp since OS 10.1 - it’s free and reminds me of my misspent youth on SunOS. The first thing that sprang to mind was, of course, Transit (links are coming), but that costs money - I know because I stopped using it when my demo expired.

You never know when a new FTP client has come out (well, I do, but I’m speaking rhetorically here), so I tried Google and discovered…Pure Mac is back! Pure Mac isn’t an FTP client - it’s the ultimate index of Mac shareware. It used to be the site to visit to find Mac software, and then they stopped updating. But now it’s being revived and the FTP page is one of the ones that has already been updated.

So with the help of Pure Mac I was able to recommend - and download for myself - Cyberduck, a free FTP client for MacOS X (10.3 and above) with a very cool icon.

As long as I’m maccing, here’s a link dump:

• Security Cannot Be Spun, another hole essay from DaringFireball
• 12″ Powerbook vs. iBook: What’s a Mac fan to do?
• MacOSXHints on keyboard layout generators
• Tumult HyperEdit, a live HTML and PHP editor
• Fish - make your own virtual aquarium, if you can figure out the cryptic interface
• Various ways to eject a stuck CD
• Spending a year on a Mac - True Switcher Tales
• Did I mention that MT NewsWatcher was finally upgraded?
• MacOSXHints on recording HDTV with your Mac
• I’m pretty sure I mentioned Ecto, a blogging client
• I’m almost certain I mentioned LyX/Mac, but possibly not this LaTeX font tutorial

Despite my fears of the dreaded lost password problem, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2. I did, indeed, experience the Dread Problem, but deleting my wordpress cookies solved it for me. Others have not been so lucky. (I backed up the database before making any sudden moves, of course.)

The new version spontaneously reordered my categories, but this advice fixed the problem. I’m hoping to use the subcategory feature to organize my categories better, although it’s kind of flaky.

Note the new blog design. If it looks dull and grey, give it a minute. In a real browser, color will slowly trickle in. I’m using the colorpress script under a semi-transparent greyscale PNG background image to get the colors. Since Win/IE is a piece of aging junk that can’t handle transparency, the most you’ll see with it is some pretty text colors. I’m also seeing some wackiness with the tabs and post content in Mac/IE - the workaround is, as always, to use a real browser. Tell me, though, if Win/IE munges the entries as well. Thanks.

[Update:] With Seema’s help, the Win/IE flashing problem has been fixed and the floating comment box is more or less anchored in the right place. To fix the latter I reduced the number of columns in the textarea from 70 to 40. (I had to edit wp-comments.php by hand to do that. While I was in there I upped it from 4 rows to 6.) The stylesheet then resizes it to the correct size in real browsers. Mac/IE’s float bug is beyond my power to fix, but if you make the window narrow enough (just over the width of the tab bar), the blog will become legible.

On this Memorial Day, Mark Steyn recalls a time when Americans had a sense of proportion. James Lileks always recalls a time when our food was frightening. Gary North recalls a time when Americans hoped to retire in comfort.

I’m two hundred years too young to recall when a man could regret that he had but one life to lose for his country, but I think that when the citizens stop feeling that way the nation is doomed. It’s not necessarily a biological dead end, but it is a political one. I have the feeling tha one of these days I’ll go to sleep in the tattered but recognizable shreds of a latter-day Roman Empire, but I’ll wake up in the Dark Ages.