Solipsism Gradient

A few years ago, when I was still getting the idea of this blogging thing, I made a serious effort to stay “in the know”. I read most of the Mac websites, I had 390+ feeds in my news reader, I posted links to interesting blogs, I tried to comment on the hot issues of the day. No idea how successful that was (depending on your definition of “successful”), but one side-effect became apparent after a year or so: no useful work on my applications got done. There are just so many nanoseconds in a day.

Perhaps the main cause of that was my overly-zealous polishing of each sentence – writing in what is, after all, my fourth language isn’t that easy – but if there’s any obsessive-compulsive polishing that must be done it would be better applied to my code than to my text. Right? On the other hand, there are people who tell me they like reading what I post here, if only to keep up-to-date with my trips. And the whole thing was, after all, just a sideshow to my support forums… no sense in closing it down.

So, I’ll probably not comment after the fact on most of the various issues du jour here… there have been an awful lot of them lately. I won’t even take the trouble to find links to them now. Let’s see, there was the AirPort security thing, the HIG-is-dead/Disco thing, the MacHeist controversy, the iPhone came-out-but-not-really flap, the options scandal is still going on, I still can’t comment on Leopard, yadda yadda.

My late father worked at a large company and he used to tell with some relish a story about how he used to sort the requests that crossed his desk into “not urgent”, “normal” and “extremely urgent” piles. His usual mode of operation was to ignore the “extremely urgent” stuff until someone asked after a particular item at least twice; it turned out that most of them were never followed up at all! The lesson has served me well. Many of those hot issues have a short half-life, emitting lots of sparks but decaying very soon into plain, dull lead. Nothing like letting a few weeks or months pass to get the proper perspective…

In the meantime, yes, suddenly I’ve been able to get lots of polishing done on XRay II. Keep tuned.

You may have noticed that this site has been down for about a day… seems that I inadvertently let the domain expire, because the e-mail at the registrar was pointing to a defunct address. A previously unnoticed side-effect of my switching to DreamHost 18 months ago.

All is being sorted out now, and I apologize for any inconvenience.

I’m starting to play around with uploading photos to Flickr and showing the last 5 or so on the left here. Pardon our dust, you may have to reload to see the latest version.

Update: seems to work OK now…

Seems I plain forgot about it, due to the trip and all, but on Sept. 21st it was this weblog’s third anniversary. Guess it’s been duly commemorated…

jeff wrote:

An email to your .mac account just bounced back to me… Not sure what’s up with your email account.

I don’t have a .mac e-mail account anymore, so that’s valid only for IM. I try not to show my e-mail here for non-logged in users, to avoid the spambots; but it’s rainerbrockerhoff.net.

Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman wrote:

Sometimes the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your faithful correspondent lacks for ideas, rants or motivation. Rather, it is that so many fecund fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment, after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit saved us from untimely termination…

…We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea to share a bed with one of your expository subjects…

…In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong…

…We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread water, waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory

Well, I feel his pain; sometimes there’s much happening, but very often it’s not a subject.

However, I’m pleased to report that some marginally bloggable stuff is actually happening inside the twisty, little passages of XRay 2’s code. I stopped worrying about the UI for a couple of months and became obsessed with writing the Ultimate File Item Browser Cache Background Engine. (You should be glad I’m not writing this in German, where this would be one huge compound substantive. )

Anyway, most of it is actually working well enough now, and once I get some weird interactions with volume mount points working, the U.F.I.B.C.B.E. will be pronounced “good enough for a beta”, and I’ll get back to work on the actual file browser frontend(s) it is supposed to be the backend for.

In order to do so most efficiently we (meaning my wife) decreed that a working vacation is called for, where we’ll be away from normal life and mostly offline for a full month. We’ll leave in a few days – details will be posted soon – and proceed to Northern Italy, where two nearly consecutive mediterranean cruises are scheduled. More as it happens!

On Sep. 12th power went off in Los Angeles, where DreamHost hosts my web pages. Everything seems to be working again, I’m not sure yet for how long they were down, but from the stats it looks like several hours.

Seems it was human error; someone overloaded one small part of the system and everything else shut down overprotectively. Obviously these things can’t be tested in practice. Still, analogies with certain pieces of software occur to me…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…and I’ll have to do something about these trackback spammers ASAP; I wonder why they suddenly came out of the woodwork again.

Seems I finally found a way to block trackback spam, whew. Referrer spam still goes on, but as I don’t publish referrer links, it’s innocuous – except for driving up my bandwidth stats a little.

A third type of spam is people registering and pointing at porn/gambling sites with their homepage link, but I’m blocking them now by not showing that link for new users, and not allowing it to be filled out on registration. So if you’re a legitimate new user and have a legitimate homepage to show, please e-mail me.