Meta note for anyone still bored enough to glace at my blog. Instead of doing blog entries for interesting links, i've been using del.icio.us under an account name srparish. I'll keep on rambling here, but probably pretty infrequently.

I think we have to stop spending money that we don't have. We're overconsuming. We have to find things to do other than just buying things. Learning things would probably be a better past time. That's a hard thing for a culture to change. But i certainly find learning things and solving problems the most challenging thing. If we're going to compete in this thing that Tom Freeman calls a flat world we're going to have to get more interested in solving prolbems and being entrepreneurial and less into materialism that we've become, the consumer emphasis that we have in this country. --Bill Joy, Nerd TV

The only other language i come close to knowing anything about is Russian. Last time i checked, when a Russian word or name is used in English, it is properly transliterated.

But what's with letting French words in full accent paraphernalia facadening as English words? Last time i checked (first grade or so), none of the letters being taught in school had anything dangling off of them. Furthermore, the only accent marks were the ones used in the dictionary to indicate which syllable takes the accent.

Is this French that we're speaking, or should i expect Hebrew and Cyrillic to start appearing in our dictionaries too?

I just had two, back to back, problems on Mac OS X.

First my printers disappeared, and i wasn't able to add new ones; several minutes after clicking the "add" button i'd get a error message about "server-error-service-unavailable". Googling found that this was a cups error message. It turns out there was cruft in /var/spool/cups which--after deleting (i didn't delete the tmp subdirectory) and restarting cups--everything took off working fine.

The other problem was that spotlight searches were returning nothing. I finally found out about mdutil and tried running both of:

mdutil -s /
mdutil -i /

to check the indexing status and try turning it on. The status returned empty, and turning indexing on gave the error: Could not set indexing status for volume. I took the advice of removing /Library/Spotlight and /.Spotlight-V100 and then running "Repair Disk Permissions" in Disk Utility. Restarting Metadata saw spotlight working again.

In both cases, the instructions i were following suggested doing the above and then rebooting the computer. Reboots are evil. The desired effect of rebooting in both cases was to get the service processes started again. It turns out you can do this quite easily manually. OS X has an equivalent to the /etc/rc.d/init.d scripts found on most decent unix systems, but a little harder to find given they are tucked away in /System/Library/StartupItems. To get the above two services started again, i just had to do:

cd /System/Library/StartupItems/PrintingServices
./PrintingServices start
cd /System/Library/StartupItems/Metadata
./Metadata start

Reboots sold separately, batteries not included, not available where prohibited.

I'm not in the mood for writing a teaser, just read programming considered harmful it turns out to be strikingly close to some of the thoughts i've been having for the last few years.

I'm not sure why, but my personal webpage has demonstrated a lot of problems i see with existing software--programming languages, operating systems, file systems, content management systems, databases, etc. For years now i've wanted to completely revamp how i create my web pages, but every time i go to plan it out, i find myself redesigning more and more things, until i find myself wanting to start from a completely new processor architecture and build from the ground up.

Hierarchy is one of the things that has bugged me most. I put hierarchy into my image collection, and this pyblosxom blog system organized things in a ridged hierarchy. The problem is that hierarchy never works right for me. This blog entry is a good example, is it a ramble, or a technical article, or a technical speech. And when making the hierarchy, i sat for hours trying to decide if books, articles, and speeches should be subsets of technical and humor or vice versa. The same thing with image categorization, is a sunset an event, or a landscape, or a thing? Eventually i just made myself be arbitrary because i wasn't getting the problem solved.

In Ontology is Overrated (also hear the audio version), Clay Shirky argues that hierarchical categorization is fundamentally not what we want, except in certain very limited situations. I highly recommend skimming what he has to say on the matter.

This is actually why i'm so excited about spotlight. While not everything is there yet, it is headed in the right direction to allow your operating system and filesystem to be your content management system.

In the meantime, i'm off to go work on redesigning our concept of the ALU.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

- Albert Einstein