Apple’s “special” non-event

I think most people would agree that nothing too exciting was confirmed/announced today. Rumors about the iPod HiFi have been floating around for a while and it was only a matter of time before the Intel Mac mini came out. Sometimes Apple just needs to release products without all of the hoopla. Granted, most of the hype was from fan/rumor sites, but if Apple hadn’t made such a stink about this “special” event and sent out invitations and all of that, I don’t think it would have received the attention it did. These products should have been announced on the web.

To be honest, the one thing that surprised me most about today’s announcements was the leather iPod case that Apple is now selling. I haven’t yet watched the event, but I’m curious to see if Steve kept a straight face when describing this thing. Not only does it hide all of the controls from you, it also covers the screen. Did I mention that it’s $100!?! Does it come with four $20 bills inside? Who in their right mind is going to pay $100 for what amounts to nothing more than a wallet that converts your iPod into an iPod shuffle without the controls?

I understand that Apple wants a piece of the insane third-party accessory space that has blown up around the iPod, but you’re telling me that this is the best APPLE can do? How about making the iPod practical to begin with and able to withstand someone breathing on it without fear of scratching it? Much more on this in a later post (I’ve been sitting on it for way too long). It’s just embarrassing.

iPod HiFi

Yawn. I don’t think I quite get it. “HiFi?” Not even close. I’m sure they will sell a lot of them, even at $349, but to say that it will replace your stereo is jumping the gun a bit if you ask me. The frequency response is certainly nothing to write home about and I don’t think anyone believes Steve when he says, “I’m an audiophile, and I’m getting rid of my stereo…” It’s more likely that Steve has super high-end speakers and equipment whose cables can’t be had for less than $349 (though probably not from McIntosh, with whom they’ve had trademark trouble in the past).

It makes more sense to me to spend the money on a device that can stream music from your computer to your existing stereo system.

At first I thought that this would be a great thing for dorm rooms and college apartments, but the fact is, most college students already use external speakers to listen to the music that’s on their computers, which, presumably, is the same music that’s on their iPods, and so I’m not sure why they would want to spend this amount of money on another set of speakers.

I’ll bet that this will sell mostly to people who want music in their bedrooms. Bose certainly found a niche there with their overpriced Wave systems. If Apple drops the price by $50, puts a screen on the front of it, and adds WiFi to the mix, I might consider putting one in my bedroom.

Am I the only Apple fan who is just a little concerned that they now sell speakers? I realize that Apple is slowing moving toward a more Sony-like product line, but for whatever reason I’m a bit put off by the whole thing. While I certainly don’t mind them branching out as it obviously pushes the rest of the industry to be more innovative, I don’t want that to take away from the research and development of their OS and computers, and I feel like that’s ultimately where all of this is headed.

Intel Mac mini

Perhaps the only surprise here is that the machine now includes an “integrated Intel graphics” chip. Of course, all of us computer nerds immediately gasp and wonder what Apple was thinking by lumping the video card in with the motherboard and asking both to share the already strained system memory. On its face, and even according to Apple just a year ago, it would seem that this would result in weakened graphics capabilities, but, if you look at the overview of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, you’ll see that this chipset is perfect for what the mini was designed for, namely, home media (not games).

That said, I do feel that this is somewhat of a stopgap for this line — Apple has to realize that without PVR functionality they can’t win the race for the living room.

Born again

Yesterday I purchased an Apple 23-inch Cinema HD Display. Finally! This monitor has been a long time coming, and really, how can I say I’m serious about digital photography and not own an Apple cinema display?  :P

I’m also happy to report, that as far as I can tell, there are NO dead pixels! All 2,304,000 are beaming brilliant light in unison.

How did I ever live without this? Seriously.

I thought it was an earthquake

I’m convinced that the family living in the apartment below mine thinks that door-slamming is an Olympic sport and has been preparing for the summer games the last two months. There really is no other explanation for the incessant slamming of their fucking door. My girlfriend can attest to the fact that I haven’t gone crazy, well, let’s not go that far, but, she does agree that something weird is going on down there.

