Sometimes I could kiss my Mac. I love the little icon in the title bar is a draggable proxy for the file. I don’t remember how I noticed this, but it’s very handy. Apple describes it on this Pro Tips page so I’ll use their nice graphic:
So that’s great but it gets better. The file icon subtly indicates whether the file has any unsaved changes, by graying out. (Reading that page, I also learned that the red close button gets a black dot if there are unsaved changes.)
Here’s the thing that moved me to write a whole blog post: right click on that file to see and navigate its hierarchy in the file system. You ever need a file that’s in the same folder as the file you’re working with? Just right click on that icon and click the containing folder. So simple, sorta intuitive, and I can’t find it mentioned anywhere.
I just finished reading an excellent article in The New Yorker by Laura Secor, The Iran Show. Here’s the first paragraph:
In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, which gives a brief history of show trials in the Soviet Union and Iran’s history. Most interesting is how in Iran among a large portion of the population, these televised false confessions are having the opposite effect.
The indictments prepared by the public prosecutor are almost surreally obtuse. Before the election, one indictment claims, Western governments, foundations, and individuals joined forces with corrupt Iranians in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic and institute a regime compliant with American designs. The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.
People are seeing right through these. They’ve even, in some cases, preëmpted them, such as when Mohsen Armin declared last month that should he be taken into prison, he is not the agent of foreign powers, no matter what he’s beaten into saying. So when Iranians see this:
[translation from the YouTube video description:] HARD PROBLEM WE HAVE IN OUR COUNTRY RIGHT NOW IS BECAUSE WITH 40 MILLION VOTES WE COULD BE THE ONE OF BIGGEST COUNTRY WITH DEMOCRACY BUT BECAUSE MUSSAVI BEHAVIOR AND KHATAMI AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE FOR DIFFERENT REASON AND COUNTRY GOT IN
AND THERE WASNT ANY CHEATING IN ELECTION AND WE SHOULD KEEP THE REGIME THAT IS THE SAME AS PRAYING FOR GOD AND SUPREME LEADER DIDN’T BACK UP AND THAT WAS GOOD BECAUSE IF HE WENT ONE STEP BACK OFF WE WILL HAVE A UNSAFE TRIANGLE OF IRAN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, AND THAT WILL HURT PEOPLE IRAN OUR REVOLUTION AND MIDDLE EAST AND MUSSAVI SHOULD SAY CONGRATULATION BECAUSE A 13 MILLION DIFFERENT VOTES ANDTHE CHEATING WAS A DELUSION
They’re really seeing this:
…in which the enemy of the state “confesses to meeting with a C.I.A. agent, importing green velvet, and having affairs with Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie. He apologizes to the Supreme Leader and to the paramilitaries who ‘kindly’ beat him.” For evidence of the beating, note the band-aids he amasses through the recording.
I wish I had this comic in my pocket last summer. I spent some weeks at the University of Washington CS department working with Steve Tanimoto. (I mention Steve because he was an amazing host.)
I didn’t know many people in Seattle and so when a student at UW invited me to go hiking along with her husband and cousins, I was happy to make some new friends and take in some of the area’s extreme natural beauty. The hike was fun and everyone was pleasant. After we went to their favorite Taiwanese restaurant. They were all Taiwanese so we got the no-English menu with the scary dishes, which made me happy.
I was happy eating with my new friends until one said she didn’t like California. That’s where I grew up so I asked why. She asked if I had seen Idiocracy. “No, but my parents liked it and I like Mike Judge, especially King of the Hill.” “It’s so funny.” Something to the effect of how, because stupid people have more babies, eventually everyone will be stupid. I asked what that had to do with California. She explained that CA is filling up “Joses”. I hoped this was merely dark humor and pushed back. She persisted, though a year later I don’t remember many more details except that my attempts to disabuse her only made everyone uncomfortable. As their guest, I decided to drop it, but I couldn’t stop hearing the TMBG song, Your Racist Friend, echoing in my head.
What’s the best course of action there? Racism is not just offensive but dangerous. I didn’t want to react harshly because I didn’t want her to conveniently retract what she was saying. Better that racism be discussed openly so it can be examined and rationally disassembled. Right?
Later in the meal I offered her more water from the pitcher and she mentioned that she wouldn’t drink tap, only bottled water. Even water filters wouldn’t do. I explained that most bottled water is simply filtered in a factory but that made no dent. I figured at that point I was better off not trying.