There are days when the door is slammed every five minutes and for an hour at a time. When I say slammed, I’m not talking about rushing out of the house and pushing the door a little harder than usual; I’m talking about rearing up, yelling to the rest of the family, “Watch this!,” and trying to get the door to move in a full 180° arc through the doorway. After which, they open the door, get the scores from the rest of the family, and then go back to improving their technique. There is no other explanation.

It’s got to the point now that every time they slam the door, I yell “Slam it!” at the top of my lungs. I’m usually sitting right by my door because that is where my computer desk is and so I think there’s a good chance they can hear me. I hope so. To be safe though, and to make sure they know I recognize their incredible door-slamming talents, I think I’m going to start slamming my door as soon as the aftershocks of their efforts reach me. Every time. Hell, given the frequency of their family tradition it will probably make for a pretty good workout.

Sound the death knell for Justin

After much consideration, I’ve just accepted an offer to be the technical editor for O’Reilly’s third edition of Google Hacks (I had the same position on the second edition). When do you propose I sleep? Yah, I agree, never sounds good.

Seagull (1)

I’m finally putting up a seagull shot from the recent Santa Cruz trip, and to give you an idea of how close I was to this bird, the picture was taken with a 50mm lens.

I’ve probably got at least two more seagull shots to put up, but I think I’m going to hold off on post-processing those for the time being.

The Genographic Project

Two months ago my father told me that he had just sent a cheek swab sample to the National Geographic Genographic Project, which, at the time, I had never heard of. To have the website tell it, the goal of the project is to “understand the human journey — where we came from and how we got to where we live today.” The data collected “will map world migratory patterns dating back some 150,000 years and will fill in the huge gaps in our knowledge of humankind’s migratory history.”

The participation kit is only $100 and it’s money well spent if you ask me.

After having read both Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, I couldn’t wait for my father to receive the results — I’m completely fascinated by this stuff.

The results

To be clear, these tests are not conventional genealogy. Your results will not provide names for your personal family tree or tell you where your great grandparents lived. Rather, they will indicate the maternal or paternal genetic markers your deep ancestors passed on to you and the story that goes with those markers.

A few days ago he got the results and shared the online account with me. They’re utterly fascinating. The picture below shows my “ancestral journey.” At the website, this picture is interactive — clicking on a marker will tell you the story behind it.

In addition to this migratory map, you’re also given your genetic sequence (not reproduced here) and told how to interpret it in light of these mass migratory patterns. Finally, you’re told your “genetic history” (reproduced below), which basically summarizes where and when your haplogroup originated, how they got to that point, and how they lived along the way.

Your Y chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1b, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M343. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168.

The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual — “Eurasian Adam.” This African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity’s home continent.

Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source.

Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave “Eurasian Adam’s” descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages.

Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is defined by the marker M89.

M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of “Eurasian Adam,” and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East.

Many people of this lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.

With much of Earth’s water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era’s vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe “superhighway” and eventually peopled much of the continent.

A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.

Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

Most residents of the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to this unique individual, and carry his defining marker. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians have the M9 marker, as do most Europeans and many Indians. The haplogroup defined by M9, K, is known as the Eurasian Clan.

This large lineage dispersed gradually. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along a vast belt of Eurasian steppe, until the massive mountain ranges of south central Asia blocked their path.

The Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya, even more formidable during the era’s ice age, divided eastward migrations. These migrations through the “Pamir Knot” region would subsequently become defined by additional genetic markers.

The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans. This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.

The M45 lineage survived on these northern steppes even in the frigid Ice Age climate. While big game was plentiful, these resourceful hunters had to adapt their behavior to an increasingly hostile environment. They erected animal skin shelters and sewed weathertight clothing. They also refined the flint heads on their weapons to compensate for the scarcity of obsidian and other materials.

The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.

Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe’s first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.

The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.

Soon after this lineage’s arrival in Europe, the era of the Neandertals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely outcompeted Neandertals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.

The long journey of this lineage was further shaped by the preponderance of ice at this time. Humans were forced to southern refuges in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. Years later, as the ice retreated, they moved north out of these isolated refuges and left an enduring, concentrated trail of the M173 marker in their wake.

Today, for example, the marker’s frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles, where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

Members of haplogroup R1b, defined by M343 are the direct descendents of Europe’s first modern humans, known as the Cro-Magnon people.

Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, during a time when Neandertals still lived in the region. M343-carrying peoples made woven clothing and constructed huts to withstand the frigid climes of the Upper Paleolithic era. They used relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro Magnons’ surprisingly advanced culture during the last glacial age.

When the ice retreated genetically homogenous groups recolonized the north, where they are still found in high frequencies. Some 70 percent of men in southern England are R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland that number exceeds 90 percent.

There are many sublineages within R1b that are yet to be defined. The Genographic Project hopes to bring future clarity to the disparate parts of this distinctive European lineage.

I strongly encourage all of you to take part in this fascinating and important project.

Introducing Post Count minus Category for WordPress

I’ve just whipped up a very simple plugin for WordPress that outputs the total number of posts you have made to your WordPress weblog minus the number of posts contained in the category that you specify. As always, this plugin was born out of necessity, but I figured the WP community would have some use for it (especially those who are implementing, or have implemented, a “linkblog”-type thing using WP).

Go to the project page

I’ve gone to a single-column layout

90% of the people reading this will have no idea the amount of time and effort involved in making such a move, but let’s just say that it took many, many hours… and I’m spent. As ever, things looked fine in every browser but IE and the majority of my post-”live” time was spent making IE play nice (you know, the same shit we’ve been dealing with since 2000). There are still some slight tweaks to be made (mostly with regard to width and the spacing between elements), but for the most part the design is complete.

As is usually the case, I had to come up with a ton of WordPress hacks and will likely write about all of them here at some point (both for future reference and because those posts always pull in a lot of Google traffic).

Daily Bits

You’ll notice that these are now displayed inline with the posts (look for the pink text). This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but leaving the side menu so empty always made me a bit uncomfortable; now that that menu is gone it’s a non-issue.

I had to update Smart Archives to handle category exclusion so that the “bits” I now have in WordPress (I’m no longer using del.icio.us) wouldn’t show up on the archives page. On a related note, those subscribed to my del.icio.us feed should point their aggregators to the local feed (actually, this has always been the address, but I’ve been forwarding it to del.icio.us for quite some time, and, depending on your aggregator, you might have been checking del.icio.us directly without knowing it).

For whatever reason, Bloglines is still pointing to the del.icio.us feed when you put in my local address. I suspect that a “hard” redirect has been implemented on their end; I’ve sent them an e-mail and expect to have that cleared up fairly soon (they’ve been pretty good about things like this in the past).

With respect to the bits, I think all that’s left to do now is to create a new del.icio.us bookmark and link it back to this post so that those who only subscribe to that feed (and not the main weblog feed) will be aware of the change.

Side Menu

Obviously, the side menu is no more, but don’t panic(!), all of the information that was located there previously still exists on the page, just in a slightly different position.

For most of the pages, the information about the page that was previously located at the top of the side menu, is now located in the center at the top of the page, with the exception of individual archives, whose page information and possibly related links are now located at the bottom of the page, under the post.

Which one is the ham?

Believe it or not, this was uttered by my Subway “sandwich artist” last night moments after I told him what I wanted.¹ What’s more is that he was asking another employee, whom, on a prior occasion, I overheard requesting confirmation that 60 minus 3 was 57.

The owner puts people like this in charge of his money?

Ferris wheel at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

Another picture from this outing.

Revamped gadgets page

I’ve finally updated the gadgets page to comport with the last few months’ purchases. I really loathe updating that page, but it must be done (right?).

I keep hoping for some all-encompassing “gadget encyclopedia” that I can link the products to so that their technical information can be found there instead of on my site, but I’m becoming more and more certain that that will never happen. Something like Console Database would be great.

Show/Hide

You’ll notice a much more streamlined look on the page. Because the list was becoming a bit unwieldily, I whipped up some JavaScript voodoo to “highlight” a single gadget at a time — clicking on the “+” next to a name will show you that gadget’s specifications.

Why?