UPDATE: Here’s some good advice. When you do respond, never claim the person is racist. That’s an argument you can’t win and they can dismiss. Explain how the thing they said was racist. That’s external to them. Jay Smooth says it smoother of course:
There’s a video on YouTube about thinking skeptically, the Baloney Detection Kit. It’s sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
Many of the comments are about whether science is an alternate religion, but there’s also a theme of denying climate change. What I find notable, though not surprising, is that deniers are using the Spam button to censor the messages of people asserting climate change.
It’s worth bearing in mind the way that tools to protect collective norms (e.g. defeating spam, terrorism) can be used as tools against someone an individual simply disagrees with.
I sympathize with this comic. The last time I sent in a rebate, it was declined. It went like this:
- We couldn’t process your claim because it lacked the original receipt.
- No, I sent the original.
- You’ll have to send the original paperwork.
- How can I? I already sent the original.
- Do you have proof?
- Well, I photocopied everything before I put it in the envelope.
- Okay, send us that and we’ll process it.
- Do you realize how insane that is?
- It may sound crazy to you sir, but you’re not here and I assure you it makes perfect sense.
Recently I got an e-mail from a loose acquaintance, let’s say Vick Timlee,
Vick Timlee wants you to join Yaari!
Is Vick your friend?
Yes, Vick is my friend!No, Vick isn’t my friend.
Please respond or Vick may think you said no
Thanks,The Yaari Team
So, that’s a lie. Vick didn’t send me anything. He’s not waiting vulnerably for my attestation of our “friend”-ship.
What has happened is that he created an account on Yaari.com and they spammed everyone in his Gmail contacts. Further, they claimed that Vick sent these messages himself.
A nice blog post goes into this practice in more detail. The short of it is, stay away from Yaari.
NYTimes has a long article on society 2.0 (if I may coin a 2.0-ism) which is at least worth skimming. The last page, including the following two paragraphs, has the most insight.
I wonder when digital identity will become so pervasive as to transform our idea of the self à la psychology, the ego à la Buddhism and the soul à la Abrahamic religions.
Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”
Increasingly, who you are is what you’ve done. Not just your idea of it, or anyone else’s idea, or the idea of a group, but the ever-growing corpus of data about the life you’re living. Not only is there always more data about you but there are increasingly powerful and handy tools to analyze it. This week Google added face recognition (not just detection, recognition) to Picasa Web. There was a similar face detection web site in early 2006, but now it’s just another easy-to-use feature in a popular image management application.
I’m giving up hope that technology or policy will do anything to abate this torrent of data about us rushing out into the public eye. Getting off the grid is not an option for most people, especially me. I expect that it’s mostly culture that will adapt. Knowing everything about everyone is how things were for thousands of years before the industrial age. I appreciated the observation in the article that anonymity may just be a phase of the 20th century, like the automobile. In tribes, everyone sees and hears everything, first or secondhand. Some might say that it’s the same online today, except now there’s nowhere to escape too because the eyes are global. From what I know of Native American tribes, you didn’t have anywhere to escape to either. If you left your tribe, no other tribe would accept you. Or at least others would always be suspicious of you. Maybe in the future we’ll have identity asylums. E.g. for people who’ve experienced psychological trauma or damage to their frontal cortex. (e.g. by a tamping rod)
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be vigilant about privacy. Just that relationships will adapt. It’s the political order that I’m really worried about.
A friend asked me recently how I keep track of what needs acted upon in Gmail, where messages live forever in the “archive”. I replied with the following and thought I’d post it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. I claimed earlier that I would post stuff like this on Practict, but I’ve since noticed that absolutely no one reads that, probably not even Googlebot. Additionally, I’ve realized that the (hopefully) practical tidbits I write up provide some insight into who I am, and thus are consistent with the stated theme of this blog.
I do delete stuff that I know I’ll never read again, like “bagels in the copy room” or automated reminders from RTM.
I think of the Inbox as another label and for me “in:inbox” means that it requires action. When the action is complete, I archive it. A reply in the conversation brings it back into the inbox to act on. I also have status labels “Waiting On” and “Some Day” to qualify the inbox messages.
I use the Quick Links feature in the Lab experiments settings tab to make new views on the inbox, like, “Research to process”. That’s “in:inbox label:Research”.