I know some of you have often pondered the purpose of this page (it’s actually served many different roles over the course of its lifetime), and I think the “explanation” currently found in its side menu sums it up nicely:

If I were a gangsta rapper, this is the page where I’d detail all of the shots I’d taken. Instant street cred. It’s basically just a list of some of the toys I’ve purchased over the years.

Category exclusion in Smart Archives

Right behind localization, category exclusion was the most requested Smart Archives feature. To all of those that e-mailed me about it my usual response went something like, “I want to keep SA as simple as possible and have no use for such a feature at the moment, though that might change in the future.”

Well, things have changed. Given that neither del.icio.us nor any other social bookmarking service allows us to put HTML in the notes/descriptions, something I’ve raised a stink about many times before, I’m abandoning them and doing it in-house.

I’ll obviously write more about this later, but I just wanted to get the quick word out that SA now supports [single] category exclusion and the new version will be released sometime soon.

As you were.

Typhoon

I took a trip to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (what a ghastly-looking website) a couple of weeks ago and got quite a few shots, mostly of seagulls (which I’ll put up fairly soon). The photo seen here is of a boardwalk ride called “Typhoon,” caught in mid-action.

On using Gmail exclusively

You’d think that someone intimately involved with two books about Gmail (Hacking Gmail; Google Hacks) would actually be using the webmail service, but that wasn’t the case for me until about three months ago.

I told myself I wasn’t going to use Gmail until two things happened: 1) an option was added to specify the from address (in addition to the reply-to) and 2) the ability to upload past e-mail was supported natively. The former has been fixed, but the latter is still missing. I’m rather confused by this because I know for a fact that there a lot of people (with serious blogosphere pull) still holding out for this feature and I have to think that adding it would be technically mindless (i.e., receive e-mail in mbox format, parse, save). I don’t get it. That said, I’m getting used to the fact that all of my archived e-mail isn’t on Gmail, and honestly, if they were to add the ability to upload it I probably wouldn’t even bother at this point.

Problems/Issues

I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to tackle this and have decided to simply list what I think are the biggest problems with the service and the things I would like to see implemented.

• Doesn’t take you back to the Inbox after replying to an e-mail. As soon as I send an e-mail off I want to move on to something else. Instead, I have to wait for the send to complete and then click (or use a keyboard shortcut) to get back to the Inbox.
• After selecting emails and applying some action to them, they are not unchecked after the action has been applied. This, perhaps, is the most annoying thing about Gmail. I can’t for the life of me figure out the logic behind this (or the technical reason why it hasn’t been fixed). What the hell!?!
• No ability to specify the width of the application within the browser window — it always expands to the size of the window.
• The drafts “folder” doesn’t show you the recipient’s name, just the subject (unless you’re replying to a then-existing conversation). Huh?
• No ability to assign keyboard functions (ala Mail Act-on). This feature would be a godsend and I bet it’s something they’re working on.
• There is no message count (just a “conversation” count). I need numbers!
• If someone attaches a picture, Gmail usually presents a scaled-down version of the image and offers two options, “view” and “download.” If you choose “view” and then try to go back in your browser you’re taken directly to the Inbox instead of the e-mail you were just reading.
• The hard-wrapping of text. Please, for the love of god, stop putting hard line breaks into my messages; it makes copying/pasting them later such a burden.
• No way to reply directly from the message list. In other words, if I receive an e-mail from a particular person with a particular subject line and know immediately that I want to reply to them immediately, I’d like to be able to do that without having to go through multiple steps.
• The number in parentheses next to “Inbox” in the menu doesn’t always match the number of unread e-mails shown in the message list.
• No way to shorten the time that spam resides on the system before it’s deleted — it’s stuck at 30 days.
• No way to sort search results (e.g., by date sent, date received, etc).
• If you are reading a “conversation” and see that a new e-mail has arrived, it would be nice if when that new e-mail is part of the conversation you are currently looking at, it would just refresh your conversation instead of requiring you to go all the way back to the list of conversations and click it again.
• No way to mass-forward an e-mail. In other words, you can’t choose to forward an e-mail and then jump to the contacts page to select multiple recipients (as you can do when creating a new message). You’re forced to create a new message and copy/paste the recipient list into the forward.

Niceties

• It works well in Lynx if you find yourself in that situation.
• Gmail Mobile is brilliant. It’s really, really nice and I plan to do a full write-up on it in the near future.
• Starred e-mails are expanded automatically in long conversations.
• To reply you just need to click inside the reply box (don’t have to find the reply “button”). This doesn’t yet work in all browsers.
• The spam filter is excellent and has been spot-on for me, which is why I wrote Three ways to filter spam using Gmail. In 3+ months of continuous use, I’ve yet to have a single false-positive (that I know about).
• Very nice spell-checking implementation.
• Still the best search functionality in the business.
• Caused other webmail providers to get their asses in gear.

Project page is live

The project page is finally a going concern, and now that that’s finished I hope to have the tour page up soon (discussed here).

Grizzly Man

In a word (or twelve!), fascinating, tragic, inspiring, confusing, desperate, primal, shocking, exciting, frightening, beautiful, chaotic, intense.

You have to see Grizzly Man (I TiVo’d it off of the Discovery channel; not sure when they’re going to air it again).

Firefox redirects malformed address to microsoft.com

Anyone know why, when you specify the HTTP protocol twice in Firefox (put “http://http://” into the address bar), it resolves to microsoft.com?

UPDATE: Mystery solved. Ricardo Vidal e-mailed me a couple of hours after I posted this to explain what was happening. When Firefox gets a malformed address it runs it through an “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google search, and, as you might have guessed, Microsoft is the first result for “http://”.

On being more anecdotal and immediate

Let me first make the point that I’m not the only blogger with these “issues;” I’ve got it on good authority that a lot of us struggle with them.

I’m really going to make an effort to be a bit more anecdotal here. I know that a lot of my writing focuses on [sometimes fringe] technical topics — it’s what I know and I really enjoying expounding on that knowledge here. But, the fact is, I’m incredibly witty and quick (and humble  :P), especially if I really know you, and I’m tired of that rarely coming across on this site. Then again, it’s almost impossible for that to come across on this site, so I’m not sure where that leaves me.

Along with being more anecdotal, I’m also going to try to post things as I write them. To some that might seem like an odd statement, that I wouldn’t post something after it’s been typed up, but I’ve always had a few hang-ups when it comes to publishing what I’ve written.

Timing

I spend an inordinate amount of time deciding when to actually post something, especially if I have a lot of articles already [partly] typed up (I currently have 36 posts-in-waiting), because I then also think about the order in which they should appear. This is incredibly counter-productive and at the end of the day probably serves no real purpose.

The delay strategy is based in part on my desire to reach those that read my site without an aggregator. I can’t believe I just had to say that in 2000-fucking-6, but I know that quite a few people that read my site don’t use any sort of aggregation and simply type out the address every few days to see if there’s anything new on the front page. I’ll never understand it, but to each his own I ’spose. I’m getting out of the do-it-my-way business; people like being inefficient and I’m tired of telling them that my way is better (it usually is, but they don’t care and I’m sick of caring for them).

Another timing-related issue has to do with who I think will be going to my site on a given day. For example, if I’ve just fired off an e-mail to a professor there’s a chance that he’ll check out the site (based on my signature and/or e-mail address) and, well, you get the point. Though everything is always here for the taking, most people won’t look beyond the front page (or probably more accurately, the first few lines of the latest post) and so I do give some thought to who might be there (for the first time) at a particular time. I know, it’s ridiculous.

Ego

Sometimes I’ll leave a post up longer than ‘necessary’ because I want a maximum number of people to see it. For instance, I recently left a picture of a Florida sunset up for a few days even though I had a billion other things to post. I loved how it looked at the top of my page and I didn’t want it to get pushed down until I felt most friends without aggregators had seen it.

The same goes for technical things I’ve written that I’m particularly happy with (how-tos, project announcements, etc); I generally like them to sit at the top longer than other posts. Altogether now, ridiculous.

From now on

Now that all of that is on the table, I’m going to make a conscious effort to push it over the edge and onto the floor. I’m going to post as I write and write as I feel. I’m not sure if anyone will notice a difference (or if I’ll actually do it), but I feel better about the whole thing already.  :)

Whew!