The Better Gmail extension for Firefox has a really great macro, f-Focus, which takes whatever your current view is and narrows it down to messages that are (in:inbox OR is:unread) AND !is:muted. i.e. ({in:inbox is:unread} !is:muted). I used to love that, but I use Mailplane now for Gmail on my Mac and it’s not extensible.
Since writing that e-mail this morning, Google released a beta of their new Chrome browser for Windows. I gotta say, it’s nice. The best part is it has a simple “Create application shortcuts…” function for any website that basically turns it into a desktop app. Mozilla has something similar with Prism but compared to Chrome it’s bloated and slow. I’ll probably stick with Fluid on my Mac, and I look forward Safari 4.0, which is supposed to have something similar. Hopefully Google will have ported Gears to work in Safari by then. Shouldn’t be hard since Chrome also uses WebKit.
While I was in Seattle I got a jury summons by mail here in Pittsburgh. It’s my first summons in Pittsburgh. I’ve been summoned before in other towns, but each time I’ve called the night before, my number didn’t come up.
Well this time it did.
I got up all early and bused down to the City County Building. That’s for civil trials. The courthouse next door is for criminal trials.
It was a pleasant experience. A nice lady named Angel guided us around and through the process. Judge James was very charismatic and friendly. I looked forward to participating.
But they needed a commitment of up to a few weeks. And I have a journal article due in two weeks, not to mention 3 courses. So they put me in the “have time conflicts” box and eventually brought me up to reschedule. The lady had the calendars printed out for each area school. I told her CMU and she referred to the row highlighting the end of the semester. “October 13?” “Did you say October?” “Yes, that’s the end of your semester?” “No, I think that’s the end of the minis. Does it say ‘mini’?” “Yeah…” “Those are half-semester courses. The semester ends in December.” “I wish they’d all get their academic terminology in common.”
Then she said I could go. “Could I have done this online?” “Yes, sure. Or by phone.” So… if you have a commitment, call instead and save yourself the trip. I would have called but I misunderstood the stated “one day / one trial” policy on the mailing. I thought that meant I was in some pool for one-day trials and I figured today would be as good a day as any.
If I had known, I would have just gone online to postpone. In the end though, it was an interesting experience. I love seeing the full cross-section of the city. Licensed voters and drivers, at least. (The judge said they’re getting other sources of names too and intend to get everyone in.) You don’t get to see full cross-sections much in Pittsburgh. That’s something I still miss about the BART in the Bay Area, you’d see both crack heads and people on their way to the opera. I got to rub elbows with a slice of Pittsburgh I don’t normally get to. Though there was a CMU prof there I recognized. I wonder if one CMU student and one CMU faculty there today do in fact reflect the local demographics?
I’m back from Seattle and Chicago. I may post about those trips. But I still haven’t posted about Montreal or DC, so it’s quite unlikely.
But I am posting about something relevant to my summer traveling: the nuisance of changing timezones on your devices as you cross them. For me I had to change my Mac system timezone and my Google Calendar timezone. I even had to change it on my Blackberry, which was particularly annoying because it knows from the network what timezone it’s in, but that’s separate from the issue here. My Blackberry also has GPS and it’s able to tell Fire Eagle where it is. If Fire Eagle could just let other systems know what timezone that location is, they could update with my new timezone.
So I set out last night to try making that work. The challenges to surmount:
Fire Eagle doesn’t output timezone info
my Blackberry doesn’t update Fireeagle
I don’t know how to write Mac (Cocoa) applications
I found the J2ME updater app by Simon King and got it to run on my Blackberry. Just downloaded the JAR to my Mac, went to Media on Blackberry and chose Receive by Bluetooth and sent it from the Mac. Then I could navigate to the file and install it. After setting up the OAuth (a little clunky) it’s running and updating Fire Eagle. (more details) And if you’re interested in making it better, it’s an open-source project, fireeagle-updater-midlet on Github. Sweet.
So now my location is updated automatically in Fire Eagle and soon applications can look up my timezone. So what software will read it and update my Mac’s timezone? I don’t know Cocoa or Objective-C to write a Mac native app. Fortunately, the timezone can be updated with a simple Mac system command. A different but equally simple command works on Linux. I do know Java and could write a cross-platform app that runs the appropriate command depending on the OS it’s running in.
I’ll wait until Fire Eagle is actually outputting the timezone info, but I wanted to document the above. Also, is anyone interested in collaborating on this application? I’d like to make it plugin oriented so different devices can be updated, e.g. Google Calendar.
